The old dairy farm that stood near the corner of Upper Dwyer Road and Old Almonte Road is now a Herb Garden. Gerry, who didn't enjoy working as an "executive recruiter" in Toronto, brought 'George' here six years ago to live with her in the adjoining farmhouse and to run the place as an agritourism enterprise. They got married in the garden, too.
I took three diplomats' wives to the Herb Garden today where we and our friends had an hour's tour guided by a herbalist (Shannon Gale of Mountain Maiden Herbworks), herbal tea and cake served by 'George' as well as a PowerPoint presentation by Gerry in the log cabin, dried flowers—statice, cornflowers, yarrow—hanging in bunches from the rafters, after which I drove my passengers to Almonte for lunch. This is a picture of Stella (from Bucharest) and me by the weir by the mill at the centre of Almonte.
The remainder of this blog post is a recording of all the things I learned about herbs today.
The word herb comes from the Sanskrit bharb, or the Latin word berba (fodder). When you make your début as a herb gardener, you should grow two of each of the plants you fancy, but before chosing you had best decide if you want your herbs to be used for medicinal, cosmetic, artistic or culinary purposes. (I mostly want to eat mine.) Apart from calendula, basil, coriander, dill and fennel, nearly all the other common herbs are perennials, so don't need much work. Plant basil near your tomatoes and it'll protect them from pests. In fact all pungent herbs act as a natural alternative to pesticide and many of them are deer-resistant too, because animals are too overwhelmed by the smell to come close enough to destroy them. You can pot basil with parsley, dill with cilantro, or rosemary with marjoram or you can grow clumps of similar plants together in beds. A combination of grey-green horehound, lavender and artemisia looks wonderfully silvery by moonlight, said Gerry.
There are nine-hundred species of sage whose botanical name salvia comes from the Latin salvare: to salve, or heal. It's a hard type of plant to kill (although the scarlet sage that hummingbirds like doesn't cope too well with Canadian winters). Sweet woodruff, a shade loving plant, is also fairly indestructible but needs a compost of dead leaves to grow well. Most herbs grow best poorly fertilised soil though there are a few, like basil, that won't tolerate drought. These should be watered in the morning. If you bring pots of them indoors, a hydrometer will prevent you from over-watering.
Lemon balm makes a tea for insomniacs. Lovage enhances soups and many other meals. Feverfew (which spreads like crazy) is said to cure you of a fever. Southernwood and rue ward off infections. Using the flowers of herbs in your salads is even better than using the leaves, because more of the essential oils are concentrated in the flower heads. The flowers of garlic, for example, can be preserved in vinegar, which colours the vinegar pink and makes a tasty dressing.
2 comments:
Be warned if you are considering lemon balm that it, too, has a tendency to take over the garden, due to self-seeding (unless you cut all the flower stalks off when it starts to go leggy in summer).
I didn't know garlic flowers did that - will have to try it! ... But did you mean wild garlic, Allium ursinum, (whose flowers we did indeed eat in a salad yesterday) or the cultivated species, Allium sativum?
I wrote the blog late at night and meant to say chives, not garlic, sorry. (Many chive flower buds in the herb garden were just about to open.) However, you can eat tame garlic flowers as well. I've just found this suggestion on a website: "Finely chop the flowers, place them in a small jar and add a little lemon juice and a pinch of sea salt and cover entirely with olive oil (or half sunflower oil, half olive oil) and refrigerate immediately."
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