I’ve now got jasmine tobacco (Nicotiana alata/affinis), three varieties of wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica)–Mt. Pima, Isleta, and Domingo–and Nicandra (physalodes) Splash of Cream in the ground in my front yard. They are lining the driveway and make me feel good to look at them. I am anticipating summer, when their flowers of the tobacco plants will be giving off their sweet scents. I still have lots more to put into the front, including a serviceberry tree just coming into leaf.
I’ve also determined that my next tincture will be of motherwort. When I first moved in here, a couple of motherwort plants had sprung up in the way-back mini-woods. Every year I have tried to help them spread by crumbling up their dried seed balls. This year I’ve got a good crop back there, and I will harvest some for drying and some for tincturing. That plant has a ton of uses, but I was intrigued especially to see that it was combined with vervain to make a “relaxing nervine.” Other relaxing nervines are chamomile, scullcap, hyssop, lavender, wood betony, and St. John’s wort. I’m growing most of these right now, so I hope to be pretty relaxed come fall.:) I havested some and put it in the dehydrator, but due to our high humidity, it took a couple days to dry at the lowest setting (which is best for preserving all that herby goodness). While I was harvesting, I noticed that actual live honeybees (getting to be kind of a rarity) were working the flowers, so I took only a small portion of tops with immature flowers. There is tons left for them. The bad thing about motherwort is that the blossom area is very prickly. When they say it irritates the skin of some people, I wonder if they are not describing the effect of these spiky things. They’re very sharp.
On a note related to this only in terms of trying to be frugal and sustainable, I am pissed off with my neighbor. This fellow has a serious fetish with mowing his lawn, mowing it three times a week with both a regular mower and a riding mower (and a weed whacker and a leaf blower and an electric pruner and and and). Three times a week. The waste, the noise, the stink. He does this because he is elderly and has nothing else to do and is repelled by the idea of volunteering to help people or going somewhere to hang out with friends. He had a problem with his third mower he keeps at his place on the lake. The cord retractor quit working. He took it to the repair place, and they told him the spring inside needed replacing and they could not get that part. So he was going to get a whole new mower because of that. I said I could not believe that the part was not available and let me see if I can find the part online. I went in the house and he went down to the lake. It took me literally less than 30 seconds to find the part, which costs $3.41. It would take about 15 minutes to take the cord retractor apart (held together with a snap ring) and replace the spring. I felt real happy when he came back today to let him know this. Well, he didn’t give a flying fuck, because his daughter had already bought him another mower. He did not go for 24 hours without a third mower. They did not even wait to see if they could replace a fucking spring in the fucking cord retractor for three fucking dollars. And they have already thrown the lawnmower out. These people are not rich, either. The place at the lake is an old trailer. But why should I be surprised, when this guy is mowing his lawn three times a week with two different lawn mowers? And I know what you’re thinking–it must be one big lawn. It is a tiny city lot! I mow mine with an electric mower and it takes me 15 minutes, tops! Sometimes people just disgust the crap out of me. If the Earth wants to shake us off its coat, no one could deserve it more than we do. Idiots.
Guess I need to try one of those relaxing nervines.
Cut from the same cloth as my neighbors the Roundups.
I just got an idea… Because these people don’t do any kind of volunteer work that we can determine, sit at home and watch tv, or she shoves him outside to cut their grass, and when they go places they go in separate vehicles, I think I might make a donation to a carbon-offsetting or reforgesting organization this year. In their name. They’ll get the lovely literature in the mail, “Someone has made a donation in your honor to _____. Thank you ever so much!” I’d do Heifer Int’l, but they’d figure it out if someone spent money for a clutch of chicks to be sent to a village someplace, in their name.
Didn’t mean to go off on a jag there.
I am sorry your neighbor is like this. Is this the feller who is overly-zealous with pesticides and almost sprayed the garlic? It sounds like OCD to me. From boredom of course.
Unfortunately, it is getting time for me to pull out our mower procured from the local swap meet, and deal with the browning weeds in the front.
Yeah, it’s the guy with the Sevin. In fact, I caught him spreading Sevin on the plants again the other day (not on the garlic, thank the gods, although he finds it very difficult not to do something to them). Once again, “Why are you spreading Sevin? Did you see any bugs?” “No, but just in case.” And he wonders, he actually has the balls to wonder out loud, WHY there are no worms in his Sevin-drenched, tilled 30 times a year, dead soil. He WONDERS. Aaaaiiiiieeee!
I mow my back yard once a year, whether it needs it or not.:) It’s shady, so the grass doesn’t grow all that much. The front I mow more often, but only because I would get cited by the city otherwise. It takes me literally five minutes to mow the front with my sissy electric mower. Him it takes a good hour, same size front yard. The mowing one way. Mowing the other. Mowing with the big mower. Mowing with the little mower. Trimming with the weed whacker. Blowing. Then he wonders why the grass dies in huge patches where he mowed it too much. HE WONDERS.
You wouldn’t believe how he has nagged me to trim my yews. He wants me to use his electric hedge trimmer. “They don’t need trimming. They need to grow more so they can shelter the house from the northwest wind in winter.” You know how many times I have told him this? STFU already about those yews. This is one of the many reasons why I cannot stay here. These people live not only on another planet, but in another universe entirely.
I’m going to have to check out Heifer. And, obviously, the nervines, as just thinking about it continues to irk me.
Oh shit on a stick, he wants you to use his hedge-trimmer to work over the yews??
I wasn’t suggesting you make a donation in his name, mind you, I was just thinking aloud about my pissy neighbors here
But you know, maybe the the NRDC would be a good choice, if you were happening to think along those lines. Sort of like when Planned Parenthood has campaign drives and offers to make donations to key obstructionists who want women who seek birth control burned at the stake, for example, replete with thankyou cards…
You might want to plant chamomile for tea-making purposes. Just so you have a nice calmative and restorative tea to drink for such episodes. In addition to the nervines. Well, you do also have the wine planned.
Let’s change the topic a bit…
What else is motherwort good for? I got seed for it because I see you mentioning it from time to time. Tell me about motherwort.
Did the cats at least come up with a hairball masterpiece for Father’s Day this morning? Lucy gifted the dood with sleeping on the laundry basket full of clean towels, leaving a chalk outline of hair on them.
Lol about the cat dad’s day presents. Miss Gracie (Kitty Princess to us commoners) allowed me to thoroughly pet her today. There was a discombobulated hair ball in the middle of the living room floor that I found with my foot, but that was an early gift, yesterday. It went well with the massive stinking load someone dropped in the box (smelling the last of the tapeworms–yeah, TMI).
I have got three chamomiles in the ground.:) And four scullcap, which was mentioned, plus a bunch of hyssop. I missed the wood betony and St. John’s wort this year. I’ll plant those next year. Plus it looks like some P. rhoeas are coming up in one of the pots where I did not plant it, as I recall. I was thinking I should plant some in the front, because the petals supposedly make a sedating cough syrup. I’ve got enough of those to broadcast.
Motherwort has a passle of uses. Primarily, it’s a nerve and heart sedative. It lowers BP and is similar to valerian in its action, according to Bartram’s (and without valerian’s gym-sock scent). Culpeper wrote about it that there was no better herb to “drive melancholy vapors from the heart,” so he combined its mentally/emotionally sedating effects with its heart effects.
It’s used for menstrual disorders when combined with black cohosh and cramp bark, and heart problems combined with 1 part hawthorn and 1/2 part lily of the valley (this is a British book–you can tell). The combination of motherwort, scullcap, and vervain is used for benzodiazepine addiction and is also the relaxing nervine mentioned. It does not that it needs to be taken for weeks.
I certainly have plenty to harvest here in my yard, but there is tons in the woods around here as well. It’s considered a pest, like ground ivy and plantain. It has a minty look to it, but the leaves are much handsomer than mint leaves, to my mind.
Magically, it’s considered Venus because it’s a mint and because it has a dedication to menstrual stuff. I think of it as a maidenly plant, not a motherly one, despite the name, esp. because it is contraindicated in pregnancy. The heart action points in a Jupiter direction, and it is tallish. The flowers are your basic small mint-type, so no big lush flowers.
I decided to give it a go because it was throwing itself in my face, basically. Seems like I need to heed plants that do that. I figure the sedating thing is something I would like to try. It can be used as a tea (that’s why I decided to try drying it) as well as a tincture or an extract. I’d like to see how it compares to chamomile, which I do use a lot.
Imagine the fury and ire of my neighbors when I respond “Mow? Why would I mow? The clover hasn’t gone to seed yet!”
Lol! I threw a lot of white clover seed in my front lawn. I think it’s good for the bees, and I just like it. I always have some around for green manure.
My landlady was perturbed when I told her that a lawn was a waste of space and energy, and “I could be growing something productive there!” She mumbled something about “curb appeal.” Dreams of “Flip This House,” I guess.
I am just surprised that Motherwort didn’t take over all by itself. I started off with a couple of plants that my wife got from a friend who was moving, and three years later I am treating it like a weed (not that I do not like it—it just keep trying to grow in places where I don’t want it to). I harvested a bushel basket of it earlier this year.
It sticks to the “way-back” area in my yard, which is underneath two rows of Norway maples and so quite shady but there is great dirt and lots of sun in the late afternoon. It kind of hovers around the edge of the sunny area, increasing each year.