Some Doggerel for National Weed Day

How could this web site possibly ignore  a topic so delicious as "weeds"? This is long enough to be Friday's post, but I'll let it go live now, in honor of the occasion.

What gardeners need most seems to be a clearer way of thinking. The wild plants that sprout in the garden, and threaten to crowd out the vegetables and the pricey imported flowers, are mostly not nuisances after all. There are exceptions, like Bermuda grass, that are neither useful nor ornamental, but most of these volunteer plants are actually what a frugal person wants to eat in spring. 

Keep a few of these around;

No better salve or lotion's found

For bruises, cuts, scrapes, burns of skin;

Eat when the leaves are young and thin.

Though they're growing big and tough,

Leaves are smooth as burs are tough.

If last year's roots went to waste,

Here's a pleasant sour taste.

Once the flowers bloom, the leaves'

Bitterness the palate grieves;

But the sap removes all warts

And roots make a tea of sorts.

Though I've never cared for these,

They delight the Japanese;

Roots they pick, peel thick, and pickle

Lend steamed rice a pleasant tickle.

Dig the roots soon as you can--

Morning's work for a strong young man;

While they thicken sauces, they

Help keep heart attacks away.

None of this plant's fit to eat

Till a berry, yellow, sweet,

Shows where that husk splits and dries;

Berries make quite tasty pies.

Nothing's fit to eat at all

On the milkweed coarse and tall,

But its rather pallid flowers

Will be good for many hours

Of bees, birds, and butterflies,

Always pleasing to the eyes.

Dried and brewed with mints in tea

Boneset stimulates, we see,

And may speed recovery.

Cleavers trails along the ground

Till the stiff hairs that surround

Leaves and stems can cleave unto

Something upright, such as you,

This peculiar sensation

Is not pain, but education,

When the plants are brought inside,

In the chimney corner dried,

They become great flu relievers,

Because cleavers break down fevers.

Tasting this one, some agree

It's best left to please a bee,

Though a kind of mint it be.

But a few leaves do no harm

Anywhere mint flavors charm.

Though the stems and husks so hairy

Make this garden stray look scary,

Once the husks have pulled away

From the berries. people say

They're like raspberries to eat,

Only bigger, and more sweet.

Smilax vines are nuisance plants,

Trip us up or make us dance,

Really make our tempers shine,

Often known as "blaspheme vine"!

Yet, in times of hunger dire,

People have lived on green briar.

All Spanish Needles I detest

More than, together, all the rest

Of weeds shown here. Still, in great need,

One might eat even this ugly weed.

If there's an enemy whose brain

Of all his parts seems least,

And whether he's dead or insane

From him you'd be released,

Then friendship with him you might feign

And serve this at a feast.

(But he will surely spit it out

Unless great powers for it you tout,

And now that people know about it,

Can this trick work again? I doubt it.)

The Algonquins put this to the test

When Englishmen became a pest.

For them we see it did not work.

So jimsonweed from ground we jerk,

And then we burn it, in all haste,

Before poor innocent creatures taste.

Still, nothing's altogether bad

In nature. Some use this stuff's had.

Of all things found in any field

This is the vilest "weed."

Whatever else that field did yield

That he felt such a need

To poison, soon there's ten times more

Of it than there ever was before.

For "bigger fleas have smaller fleas

Upon their backs to bite'm,

And smaller fleas have smaller fleas,

And so ad infinitum,"

And so a balance is maintained

By which all creatures are sustained,

Until this fool who thinks he's wise

God's plan for nature to despise

Creeps in and kills the "smaller fleas"

That check the ones that us displease.

So such a feeble helpless thing

As the corn earworm loss can bring.

And still increases each year's grief

Of those who from loss sought relief

By spraying poisons on the land,

Now not a cornstalk can withstand

The hordes of corn earworms unchecked,

And nothing can the corn protect,

And every ear they pick's defiled

Unless it's been completely spoiled,

And each year's gain is less and less,

And sprays cost more, to their distress,

And soon men take them by the hand,

Lead ruined men from ruined land.

If so you've tried to keep a garden,

First beg God's and your neighbors' pardon,

And then all poison sprays forsake,

And seven years' loss you must take

As nature's toll for poisoned land,

And to some other work set hand.

When land's had seven years of rest,

Then once again you may be blest

With crops or flowers worth the time

To plant them, as before this crime.

Health Food Tip #1: It's Not All or Nothing

Last week a couple of people replied to Ann Corson's recommendations, as they had been posted at a lively blog/forum, with the "Not everyone CAN do that" argument. 

One development of the argument was especially helpful, although the person thought I wouldn't find it helpful. This was someone who'd been in the same situation I was when I started having to consider health concerns in the grocery store. I started shopping for health in my twenties, and I had the fantabulous blessing of being a foster mother, or adoptive sister, to a teenager who was eager to show how competent and responsible she could be, rather than to a baby, or babies, who have to be fed according to their own special needs. This respondent was approaching the question in per sixties,  as an empty-nest landowner who was accustomed to producing and preserving healthy food but wasn't up to doing that alone. 

This is the respondent's comment in the discussion of the Corson article. I hope Blogspot displays it in a different font, because otherwise it looks very similar to what I said to my mother and to my doctor when both of them concurred: "You need to try Jethro Kloss's 'elimination' diet." 

"

...Most of my entire life I have eaten healthy by choice, grown a good portion of my own food...hardly used any pesticides in our gardens...hardly ever ate any processed stuff and very rarely ever went out to eat. Took vitamins and other supplement and we pretty much never ever got sick. But all of that is a lot of work outside of having a regular job and a fairly normal life. So when people say things like she did above... You must drink plenty of fresh, clean water. Your diet should consist of organic whole foods, 100 percent grass-fed meat, free-range poultry, wild-caught fish, plenty of green leafy vegetables, nuts, healthy fats such as coconut oil, organic olive oil, grass-fed lard and butter, limited grains, minimal fruit sugars, and a complete avoidance of GMO, pre-processed, or highly refined foods, especially those high in added sugars. I want to know just WHERE she thinks someone who lives out in the boondocks is supposed to FIND all these wonderful things she insists upon. We were not ones to go 'on-line' and order everything either...All the produce from Mexico is pretty much awful, and now of course no matter how bad the quality of anything is, the prices are outrageous.

"

Now, Jethro Kloss's audience were recovering from the Victorian Era. Not all of them had modern or even water-flush toilets, and some of them lived in cold climates. So it seems that a lot of them would happily avoid as many trips out to the old cold outhouse as possible, and Dr. Kloss spent a lot of his time telling them about the benefits of "elimination" of bodywastes. For just about every disease he mentioned in Back to Eden, his plan of treatment began with "Give the patient an enema." The "elimination" diet aims at flushing the toxins out of the body, too. But it's about "eliminating" foods that impede the flushing process. Basically you eat fruits and vegetables, raw if possible, and drink water...

"In the city? In winter? The fruit and vegetables in the stores aren't any good and they're so expensive, and I won't have time to cook once I go back to working fourteen hours a day, which is the goal after all. Jethro Kloss's patients were in a hospital. The special foods and herbal medicines were brought to them on trays. I can't afford to go to a hospital, even if even the Seventh-Day Adventists did the Kloss program any more..."

Anyway I wouldn't have been likely to be admitted to a hospital. I wasn't healthy but I wasn't yet sick enough to spend days in bed. Well, one day, one 24-hour period, with flu. After having mononucleosis for most of two years, I was too ill to work on one day in the rest of the 1980s. 

It was an especially nasty strain of flu. Washington doesn't have enough senior citizens at best and we lost many of the ones we had to complications of that virus. It seemed to come with all sorts of complications. After the flu passed people could be divided into groups based on their complications. My slightly older housemate had bronchitis. I had viral arthritis, the kind that occurs when a virus causes inflammation in the joint tissues. If you look up the symptoms of viral arthritis in a book, they're just like the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, which is enough to make anyone consider the benefits of euthanasia. There is a clear consensus on what viral arthritis feels like--it feels like having red-hot wires run through your thumbs, or whichever other joint is affected that day--and when you think about its being chronic and carrying on until your fingers shrivel up into horrid twisted claws you can't even use to roll your own wheelchair...

Well, the thought was horrible enough to make me think that trying the immunity-boosting diet had to be preferable to being crippled by arthritis or calling Dr. Kevorkian, so I tried it. 

The fruits and veg weren't good by Scott County, Virginia, standards. And also that was my rationale for having slipped into a habit of buying pre-packaged, over-processed, novelty-and-convenience-type food. I did always buy some fruits and vegetables: the cheap and easy ones--oranges or canned pineapple, iceberg lettuces, radishes, parsley, cans of beans and vegetable soup. I was a vegan at the time, and ate nuts as a protein food. But it was sort of fun to try all the different simple-carb pastries instead of baking bread or cooking rice. After all, doughnuts and Danish and cookies and cakes baked from packaged mixes and sugary cereals were grain products just like boring old sliced bread, and sandwich bread from the supermarket wasn't very healthy either. And there was, at the time, a local specialty brand of gumdrop-type candies made with real fruit juice, and a couple of brands of odd-flavored soda pop ditto, that I liked. \

Well, on the elimination diet, you don't eat baked goods. You eventually get to phase zwieback bread back in, if it's whole-grain, cut thin, baked hard as a brick, and eaten without any kind of lubricant like butter or jam, but no fresh, spongy, yeasty bread, and no sweet baked goods whatsoever. 

My first healthy shopping excursion was something my adoptive siblings didn't want to miss. Celery was recommended. I bought celery, wailing amusingly all the way. Carrots were coming into season, and radishes. I bought carrots and radishes. I bought parsley because I like it. I bought cans of supermarket corn, peas, beans, and tomatoes. Rice was on the list of things I could have once a day, preferably for breakfast, along with oatmeal. Rice-a-Roni was on sale. I did not actually buy rice, as either Dr. Kloss or my own Dr. Okon understood the word. I bought ten different flavors of Rice-a-Roni. I didn't buy any leafy green vegetables except an iceberg lettuce. Oranges and tangerines were past their peak; I bought canned pineapple, although back then the "juice pack" pineapple was packed when it was ripe and tasted as sweet as the sugary version. Pineapple juice was affordable back then, and V-8 was safe in those pre-glyphosate days, but my diet plan specified whole fruits and vegetables, no juices or soups.

The diet started with a 48-hour fast on water only, to get the flushing process started. Then for the first week I could eat one plant product per meal, three meals per day. The diet plan did not allow snacks between meals but my doctor, anticipating that I'd have snack cravings because I was cutting out all that refined sugar, said I could always eat a celery stick. I must have gone through three or four whole celery stalks that week. Celery really does contain a phytochemical that helps reduce inflammation and pain. Worked for me. 

I was not eating anything like a balanced diet. I was also cheating; Rice-a-Roni is a mix of white rice, white-flour pasta--mostly pasta--and monosodium glutamate. And after the first week, when the plan allowed an egg or a handful of nuts early in the morning, I also sneaked back to soybean sausages. The best ones were made and bought by Seventh-Day Adventists; I was living in the Adventist neighborhood, where the whole collection of soybean sausages were in all the stores. They were full of wheat gluten and monosodium glutamate. I had them for breakfast, often, with my definitely-not-health-food "rice." 

But it worked. It wasn't even a gluten-free diet, yet--but it was better for me than the diet I'd been eating, with all those cookies and pretzels and overprocessed wheat flour products. 

The results were spectacular. I was still growing, as most people in their twenties are; after reaching our full heights we take a few more years to reach our full healthy weights. In eight weeks of immunity-boosting, I gained one pound, but everyone could see the flab melting away as the bones and muscles grew. At the end of those eight weeks my measurements were 35-19-32. My face lost the haggard, jaundiced look that I considered really ugly and merely looked juvenile. Energy and joie de vivre came back, to a degree other people found positively annoying. I really was bounding out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to have time to run a mile before breakfast. 

The arthritis basically disappeared in the first week. During the second week I relapsed, ate some of those fruity gumdrops, and had another flare of pain. After that I stuck to the diet, flushed out the virus, and, after the eight weeks were over, could even eat sugary stuff again without having more pain--though, oddly enough, I'd got through the sugar cravings and didn't want sugary stuff any more. I felt better than I could remember having felt in my lifetime.

One thing I've always liked about the McDougalls is that, while they recommend a best-case health-food diet that's not going to be an easy transition for most people, they emphasize that eating a healthier diet is not all or nothing. 

In my twenties, I would have done much better to have gone gluten-free, but I didn''t yet realize that that was necessary or believe it was feasible. Just cutting back on the refined flour and sugar--not even cutting either of them completely out--was enough, at the time, to yield results that the whole neighborhood noticed. Youth was on my side. I wouldn't get equally good results from the same diet as an adult///but I would have got some benefit.

If you do the McDougall diet, which is basically vegan, or the Corson plan, which encourages using animal-derived foods of a quality most people aren't going to get every week, or even the Sinatra diet, which is a normal balanced diet of tasty food that involves a lot of cooking time and freezer storage space, going all the way with it is likely to yield the best results in the least time. Of course. 

If you can't go all the way? You go as far as you can. 

One of the reasons why people hire private nurses is to have someone cooking the food on a special diet plan--most often a diabetic diet, sometimes a gluten-free or vegan diet, or something more unusual. When I met my husband, I cooked McDougall meals, which are low in protein and high in complex carbs, because his brother had Parkinson's Disease and a low-protein diet is important in treating that disease. Just as I'd had a flare-up of pain when I went off the immune-boosting diet, my future brother-in-law would have more tiresome "parkinsonisms" when he treated himself to a hamburger or a bowl of chili...but when he ate the diet the doctor recommended, he had better control of his hands and feet. 

Will any diet cure cancer? That seems very unlikely. Will a healthy diet improve the health and spirits of a person who has cancer, whether the person's case is terminal, or will go into full remission and allow the patient to die old from something else? For most patients it will. If you have cancer, by all means do what works. I'd hesitate to say that a diet cured cancer but I've certainly seen people, like George Malkmus, for whom the right diet certainly fed a long, healthy, happy remission. How many days in remission people can get by working their health program, nobody knows. 

My husband switched from McDougall to Sinatra plans, after his brother died. We had ten very good years in between what, in hindsight, had to have been the initial flare-up of multiple myeloma, and the final one. Would we have had more good years if he'd stayed with the McDougall diet, or if the neighbor hadn't used "Roundup" on his garden and persuaded my husband to use it just once? May never be known. I remember my husband began to notice something badly wrong, but kept working through it, for four or five months after using "Roundup" on the stubborn weeds at the edges of the lawn. The neighbor was an old man, a great-grandfather. He died the summer after my husband did.

There will always be a mix of pro-cancer and anti-cancer, pro-health and anti-health, factors working on us, all through life. When we're young the balance is usually on the side of health. After age 80 the balance is usually on the side of illness and death. We are mortal. This is not likely to change.

But meanwhile, every pro-health factor we can add is likely to do us some small amount of good. 

Although the McDougalls can sound a bit evangelical on Twitter, in their books they and Dr. Sinatra recommend not making your healing diet a burden to yourself and others. If you eat with other people every single day you may have to learn to sit at the same table eating a different meal, though at least your meal can be one that the other people will want to share. If you see someone once in six months and they want to take you to a great restaurant, really great restaurants have salad bars, but you don't have to pick and whine the way some "dieters" do. Think of yourself as a primitive hunter-gatherer, the McDougalls advise. They ate the way nature intended us to eat. Mostly they gathered edible plant material, and when they trapped an animal they feasted. If your visiting relatives want to treat you to a steak dinner, enjoy a steak (you can order a small lean one) with your veg. 

How well the occasional lapses work depends on what you're trying to recover from. Nobody has to stay on the "elimination diet" forever, and many people are able to recover tolerance for foods they have to stop eating for a few years. If you work the McDougall Plan for a few years you'll be eating mostly vegan meals with a "feast" of animal protein once a month--we do need some animal protein, though it can come from eggs or yeast instead of a living animal who had feelings, if you have a special concern about the animals.

If you can work with either the Sinatra or the McDougall diet, you have it made, really. Both diets give specific menu and recipe plans that really walk you through the first few weeks. Both involve a fair bit of cooking with raw unprocessed produce, but you can get into the habit of cooking on weekends and freezing portions of food to eat during the week. The recipes are almost idiot-proof and reliably delicious. If you offer those dishes for the vegetarian or health-conscious people at a church or family gathering, you will need to prepare enough for the carnivores who will wander over to the vegetarian and/or health-conscious table. 

There are more rarefied refinements of the Sinatra and McDougall diet plans for people with special needs. Both plans leave abundant room for options like gluten-free, purine-free, or low-sodium. You can cook delicious meals, and notice major improvements in health, if you follow either diet's shopping lists at Kroger, Safeway, Giant, and probably even at the cheap chains. 

Actually, when people start seeking for what they can no longer just run out and pick out of the garden, they tend to find it. I found a real 1960s-granola-style health food store in Hyattsville, later, and got onto the long lists of some farmers in rural Maryland who delivered unsprayed veg, and even met someone who used to drive down to "the markets" for deals on meat and fresh fish. But my own amazing results came from eating a pathetic, additive-laden approximation of a healing diet, shopping at Giant, and buying the fresh fruit instead of the pretzels or candy from the streetcorner vendors to whom I wanted to show due respect.

Speaking of Giant reminds me of a wonderful idea more of the "upscale" supermarkets can and should be using. I'll blog about that next week.

Meanwhile, the more comments people care to share about their experience of shopping for clean food, the merrier. 

Heirloom Seeds in California

From Food Democracy Now:

"
Join the urgent movement to Save Important Rare Heirloom seeds: Enter this code [FOODDEMOCRACY], which can be entered at checkout, when you purchase heirloom seeds at Baker Creed Seeds at rareseeds.com.
Dear Priscilla,
Every year at Food Democracy Now! we look forward to attending Baker Creek's Heirloom Seed Festival in Santa Rosa, California. Also known as the world’s largest Pure Food Festival, it's our favorite conference of the whole year, with an amazing gathering of some of the most dedicated family farmers, seed savers and grassroots activists on the planet and the most incredible display of heirloom seeds.
Unfortunately, this year, an unexpected visitor from the biotech industry showed up with a camera and a hidden video recorder in his pocket. When confronted by activists who he had harassed online for years, this biotech bully admitted that he was there to find out more about the genetics behind all the incredible diversity of heirloom seeds at the festival!
Incredibly, over the years this biotech bully and his colleagues have launched major attacks on GMO labeling activists like us at Food Democracy Now!, scientists like Don Huber and Eric Seralini and even nasty attacks on Vandana Shiva and Food Babe author Vani Hari.
Now, they coming to the Heirloom Seeds Festival to try to pick up desirable traits that they could then use to genetically engineer new GMO crops from and sell these newly patented seeds to companies like Monsanto, Bayer, Dow Chemical and DuPont.
But we need your help to make sure that we can save the incredibly biodiversity of natural traits that have been found in nature and bred traditionally for thousands of years by local farmers and home gardeners.
This is why Food Democracy Now! is partnering with Baker Creek Seed Company to make sure you have access to these seeds and can help spread and protect their amazing diversity in your own home garden.
Please SHARE this Important message far and wide with friends and family today!

Baker Creek Seed Expo Unfairly Targeted, Harassed and Fined
If having an attack dog for Monsanto show up with undercover recording equipment wasn't bad enough, this year for the first time in the Heirloom Seed Festival's history, a local Sonoma county health inspector showed and started harassing vendors for things allowing visitors to taste test organic apples before they bought them.
According to a report in the local paper:

"Vendors and exhibitors at a popular natural foods event contend they were harassed and unfairly targeted by Sonoma County health inspectors who cracked down this week with fees and fines, as well as permit requirements.

Organizers of the National Heirloom Exposition at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds said previous health inspectors were positive and supportive of the three-day event, which ended Thursday. But this year was different.

Organizers said the treatment by health inspectors threatens the future of the Heirloom Exposition, which draws more than 15,000 people. They said it makes it challenging for the participation of backyard farmers and hobbyists who can’t give away an apple or tomato without a permit.

“We feel we’re not really wanted,” said farming entrepreneur Jere Gettle, who co-founded the Heirloom Festival and the Petaluma Seed Bank. “It’s taken the heart out of the event.”

It's hard to know what's changed from the previous 5 years, but it's no coincidence that this year an attack dog for Monsanto showed up and people start getting harassed. With the new proposed Monsanto - Bayer merger expected to go through, we need to make sure we support vibrant, independent sources for rare heirloom seeds and we hope that you'll take advantage of this opportunity to buy some seeds for your home garden or start your seed collection right now!
It doesn't matter if you have a full acre plot dedicated to growing your own fruits and vegetables during the summer or if you just want to put a few seeds in a pot on your windowsill.
It's important now, more than ever to make sure the incredibly biodiversity created by previous generations of farmers and home gardeners is passed down to the next generation of seeds savers.

• Join us today in protecting heirloom seeds for future generations. We need your help to make sure that all of nature's creations don't because the private property of corporations who have no interest in our health or the environment.

• Take this opportunity to purchase rare, heirloom seeds — rare heirloom vegetables for your home garden, or pick up flower seeds and bulbs and herb seeds for your backyard or the front porch. Or just collect a bunch of their heirloom seed packets for fun!

• Use this code [FOODDEMOCRACY], which can be entered at checkout, when you buy seeds today to receive a discount and a portion of your purchases will be donated to support our work at Food Democracy Now!.

We couldn't thank Jere Gettle and his amazing crew of seed savers at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds enough for protecting this incredible birthright of saving seeds and we wanted to make sure that if you care about seeds and biodiversity you have access to some of the most beautiful seeds and amazing heirloom fruits and vegetables on the planet.
Remember, democracy is like a muscle, either you use it or you lose it!
Thanks for participating in food democracy,
Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! team
Source:
1. “Uproar over Sonoma County’s handling of National Heirloom Exposition”, Sonoma Press Democrat, September 9, 2016 http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/2035?t=11&akid=1933.359821.NFzewF
"

Book Review: Earth Magic

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Earth Magic

        
Author: Corinne Martin

        
Date: 1991

        
Publisher: Countryman Press

        
ISBN: 0-88150-184-0

        
Length: 222 pages plus bibliography, glossary, and index

        
Quote: “This is...a sharing of one person’s ex­perience in gathering and using herbs. The reader should avoid draw­ing generalized conclusions as to what will work successfully for any one individual.”

        
Do herbs work? In the sense that most medicinal herbs contain medicinal substances, there’s no question that they do. Will herbs work for you? Hard to say. It’s hard to predict how even controlled doses of medicinal substances will work in any given case. Prediction is even harder when it’s uncertain how much of the medicinal substance is in its natural form; we understand carotene well enough to say that you’ll get a good dose of it by eating a carrot, but there are larger and smaller carrots, drier and juicier carrots, carrots grown in different soils and under different weather conditions, and these different carrots contain different amounts of carotene and of other nutrients.Additionally your body might metabolize carotene differently than other bodies do, so you might need more or less carotene to get the same benefit from eating carrots. If you really study the properties of foods and herbs, rather than memorizing rules, it will start to seem that “the more we know, the less we know.”

        
Herbs work best as part of a natural lifestyle that’s aimed at preventing rather than curing diseases. The real “power herbs” are the ones, like carrots, that contain the substances the body needs to protect and repair itself. Some people would rather take some rare, probably foul-tasting, possibly toxic herb than use the cheaper, safer, more pleasant herbs found in their gardens, or even in the produce aisle at the grocery store...I don’t recommend this, myself.

        
The 52 herbs discussed in detail, in this book, are fairly common throughout North America. They are generally safe when used as discussed in this book, but their effects will vary. What Corinne Martin learned about the herbs she gathered and used in New England is only sometimes, not always, what she would have learned about the same herbs if she’d stayed in the Deep South; their seasons obviously vary and so do their benefits.You can use this book regardless of where you live, but as the author says, you must not be too dependent on it for advice on where and when to find herbs or what they’re most useful for. Even if you live in northern New England, you may find that your reactions to herbs differ from Martin’s, or that your symptoms came from a different cause, or even that there’s a difference between herbs picked in a wet year and herbs picked in a dry year.

        
The format of this book is distinctive. I find it distracting. The main text, which gives scientific descriptions of herbs and their uses, occupies a wide column and the author’s personal journal appears in a narrow column on the side. This does allow you to read either the journal or the reference work and ignore the other; if you’re reading through the book you might wish they’d appeared one after the other, so that the effect is less like the author’s two voices constantly interrupting each other.

        
Sections of text are also broken up with lined, blank pages for you to add your own recipes and results, in part so you can compare and contrast findings. E.g., “Willow: I have willow trees but have never used them. Most of us would have very little pain if we’d listen to the pains we do have. Common causes of headaches are dehydration, constipation, blood mineral imbalances, tension, or mild carbon monoxide poisoning—it’s almost easier to recognize what caused a headache, and cure it accordingly, than it is to pop an aspirin, much less brew willow tea for headaches. When pain can’t be immediately fixed, celery is easier to prepare than willow (just eat a celery stick) and about as effective. All the same I’m glad to have this information about willow just in case there’s a celery shortage some day.”

         
No, I don’t take anything for these outbursts of cranky criticism. I indulged this one because I think too many people try to use herbal remedies in an inefficient, ecologically unsound way, and are debarking too many willow trees. If you have to live with rheumatoid arthritis or some such horror, willow is for you. If you have headaches because you don’t drink enough water, please leave the willow for those who need it.

        
On the other hand, some real “power herbs” are undervalued because they’re common...treated like weeds, in fact. Plantain (not plátanos but the little lawn weeds) is wonderfully soothing and healing to any kind of cut, bruise, burn, insect bite, sting, scrape, blister, or other simple skin wound. Clover is hard for humans to digest raw, but contains vitamins and minerals that can be leached out and taken in medicinal tea. Dandelion tea is a natural diuretic contining potassium, useful for hypertension, diabetes, and premenstrual bloating. Dock roots can be dug in the autumn and used in medicinal tea, as Martin describes, or left to sprout in spring, when the young leaves are only somewhat sour and can be cooked like spinach, or left to grow in summer, when the ripe leaves become tough and bitter to eat but are still soothing and healing when rubbed on skin wounds. This book can encourage gardeners to find uses for several wild plants and weeds.

        
The “other” parts of plants gardeners prize for their fruit and/or flowers can also have medicinal value; this book discusses the herbal benefits of garden plants like violet blossoms, berry leaves, cherry bark, rose hips (seeds), and pine needles.

        

Some of the drawings of herbs aren’t the easiest to recognize I’ve seen, but overall this is an excellent first book of household herbs. Many people use and recommend this book. 

At last report Corinne Martin was alive, and active in the Maine Organic Gardeners and Farmers Association, so this web site offers Earth Magic as a Fair Trade Book. If you buy it here, by sending $5 for the book + $5 for shipping to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com, we will send $1 to Martin or a charity of her choice. (The shipping charge is per package; if you order more than one Fair Trade Book at one time, you pay only one shipping charge and the living authors receive $1 or more for each of their books that fits into the package.)

Book Review: Under the Tuscan Sun

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Under the Tuscan Sun

        
Author: Frances Mayes

        
Date: 1996

        
Publisher: Broadway / Bantam Doubleday Dell

        
ISBN: 0-7679-0038-3

        
Length: 280 pages

        
Quote: “My reader, I hope, is like a friend who comes to visit, learns to mound flour on the thick marble counter and work in the egg.”

        
Frances Mayes bought a house in Italy. More people wanted to visit her than she could entertain, so she wrote a book about the house. This book has been a bestseller, even though it’s family-friendly with only occasional flashes of dry humor. It’s not likely to make any college reading lists, but it’s a very enjoyable read, a sensory tour of a big country house written skillfully enough to give readers a wholesome mental escape from their boring commute or dismal hospital stays. It’s an almost perfect pillow book. Sort of ironic, in view of recent news stories from Tuscany, but a pleasant read.

        
Its one flaw as a pillow book might be the continual references to Real Italian Food, or specifically Tuscan food, the delicacies that grow in Tuscany and wouldn’t be the same in other parts of Italy. The secret is all those fresh vegetables. Our protagonists live in the country and have masses of vegetables to use up. “We no longer measure, but just cook...ingredients of the moment are the best guides” to creating their own new, authentic Italian dishes. Simmer chicken and vegetable scraps, skim the broth, add tomatoes and herbs as available, and sup. Cook pasta until it’s soft enough, add greens, cream, cooked meat, and grated cheese, toss them together and eat. Shell peas, mince shallots, soften them in butter, add a little mint, salt and pepper, chop this into a paste, and spread it on toast. Absolutely nothing to it...if you have garden-fresh vegetables. If you have to buy vegetables in a supermarket the recipes won’t turn out half as good. And if you don’t need to think about food when you’re not cooking or eating, Under the Tuscan Sun qualifies as “food porn.”

        
But of course Italians do other things as well as eat. Our protagonists settle in, and see the sights in the nearby towns. They go to night concerts in the town square, visit a museum and describe the elaborate fourth-century candelabrum, go to what’s ordinarily the movie theatre and watch the ballet. Nothing more “exciting” or like the plot of a novel happens to them than the renovation of the house, but it’s all fresh and new to Americans and it all feels good.

This book was a bestseller because everyone enjoys reading it once. So, Under the Tuscan Sun is recommended to anyone who hasn’t read it. It's tasteful, it's tasty, it's a Fair Trade Book, and if you buy it here for $5 + $5 shipping we'll send Mayes or a charity of her choice $1. And you can add a few other things to the package for that $5 shipping cost, too.

Virginia SB 354 Update

Some readers out there keep searching for a 2012 post on Virginia Senate Bill #354. They can't be all that keen to reread the silly pun I made about it. They must want an update! Yes, SB 354 was enacted into law...

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+CHAP0473

Free money for beekeepers? Well, money, anyway. Strings may be attached; the number and position of "strings" may vary.

One good string that needs to be attached is that, before people go into beekeeping, they understand why honeybee populations have gone into decline. The more peaceable bees are, the more vulnerable they tend to be to a fungus infection that's wiped out whole beekeeping operations during the past twenty years or so. If anybody out there is thinking, "Well, my great-uncle left some old hives moldering away on the hillside. I'll just stock'em with bees and collect the money," you need to get educated before you apply for this grant money. You will need new hives; you may need a new plan for assuring any bees you adopt a dry, healthy place to live. Hives in which bees died of foulbrood need to be burned. Land on which bees died of foulbrood should in most cases be disqualified for grants.

Another thing: I didn't have to look up foulbrood. I learned about it from a beekeeper who had to burn his hives in 1994. Although beekeeping was his only job for many years, he no longer handles bees. He became disabled by a mysterious blood disease that's not believed to be either contagious or hereditary or cancer-related. Doctors suspected that prolonged and frequent exposure to bee venom might have caused the disease.

Another thing: "Africanized" bees aren't as genteel in their habits as the peace-loving, lower-immunity "Italian" breed. Although the Bible notes the phenomenon of bees nesting in a carcass as a "News of the Weird" item thirty gamblers and riddle-lovers failed to imagine, I have seen "Africanized" bees ignoring clover blossoms to buzz around carrion or cat litter. (Yes, these were bees, not flies that try to look like bees; they had nests containing honeycombs.) I would not expect the kind of health benefits sometimes reported for various kinds of flower honey to be available from honey produced by garbage-eating bees. "Italian" bees are said to be so particular about their honey that the alert beekeeper can pick out separate combs of honey derived from different kinds of flower; I don't know whether this is true for the "Africanized" breeds.

So...beware: the challenges of beekeeping go beyond buying hive material and avoiding stings. Nevertheless, many people do find beekeeping pleasant and profitable.

Can Monarch Caterpillars Eat Dill or Parsley?

How this web site turned up on multiple web searches for this topic, I'm not sure. Anyway, when people are searching for information that this web site could display but hasn't, I'll try to provide the information. Although outdoor herb gardens and caterpillars are still a month or two ahead of us in the Blue Ridge Mountains, people further south may already be finding caterpillars in their herb gardens and asking whether monarch caterpillars eat herbs like fennel, dill, or parsley.

The short answer is no. Caterpillars sometimes explore plants they can't eat, or eat things that aren't part of their natural diet and don't give them proper nutrition. You might see a monarch butterfly caterpillar on a plant other than milkweed, but that's not normal and the caterpillar wouldn't eat very much of that plant. (Monarch caterpillars often choose plants they can't eat, where the creatures that eat them are less likely to look for them, to pupate and turn into butterflies.)

However, baby swallowtail butterflies, sometimes known as parsley caterpillars, devour parsley, dill, and related garden plants.

Confusion is possible because, although the caterpillars look very different, they might be described in similar terms. Both are good-sized caterpillars, eventually growing two inches long (some swallowtail larvae are bigger). Both have black, white, and yellow stripes; monarch caterpillars' stripes are narrower. Both, during the last stage before they pupate, have "horns"; monarch caterpillars' appendages are long, flexible black "whips," and swallowtail caterpillars' "horns" are a fleshy erectile organ called an osmeterium that resembles a snake's tongue and emits an odor many birds dislike.

Monarch caterpillars are slim, with straight, smooth bodies. Swallowtail caterpillars vary--there are different species that can eat dill and parsley--but most have a humpbacked shape and a stubbier build than monarch caterpillars.

Here's a primary-school-friendly web site with more information about monarch butterflies:

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/ExpertAnswer11.html

Here's a page with nice clear pictures of mature monarch caterpillars, showing their "horns":

http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/do-monarch-caterpillars-eat-anything-besides-milkweed.html

Here's a chart showing what lots of different butterfly caterpillars eat:

http://www.joyfulbutterfly.com/articles/whatdocaterpillarseat.html

Here's a page with (gross-out alert--highly magnified caterpillar images) clear, colorful photos of many caterpillars. You'll have to scroll a long way down for the monarchs, even further down--almost to the bottom--for the swallowtails:

http://richard-seaman.com/Arthropods/Usa/Caterpillars/NorthernIllinois/

Here's a stressed-out Black Swallowtail caterpillar, waving its "horns":

http://bugguide.net/node/view/28634

Here's an article about swallowtail butterflies, including nice clear photos of eggs and newly hatched swallowtail caterpillars, so you can (if you wish) pick them off your herbs before they really start devouring:

http://themagnifyingglass.typepad.com/weblog/2009/05/how-to-raise-swallowtail-caterpillars.html

While the monarch butterfly is unique, the swallowtails are a large family, with some member species that don't eat garden plants at all. Tiger Swallowtails mostly eat the larger and tenderer leaves found at the tops of tulip poplar trees, which is why you seldom see the caterpillars. Zebra Swallowtails eat only pawpaw trees. And so on.

Please Help! Monsanto Manipulates Mikulski

Food Democracy Now reports: "Once again Monsanto is working behind closed doors to corrupt our basic democratic rights to give a blank check for the approval of their new GMO crops.
This week, Senator Mikulski (D-MD) has introduced an outrageous rider giving a blank check to Monsanto and other corporations to plant illegal genetically engineered crops and it could be voted on tomorrow!

This dangerous rider was not included in the House-passed CR, and we are extremely disappointed to see that Senator Mikulski has included it in the Senate version.

Thanks to our pressure Senator Tester has introduced an amendment (#74), co-sponsored by Senators Boxer, Gillibrand, and Leahy, to strike the rider from the Continuing Resolution!

Click here to help stop the Monsanto Protection Act in its tracks!
Late Monday night, biotech lobbyists succeeded in slipping the dangerous biotech rider (Sec. 735) into the Senate Continuing Resolution spending bill in an effort to strip federal courts of their authority to halt the sale and planting of any illegal, potentially hazardous GMO crop.

If approved, the Monsanto Protection Act would force the USDA to allow continued planting of any GMO crop under court review, essentially giving backdoor approval for any new genetically engineered crops that could be potentially harmful to human health or the environment.
Clearly Monsanto and the biotech industry are getting desperate and want to try an end run around a growing movement of farmers and citizens who are rejecting their products and calling for GMO labeling in an effort to make sure their new GMO crops can evade any serious scientific or regulatory review."

Yes, please click that link, Gentle Readers. I added to the form letter FDN provides that organic (True Green) farms need protection from genetically modified organisms; you're encouraged to share your thoughts along this line.

Beware Richmond's Bearing Conservation Easements

Donna Holt warns about conservation easement for farmers...

"Beware Richmond’s Bearing Conservation Easements for Farmers

By Donna Holt, Virginia Campaign for Liberty

Matt Lohr, Commissioner, Virginia Dept. of Agriculture and Consumer Services, touts conservation easements as a means of “protecting the family farm” in his recent Cooperative Living editorial.

The original intent of conservation easement was to provide the means for the struggling farmer to save the family farm and preserve agricultural and forestry industries.
It wasn’t long before wealthy estate owners took advantage of the generous conservation program with a state giveaway of vast sums – some measuring into millions of dollars – to induce millionaires to “conserve” luxurious estates that they had no intention of developing anyway?

Virginia, which forces the humblest homeowners to place their real estate transactions in public view, created a special law allowing the millionaires to shroud such deals currently measured at $106.8 million a year in taxpayer money. Conservation in Virginia makes that possible.

Virginia boasts that its land preservation incentives are the “most generous” in the country. Indeed, the state budgets over $100 million a year to pay people not to develop their land.

While the amount that any individual landowner receives is kept secret from the public, a 2010 investigation by Hook, a Charlottesville weekly newspaper, revealed a veritable who’s who from the Charlottesville business, entertainment, government, and environmental worlds taking advantage.

Such entertainment magnates as Dave Matthews, John Grisham, and Coran Capshaw join business titans Hunter Craig, Wick McNeely, and Jim Murray. Local leaders Ann Mallek from the Albemarle Supervisors and waterworks chair Michael Gaffney use the program. So do big names from the environmental world such as Nature Conservancy board member Michael Bills, Southern Environmental Law Center director Rick Middleton, and avid eco-donor Tony Vanderwarker.

All these people have partnered with green groups to receive compensation for keeping some land unspoiled. What could possibly be wrong about that?

“It’s socialized capitalism for the rich,” says former Albemarle teacher Mark Crockett. “People who buy big estates don’t plan to develop them. Why turn and give them a tax credit?”

It’s also an appraisal racket. Biscuit Run serves as a prime example of the corrupt use of the conservation easement program.

The value of land is in its use. When the ability to engage in commerce and profit from the use of land is restricted and often denied, the value of the land is reduced. In contrast, an estate owned by wealthy elites maintains a much higher value per acre. The appraised value of the land determines the initial payout and tax benefits of the easement. The result is the benefit to the wealthy estate owner far outweighs the benefit to the struggling farmer.

The farmer is most often forced to place his land into a conservation easement to save it in response to the very strict land use regulations and expensive permits for every conceivable use of land. The noose is further tightened by limiting commerce, by permit only, to only raw produce. Permits aren’t granted for the sale of byproducts produced from the things farmers grow. Unless, of course, you happen to be the wife of a member of the Board of Supervisors in your locality as is the case in Fauquier County.

Fauquier County has some of the strictest land use restrictions of any locality in Virginia. Consequently, they boast a total of approximately 96,600 acres are in conservation easements, or 23 percent of the total land in the county, according to The Piedmont Environmental Council.

As numerous land trusts, set up by non-profits, have grown in size and number, so have their association and influence with government. This is particularly the case with large, national organizations like Piedmont Environmental Council and The Nature Conservancy that obtain enormous sums from federal funding.

Many land trusts have operated more like government agents. They often help to write the strict land use regulations adopted by local governments. They stand in waiting to acquire easements from struggling farmers, only to turn around and quietly sell them – sometimes for a profit – to state or federal governments.

It’s not surprising that Matt Lohr, the Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture, would consider joining the ranks of the rich to fleece the taxpayer while he supports restricting the sale of agricultural products by a struggling farmer.
From Fauquier Free Citizen: http://fauquierfreecitizen.com/beware-richmonds-bearing-conservation-easements-for-farmers/

Remember, Governor McDonnell announced Virginia Land Conservation Grants of $1.55 million dollars to add 1,642 acres of conserved lands through the Virginia Land Conservation Fund (VLCF) administering agency of The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. Most of this private land was acquired through conservation easements.
Please read the analysis below on conservation easements from The National Center for Public Policy Research, then forward this important information to others, especially landowners. An educational effort on reasons to say no to conservation easements can slow the central government control of our agriculture and natural resources and help "conserve" private property.

Given the rapid growth in land trusts and the rising use of conservation easements over the past decade, along with increasing involvement with government in the arrangements, easements have become a far-reaching means for public land acquisition. ( Don't miss the graphs in the report ) Easements have evolved into the prevailing method for government to shift lands unobtrusively from private to public control. The mission has evolved from protecting open lands through private stewardship to aiding government agencies in acquiring private lands and to curb development by permanently removing development rights in exchange for tax benefits.

Through manipulations to the tax code, government influences property owners' decisions on land use, promising immediate tax relief to those who forfeit full rights and ownership of property. But given inherent problems with conservation easements, most pointed, the rise in government involvement, influence, and acquisition of lands under easement, a far more effective means would be to eliminate the estate taxes that discourage land preservation in the first place. ( See more Recommendations in the report )

Property owners must donate the easement to a government agency or a "qualified" nonprofit organization, defined as a charitable organization "that receives a substantial portion of its support from the public and government entities." Virginia’s United Land Trusts (VaULT) serves as the statewide umbrella organization representing the 29 private, non-profit organizations working with the government to "conserve" ( and to bring under central government control ) Virginia’s natural, cultural, historic, scenic and recreational resources and working forests and farmlands : http://www.landscope.org/virginia/programs/vault/

This report from The National Center for Public Policy Research examines 1) conservation easements' questionable arrangement that shifts private lands to government control; 2) the costly and potentially detrimental impact of perpetual deeds; and 3) the manipulative use of the tax code.

Conservation Easements: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The National Center for Public Policy Research

Read more: http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA569.html

--
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." - Thomas Jefferson Virginia Tea Party Patriots www.virginiateapartypatriots.com Danville Patriots http://danvillepatriots.com/ "

SB 1309: Soil and Water Conservation Board

Virginia Senate Bill 1309 passed the State Senate by a unanimous vote, passed a House committee vote, and is likely to become law. It authorizes a panel of unelected persons known as the Soil and Water Conservation Board to "convene stakeholder groups" of representatives of various organizations--including farmers' organizations, how thoughtful of them!--to "plan" how farmers should "manage nutrients."

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?131+ful+SB1309S1

Is this Agenda 21? Are death panels only one step behind? Who knows. Is this even a scheme to adapt "cap and trade" to farming, so that big industrial-type "farms" can continue to pollute as long as Grandma is not allowed to keep a few hens and sell the eggs? Who knows. This is a substantial expenditure of money that meets no urgent need, offers no great advantage, and anticipates a degree of economic stabilization or growth that seems unlikely to materialize in the near future. Even if the sole effect of SB 1309 were to create a few jobs, I'm not sure why our legislature was so quick to agree that we can afford to create those jobs.

Monsanto Lawsuit Update

Due to recent Yahoo hacking issues, instead of sending this to a small group of e-friends as recommended by the Food Democracy Now site, I'm going to post it here:

"On January 10, family farmers will enter a courtroom in Washington DC to take part in the appeal of OSGATA vs Monsanto et al, a court case filed to protect farmers from genetic trespass by Monsanto’s GMO seed, which contaminates organic and non-GMO farmer’s crops and opens them up to abusive lawsuits. In the past two decades, Monsanto’s seed monopoly has grown so powerful that they control the genetics of nearly 90% of five major commodity crops including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola and sugar beets.


In many cases farmers are forced to stop growing certain organic and conventional crops to avoid genetic contamination and potential lawsuits. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto admits to filing 144 lawsuits against America’s family farmers, while settling another 700 out of court for undisclosed amounts. Due to these aggressive lawsuits, Monsanto has created an atmosphere of fear in rural America and driven dozens of farmers into bankruptcy.

Farmers need your voice today. Please spread the word.

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/farmers_vs_monsanto/?referring_akid=717.359821.JFJptD&source=taf "