Herbal hot chocolate

Herbal Hot Chocolate 

• 3 oz really good chocolate (the best you can afford)
• 2c milk of your choice (cow, almond, rice, coconut, etc)
• 1/4c cream (optional- cow or coconut)
• 2tsp dried herbs (combinations suggested below, or experiment)

Method

• Put your milk and herbs in a small sauce pan and heat gently and slowly (you don't want to scorch the milk and have it stick to the bottom of the pan
• Take it off the heat and let it cool while you chop the chocolate
• Strain the herbs out of the milk and back into the sauce pan. Add the chocolate.
• Heat again very slowly and over a low heat. The chocolate will melt. Whisk very frequently.
• Pour into a mug when it is quite warm to the touch, but not boiling.

List of good herbs and other ingredients- mint, bee balm, lemon balm, lemon verbena, sweet violet, rose, citrus (from organic peels), ginger, lavender, raspberry leaves

Herb combination suggestions- White chocolate and lavender, milk chocolate with citrus and ginger, white chocolate with sweet violet and rose, dark chocolate with raspberry leaves and mint, dark chocolate with lemon balm and ginger.

Hopefully this will help you get through the long, dark teatime of the soul in January and February... Along with garden catalogues.

How to wean your garden off its oil dependency- Step 1: Fertilizers

Happy New Calendar Year to everyone! I work in a school, so for me the year 'ends' in June and starts again in September... It also ends in the fall and starts again in the spring... It's an endless cycle of endings and beginnings, and odd spaces in between. This liminal time of the year is when I like to dream about my spring garden (and try to stay away from garden seed catalogues. Danger, Will Robinson!).

Growing your own veggies and herbs not only ensures that you have the best quality and highest nutrition, it can also reduce your impact on the environment. If you want to take that to the next level then you need to wean your garden off of its dependency on oil. The next level is barely a short step, and not hard at all to do.

Most commercial fertilizers are made from oil (natural gas in the case of nitrogen), or with the use of oil or coal in their production. In the end it's all the same chemicals (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium), but where the chemicals come from, and what pollution is left behind in creating them, matters.

Alternatives for gift-giving

It's that season again for people who celebrate Christmas or participate in gift-giving traditions around the time of the solstice... I've been trying for the last seven or eight years to make sure that I support local artisans and stores, especially independent bookstores. Christmas markets and bazaars are one good place to look, but if you want to shop online, sometimes that can be hard to do. Etsy is one obvious place to go looking, but there are other avenues as well.

Just recently my friends and I have been soliciting our friends to post what they make or sell on our timelines. It's a bit of free advertising. I lucked out and got something nice for my daughter. She doesn't read this so I can safely say that she's going to LOVE the crocheted mermaid tail blanket. It's exactly the colours she loves. Score!

I've made a short list of places below for your information and for the sake of interest:

Composting. It's really not that hard!

You don't need anything fancy or expensive to start composting. All you have to do is designate a spot in your yard to let nature do its thing with vegetable matter. As always, don't put any bread, milk-products or meat into your composter. It will smell horribly, not compost very well, attract disease and pests... and just generally make your life difficult. Egg shells are one exception to this rule. I rinse them out and then crush them flat before I put them into the compost container.

The most basic way is a pile. Just a pile. You can hem it in with some sort of fence, but that can be made out of a cylinder of chicken wire, old pallets, or just a pile. People tend to put compost into vertical containers to save space and restrict access for wild animals. Container composting is the most popular for those of us who don't live on a farm or have a large amount of yard. However, in vertical containers there is also restricted air flow, so they need to be turned more often to maintain a good mix of oxygen-dependent bacteria.

The fancy word for this is aerobic. They thrive in oxygen-rich environments, and make your dirt good for for your garden. The other kind, anaerobic (surviving in oxygen-poor environments), aren't as good for plant growth and development, and will take time to clear out once added to your garden so the good kind can move back in. So, in this instance, cheap and lazy isn't a bad thing. Piles are messy, but they work.

Apple peel chips and apple cider vinegar

Apple Peel Chips

• Some apple peels
• Cinnamon and sugar to taste
• 1/2 Tbsp melted butter or other neutral oil
• Pinch of salt

Winding down for the winter

It's quite cold out there. There's something about damp air which ignores layers and insulation. And that lazy wind doesn't bother to go around... it just goes straight through.

But, my lasagne garden has some gorgeous, large worms in it now, and I uncovered a centipede (Chris called it a 'bazillopede' and got a bit squicked) whilst digging around. The soil is improving immensely. These are good signs. I have two composters digesting leaves and a bit of veggie scraps, but I don't want to put out much more than that because we seem to have rats. The green bin is for everything else. Thank goodness for that. I can feel less guilty about it.

Yet more on horehound

Since the horehound seemed to be effective I decided to start looking up *why*. There's been a lot of work lately on ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology and whether traditional folk cures actually work or not. Unsurprisingly, some of them actually are effective to a certain degree. Horehound was amongst some of the best that I have researched so far.

In the study referenced below the essential oil was distilled from the 'aerial parts' (ie. the leaves and stems) of Marrubium vulgare (horehound) and that was tested on various types of bacteria and fungi in vitro (ie. dropped onto culture plates of the bacteria, etc. and then studied). To distill it down to a sound-byte- Yes. It's very effective against two kinds of bacteria that make your throat sore, plus one kind of fungus that makes people feel sick. Plus, it slows down a few other kinds of bacteria. So, without knowledge of the scientific causes of sickness it would have been useful in quite a few instances to alleviate sore throats. I don't know how technical people want me to get with this... I could go into more detail, but I don't want to bore anyone. Basically, horehound was much more effective against gram+ bacteria than gram-. Also, it's a pretty good source of anti-oxidants, and it reduces inflammation and swelling.