ligaya garden

It’s that time of year again – Spring. That means it’s time for our feral foraging foray, ‘Food Underfoot’. Every year, thousands come to Gawler for a week of wild pllant based festivities. Well..not quite (I’m well known for hyperbole😁). More realistically, up to 15 people gather at Henry Chenoweth Park in Gawler and, along with me, examine some ecological, cultural, culinary and medicinal facts about some of our most common ‘weeds’. Henry Chenoweth Park is along the South Para River, in between the Gawler Community House and The Elderly Centre. It’s a large, flat area with easy access, even to folks with mobility issues. There is a paved bike track running through the middle of it and it’s large enough for kids and dogs to run around. The best part about this is that it has several different ecotones in its space that contain a large variety of wild edibles and medicinals, all easily accessed. This year’s extravaganza is planned for Sunday September 7th at 11 am. It’s Fathers day and what better present for Dad or Hubby than giving them the day off from weeding his own garden and letting him look at someone else’s? I’ll be sharing enough information on the day to allow him to say ‘no’ to further weeding, or at least reduce his weekend load. Sorry, I can’t help with lawns. You’re stuck with them! Car parking is readily available,  the Elderly Centre is usually empty on Sundays and there are a lot of empty parking spaces along Scheibener Terrace Here’s where to book your tickets – Submitting form Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are – Garden Herbs Wild Herbs Making Remedies Mushroom medicine All of the information on Ligaya Garden Online is freely shared. Please consider making a small donation to keep it free for everyone. Just click this blue button.Submitting form

Our website ligayagarden.online is celebrating its 10th anniversary!

We've got an apology to make.

Hi everyone.   I want to thank you all for subscribing for free to our website. Some of you have been here for almost a decade, quietly enjoying our content.  I realise that I’ve been neglecting you good folks for a while and will get back to a sporadic newsletter like in the old days. Many people loved Athena’s woofletters that used to come out from time to time. Maybe I can convince her to…

Herbal Honeys

Making a flower essence

Updates

Herbalism isn’t just about ingesting plants,it’s about living in a mutually supportive relationship with them. The ‘medicinal’ part that we focus on is really just a bonus. Here’s an example from our garden… Folks ask sometimes ask is why we have so many Spider Plants (Chlorophytum cosmosum) under our front porch? One reason is that once you’ve got Spider Plants, you have no choice but to have more  But besides being edible, they are amazing at filtering  and cleaning air. The leaf structure on both macro and micro scales effectively filters particles and the plant’s biochemistry breaks down a lot of nasty, airborne chemicals.  They’re so good that NASA uses them for this purpose. ✓ Subscribed We have also found a species (or maybe more) of tiny Orb Weaver Spiders that love to live amongst the leaves, making an effective pest barrier. They must live on gnats and mozzie because the other critter that seasonally makes them their home is the Green Looper Caterpillar, whose size dwarfs that of the tiny spiders. Their parents lay eggs on the Spider Plants in preference to our Brassicas and they’re easy for me to find as they leave the tale take signatures of lots of little pellets and well chewed leaves. I cam easily pick them off to feed the chooks who. It’s beautifully efficient – leave the front door, pick a few bugs and head down the path  to the mailbox, feeding the chooks on the way. It’s minimal effort, just the way I like it. This way, too, the chemicals from the air are further broken down. First the plants capture them and break them down, then their products are metabolised by the caterpillars, then they are further broken down by the chooks before being sent to the deep litter for microbes and fungi to further decompose them It’s a very simple and very effective system that leverages our mutually beneficial telationship with the Spider Plants to contribute to our overall health by cleaning the air, feeding the chickens and feeding the soil that feeds us. We don’t even have to eat the Spider Plants to improve the the health of the garden and ourselves. Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are – Garden Herbs Wild Herbs Making Remedies Mushroom medicine All of the information on Ligaya Garden Online is freely shared. Please consider making a small donation to keep it free for everyone. Just click this blue button.

Recently a chunk fell out of one of my few remaining front teeth. The pain was excruciating and way beyond my personal (admittedly very low) pain threshold. So i needed to reach for something to give me relief. I’d previously had troubles with that tooth and those alongside it and the dentist I usually see told me that I’d need to have the whole block of them removed. Of course, that would ruin the gap toothed beauty that I’d cultivated for so long. There’s a nasty hole there. I’ve a few workshops to teach in the next couple of months and the image of me presenting them sans choppers wasn’t a pretty one, so I decided to hit the pain relievers. Then I thought, let’s do a comparison between herbal remedies and Panadol. Good old Panadol. I thought that because it was nerve related, St. John’s Wort had to be in the mix but it was a hot kind of feeling, so cooling Lavender was indicated in equal amount for that, plus the tension I was feeling. That made for a balanced mix – a warming herb plus a cooling herb. The pain was giving me a stomach ache too, so a tiny splash of Ginger was called for, being a carminative and pain killer so it would help with possible tummy upsets from the pain.  I had all of those herbs as both tinctures and glycerites (page coming soon). Ginger has a diaphortic effect, which was good, it being a very hot day – sweating would cool me down! As a method of comparison, I started with 1 Panadol and waited to see how much pain it relieved. It took the edge off a little, an effect that was noticeable after 20 minutes or so. After a while the pain returned  I decided to go gently with the herbs to get the best comparison, so  glycerites were in order.To compare, I used 2 dropperfuls of glycerite combination taken directly and swished around my mouth. The pain lessened within minutes but returned shortly. A second dose of the glycerite was taken after half an hour (to make sure that the immediate effects of the first had worn off. Once again, the pain lessened and stayed at a lower, much more tolerable level. ✓ Subscribed A third dose half an hour later yielded a better result with the pain not returning. St. John’s Wort lessens the tendency of nerves to irritability and it looks like it did its job. A different kind of pain… There was pain of a difeent kind the next day that gave me another excuse to try a comparison. I spent too much time redoing the irrigation. I have an arthritic condition in my elbows and I know full well that pulling and pushing that black pipe on and off of the fittings, even after hot water has been applied to them, will cause me grief but being a stubborn old bugger, persevered ith the job even after the pain started. One or two fittings I can handle but too many and I’m in pain for days. This gave me the opportunity for a second test. Two Panadol this time with no result. I held off for an hour and a half before trying the tooth pain remedy mentioned above. No luck. I tried a double dose – no luck. The pain wasn’t nerve related (yes, I know that pain is sensed and relayed by nerves), so St. John’s Wort wasn’t indicated. As it was a dull ache (cold condition), Lavender wasn’t specifically indicated but could have been used as an analesic. Prickly Lettuce decoction. I had restless nap for a couple of hours and decided on waking to move onto the big gun in my pain killing arsenal…Prickly Lettuce decoction. I’d dried and concentrated a jarful of this and took half a teaspoonful of the tar-like substance. Once the bitterness hit my tongue, I felt the pain in my elbows recede. Maybe I was distracted by the strong taste but subsequent changes in the symptoms support the pain killing effect.  Half a teaspoonful of this is quite a large dose but it took away all but the deepest, core pain, right down in the joints.. It was two hours before the pain returned in  full and a 1/4 tsp took care of it until I took a precautionary dab on my tongue before bedtime. It only took 2 smaller doses the next day to control the discomfort...

Mal's special sweet black goo

I’ve always been timid in my fund-raising efforts for to support this site, buy the occasional herb or gardening book or the more occasional cup of coffee and have wanted to make dedicated posts for our paying supporters but the technology confused me. I’m good with plants, but not tech. I did have an attempt a while back but it was a clunky method and interfered with the free posts we love to share. This website will always be a free, reader supported publication where a growing number of folks subscribe for a little every month in order to keep it free for everyone. But the other day, I scrolled down deeper into the settings than I usually dare go and found the option to share post with paid subscribers. Hooray! An easy fix. ✓ Subscribed At the moment, supporters get only a few bonuses – the joy of keeping this site going, a seasonal newsletter plus the occasional other if I’m in a chatty mood and they get free entry to a workshop of their choice during the year. They’ll also get a free copy of any of the ebooks that we’re (slowly) working on. New calling cards with the new site logo on them. Now, they will get all that plus a monthly, free post on herbalism and gardening. I think that’s worth $6 AUD a month. For transparency, we get $5.35 out of that $6 after Stripe’s fee. Also, I’ve worked out a way to make an archive of earlier newsletters. Cool, hey? If you’d like to support us and get a piece of those ever growing pile of bonuses, use the button up there in the middle of the post or use the one below us for donations (which get bonuses too). All of the information on Ligaya Garden Online is freely shared. Please consider making a small donation to keep it free for everyone. Just click this blue button.

I decided to explore the percolation method of extracting herbal constituents, so thought about making my own percolation cone. I thought it would be cheaper than buying one and in one sense, it is. Now I’m equipped for cutting glass it’ll be cheaper in the long run but this first one was a bit steep. I’ve got to give a nod to the folks at Cafe Nova who let me raid their bottle bin for wine bottles so that I could practice. First of all, I tried the string and metho method to but the bottom off of the bottles. That was very inconsistent. I invested in a glass cutter from eBay. It only cost me $16 and was adequate but still, the results were not perfect. ✓ Subscribed I decided to bite the bullet and bu a diamond cutting disc for my Dremal. It  was $20 on sale at the big green shed around the corner.  This cut beautifully but it was tricky to get a straight and even cut. If only I had something with rollers…? Then it hit me…why don’t I mount the Dremel on the roller cutter that I’d purchased from eBay.. A bit of fiddling to get the height right and I was away. I could roll the bottle against the rapidly rotating disc foir some decent cuts! The total cost was $36 plus some bits and pieces I had around. It works nicely but there’s still a bit of wet and dry polishing to do after and doesn’t it make a noise?! The stand was modelled on a test tube rack and made of offcuts of wood plus some short lengths cut from a 25mm broomstick (cost $7) and some paint that I had laying around. I thought I’d try enamel paint because it may get splashed with alcohol and I thought it would last longer than an acrylic based paint. There’s a ring of stick-on rubber sheet around the inside of the hole to help secure and protect the bottle (cone). I tried several bungs to stop up the bottle and hold the tap. The best I found were the pre-drilled second stoppers from Brewcraft (about $5 each). The tap is a 1/4 inch valve from an air compressor setip and a barbed whatever-they’re- called that goes through the bung. I needed to trim the bung a little si the while assembly fitted neatly inti the bottle because the initial try was too flexible and moved a lot. A bit of thread tape to stop leaks and away we went. Then I found that the while thing was longer than I’d estimated, so I cut and drilled a block of wood to add to the top so that the bottle was raised a little higher. The rubber insert helps raise it a little too. It works nicely. Soon,  I’ll be adding a link to our Tincturing page so that you can find out how to percolate your herbs. Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are – Garden Herbs Wild Herbs Making Remedies Mushroom medicine All of the information on Ligaya Garden Online is freely shared. Please consider making a small donation to keep it free for everyone. Just click this blue button.

Hibuscus Hibiscus are nice

Herbal tastes

I’m drying Raspberry leaf and Mugwort from the Kapunda Community Garden and the irrepressible David. Their Mugwort patch is the most beautiful I’ve seen. Even though they’re in the same family and even look pretty similar, Raspberry and Blackberry leaves are herbally used for seemingly opposite things  You would make a strong Blackberry infusion if you have diarrhoea but if you are constipated, Raspberry leaf is the go! But don’t use Raspberry leaf if you’re pregnant, it has a potent effect on your uterus, the fragarine in it has been used to tone and strengthen uterine muscles in preparation for labour. Raspberry leaves are traditionally used as a tonic during pregnancy – they’re full of minerals and other constituents that are great for the health of mother and baby during pregnancyand after the little one comes into the world. As with all things though, take caution using anything during the sacred time of pregnancy. While writing this post, I realised that I don’t have a page for Raspberries on this site. 🤔. I’ll fix that over the Summer. The really hot weather and the really cold are  when I do a lot of updates to the information on here. Nice rack! Raspberry leaves. I love Mugwort. It has some amazing properties but I use it herbally because it helps to carry the benefits of other herbs deeper into the body  I always add a little Mugwort oil to any of my other oils for just tthat purpose. Mugwort is such a useful ally that we let it go wild in our garden. Our local Mugworts are interesting. The Kapunda plants are deep green and mild, mine are a lighter green, much shorter and have a distinct bite. Our neighbour, Lucy’s are, so far the most potent medicinally – so I always take a pinch whenever I walk past and nibble on it on the way to town. They’re all the same species but gown in different conditions. Just like people, each plant is an individual. ✓ Subscribed Some herbs are like Mugwort in that they enhance and magnify the effects of other herbs, usually for the better, sometimes for the worst. It’s called ‘synergy’ and goes beyond simple combinations of herbs that support the effect that another herb has on the mix. Ginger is a great one. It’s warming, dispersing nature helps carry the effects of many herbs further throughout the body than they’d normally reach, especially to the peripheral parts of the body.  Ginger is also known for its beneficial synergy with Turmeric. It helps the compounds in Turmeric be assimilated better and in return, the curcumin in the Turmeric helps the inflammation reducing compounds in the Ginger enter the body more easy. Nearly dry. Black Pepper is used in a similar way to Ginger and the combination  of Black Pepper, Ginger and Turmeric is famous for its potency. Licorice root too is a synergist. In TCM, it is said to ‘ease the flow of Chi throughout the body’. Western herbalism uses its adrenal supporting properties to reduce inflammation (the bodys natural cortisone cones from the adrenals). Because all of the endocrine glands work together, supporting the adrenals supports all of the rest – pituitary, thymus, all of them – meaning a better functioning body and an easier flow of energy…just like the ancient Chinese said! All of the information on Ligaya Garden Online is freely shared. Please consider making a small donation to keep it free for everyone. Just click this blue button.