Making a herb 'shampoo'

I'm not a 'girlie' girl. I don't buy cosmetics or beauty products beyond what I need - shampoo, soap, toothpaste - and I try to avoid anything containing parabens or sodium laureth sulphate, choosing organic products which haven't been tested on animals.

Knowing this, my sister bought me a couple of books full of recipes for making natural beauty products at home. I got really excited about the possibilities. What if I could not only make my own shampoo from herbs, but grow the herbs for it myself? And what about toothpaste or moisturiser?

Some of the recipes involved buying a natural shampoo base and scenting it with essential oils, but the ones that interested me most showed how to make a 'shampoo' entirely from plants. For my first attempt one of the ingredients I used was dried irish moss (as per the recipe) which produces a gelatinous base when re-hydrated, but found the texture and stickiness of the shampoo unpleasant, so I changed the recipe and used an alternative.

The herbs I used were:

2 parts dried marshmallow (Althaea officinalis) instead of the irish moss
2 parts dried soapwort root
1 part mixed dried herbs according to hair type (I used chamomile, lemon zest and rosemary)

I got my herbs from an online retailer called Luminescents.

The marshmallow gives the mixture a glutinous (but not sticky) base and the soapwort root contains saponins which produce a very gentle foam when rubbed in water. Chamomile and lemon zest are good herbs to use with fair hair (as mine is), and I added rosemary as I've read that it is also good for hair.

I mixed a small quantity of the dried herbs together (enough for one wash - probably about 50g total) and added enough hot water to cover them. I gave it all a stir and left it to cool, stirring again occasionally.

I then pushed the mixture against a fine sieve with the back of a spoon, giving me a small amount of yellowy-brown gloop (with most of the herb material left in the sieve).

The resulting 'shampoo' didn't smell too appealing, certainly not by conventional shampoo standards. It was just rather earthy and green smelling. When I washed my hair with it, I concentrated on rubbing it into my scalp, including the rest of my hair (which is long) as best I could. I then rinsed it out and finished with a rinse of cold water. I let my hair dry naturally as I usually do.

I used the herb shampoo for three days in a row. Normally I shampoo my hair every other day, but the look and feel of my hair while using the herbs made me want to wash it more often. I would say the results were mixed.

Immediately after washing I found it much easier to comb out my hair after using the herb shampoo. My hair was largely free from tangles and felt quite smooth. Once dried, my hair felt very soft and was very manageable - I could have styled it very easily had I felt the need to. However, being used to the feel of my hair after using shampoo (even a natural one without harsh chemicals), I felt as though my hair was a bit on the greasy side and didn't feel that confident with it, although it didn't feel as greasy as it would have done if I hadn't washed it at all. The main problem was the inconvenience of having to soak and then sieve the herbs in advance of washing my hair, but I could probably do a batch at a time to last the week to make things easier.

I've read a few articles recently about going shampoo free and letting my scalp's oils regain their balance for ultimately better hair. I'm certainly tempted to try it. A herb shampoo like this one could be a good way to wean myself off bought shampoo, especially combined with some other home-made hair care products. There are some lovely recipes in the books for conditioners and also hair rinses using cider vinegar and herbs.

In the spring I'm planning to start growing some soapwort and marshmallow, plus some other hair herbs, and hopefully I'll be able to use them to make my own herbal hair-wash. In the meantime I'll keep using the herbs I've got and maybe try going shampoo-free. The experiment continues!

Processing my Quinoa Harvest

In mid-October I harvested the seed heads of my quinoa crop and laid them out on newspaper in a couple of crates, turning them every so often so the air could circulate around them, drying them out in preparation for separating the grain.

Because of the wet weather this year, and because I've never grown quinoa before, I was unsure whether I would get a reasonable amount of grain or not. By rubbing some of the seed heads between my fingers I knew that some seed had formed, but today I decided to start processing the grain to find out how much was there. The stems had dried out reasonably well, but some were starting to show mould so I didn't want to wait any longer.

The seeds are held inside the spent flower buds, so all I had to do was rub the seed heads between my hands, releasing the seeds and other dried bits from the stems. I did this as thoroughly as possible to ensure that I got as much grain as I could, so it took a bit of time. I collected the seeds, leaves and bits of flower bud in newspaper in a crate.

The next step was to sieve the material to remove the larger pieces of chaff, but I kept these for further drying and will re-sieve them in a few days to see if any more seed is present.

I was left with a reasonable amount of grain (it shows up yellow in the photograph below), mixed with smaller pieces of chaff.

The next step will be to winnow out the remaining chaff, which will involve pouring the seed and chaff from one bucket into another in a breeze, so that the seed falls into the bucket and the chaff blows away  (according to instructions from The Real Seed Catalogue). I will blog about it once I've done it!

An edible hanging basket for the winter

I enjoy experimenting with growing edible plants in different situations, and the hanging baskets which held my tumbling tomato plants this summer were more than ready for refreshing(!), so I decided to plant up a hanging basket using some edible (or otherwise useful) plants for the winter. Hopefully it will look good throughout the winter, and especially at Christmas hung in front of the house. With Christmas in mind I kept to red, white and green when choosing plants.

I used:
2 Lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) 'The Pearl'
1 Gaultheria procumbens
6 white viola bedding plants
2 small variegated ivy plants (not edible!)

and potted with ericaceous compost because of the Lingonberries and the Gaultheria.

Lingonberries can be made into a delicious raw jam (see my previous post on jam-making in Sweden), and the plants are evergreen. They have delicate white flowers and the red berries look lovely as they ripen.

Gaultheria procumbens is also known as wintergreen. It is hardy, evergreen, and produces red berries, which can be eaten, with a slightly minty taste. The leaves have a characteristic 'wintergreen' flavour, and can be made into a tea or chewed (but not swallowed) to release their oils. The whole plant contains aspirin-like compounds.

Violas produce edible flowers.

Ivy is not edible, but it has medicinal and cosmetic uses - the leaves can be made into a hair rinse for example.

Other potential plants which could be used in a winter hanging basket include:

Pansies - edible flowers

Calluna vulgaris (heather) - flowers and shoots used in tea or to flavour beer

Any hardy salad greens such as Winter purslane (Claytonia), Lambs lettuce, Salad burnet and        winter lettuces.

Evergreen herbs such as Rosemary (prostrate forms would be good), winter savoury and Lavender (although these would need some protection in a severe winter).

A November Harvest - Picking and Storing Apples

On a blue-sky day in November...

I went to pick some apples.

Then checked them over and wrapped them carefully for storage in the shed,

putting away lots of small presents for my future self.

Using the Tomatillos!

During the summer it became almost impossible to get into my greenhouse. Despite being planted in pots that were comparatively rather small, my tomato and tomatillo plants managed to grow to fill the majority of the volume of the structure, and having outgrown my somewhat inadequate bamboo-cane supports, proceeded to enmesh their branches together as they billowed ever upwards. It was as much as I could do to get in through the doorway far enough to water and feed them, so that was about all the attention they got.

Before we went away on holiday in September I decided the time had come to gather in the harvest, ripe or not (mostly not, no sun this year, grumble) because no one would be around to water the greenhouse. The tomatoes went into trays to ripen on a windowsill while we were away (which they did), but I ran out of room so left the tomatillos (still in their husks) in a crate in the greenhouse, hoping they would ripen too.

More than a month later I was beginning to despair that the tomatillos would never ripen. Some had turned purple, which I assumed was ripe, but most of them were still green or partly green. As a last resort to find a way to use them I did an internet search for what to do with unripe tomatillos, and as it turns out they are at their best when unripe! Immediately I set about preparing them lest they ripen any further!

First I removed the husks and washed the tomatillos to remove the sticky residue left on the skin. I had noticed this stickiness before and thought it odd, but as I discovered from my googling this is a normal feature of the tomatillo. I then tasted the fruit raw, one green and one purple. The green fruit was acidic and pleasantly sour without causing me to pull a face. The purple fruit was still sour enough to be tangy but with a more rounded flavour. Not really like a tomato but reminiscent of something similar.

As I had quite a few tomatillos I decided to make a salsa verde. I roasted the fruits first, then whizzed them up in a blender with chopped onion, lime juice, coriander leaves and seasoning. We ate some with roasted belly pork instead of apple sauce and the combination was delicious.

Chopped tomatillos ready for roasting

Propagating Jostaberries

Last week I bought a large, sturdy jostaberry plant as a birthday present for my Dad. The jostaberry is a cross between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant and this parentage is reflected in the flavour of the berries. Jostaberry bushes grow quite large and have no spines. They are vigorous and productive once established and are resistant to several diseases which affect gooseberries and blackcurrants. They flower early in the year so there can be a risk of damage to the flowers from late frosts, but I've not grown them for fruit before so I don't know how much this is likely to be a problem in the south west of the UK.

From previous experience (at work) I know that hardwood cuttings taken from jostaberries at this time of year are easy to take and root readily, so before I gave the plant to my Dad I took the opportunity to propagate a few free plants for myself for next year!

Using a sharp, clean pair of secateurs I took a cutting around 12 inches long from each of the main branches, making my cut just above an outward-facing bud on the parent plant. I then trimmed up the bottom of each cutting, making a horizontal cut just below a bud, and snipped off the tip of each cutting by making a sloping cut just above a bud. This left me with seven cuttings of around 9 inches in length, each slightly thicker than a pencil.

Bottom of the cutting

Top of the cutting

I pushed the cuttings into a large pot of compost (mixed with grit or perlite for drainage), watered them in and placed the pot in my greenhouse, which will remain unheated through the winter. A cold frame would also be fine. Now I just have to wait until autumn next year when they should have rooted well enough for me to separate them and pot them up individually or plant them out.

The parent plant left tidy and ready for planting.

Potting up strawberry runners

Strawberries always seem to me to be such generous plants. They produce some of the most satisfying and delicious soft fruits and they also readily propagate themselves, spreading by runners which form chains of young plants all linked to the parent.

My container-grown strawberry plants have been putting out plenty of runners over the last few months, which I've allowed to root down into the layer of composted bark which the strawberry pots sit on. This time of year is ideal for separating those runners from the parent plants and potting up the rooted plantlets as individuals ready to grow on for planting out next year, so I spent this morning doing just that.

All I had to do was cut the runner where it grew from the main plant and gently pull so that all of the roots of the strawberry plantlets came away from the bark chips (if the runners had rooted into the ground it would have been simple enough to lift them out of the soil using a trowel). I then cut the runner into separate plantlets and removed any excess bits of runner or any damaged and yellowing leaves, leaving three leaves on each plantlet.

Removing some leaves helps to minimise water loss from the young plant while its root system is still small (the more leaves the plant has the more water it will lose by transpiration). I did my potting on a damp, overcast day which helps to prevent the roots from drying out while they are exposed to the air. Sometimes there is some transplant shock if the roots do dry out and the plantlets may look wilted for a few days, but they will soon recover.

I potted up the plantlets into compost in small pots, firming the compost around the roots and watering in well.

I've laid out the potted plantlets in trays in my greenhouse to give them some protection while they root out and they'll stay in there through the winter before I harden them off in spring for planting out. As I'm growing four varieties of strawberry I've also labelled them so I can easily tell which is which.

This year I grew Honeoye, Red Gauntlet, Mara des Bois and Sophie varieties in large plastic pots on the sunniest side of my patio. I chose these varieties to give me strawberries to pick throughout the season, from early to late. Despite the difficult weather and hordes of munching slugs I did get some strawberries, although not as many as I'd hoped, and the plants were quite high-maintenance, requiring lots of watering (when it wasn't raining!) and I fed them with seaweed-based liquid feed weekly.

Honeoye was certainly the earliest to crop and the berries were quite large and fairly sweet, with good colour and classic strawberry shine and shape. Red Gauntlet cropped very disappointingly - most of the berries produced turned brown before they ripened so I only ate a few. They didn't ripen very well and weren't very tasty. I assume this is due to the weather and maybe Red Gauntlet simply needs more sun.

Mara des Bois was undoubtedly the star variety for me. Not massively productive but delicious - juicy with great flavour, and being a perpetual variety it carried on fruiting throughout the season. I even picked some in September! Sophie was the late season variety I chose and the plants put on lots of leaf growth through the first part of the season, looking very lush and healthy with huge, dark green leaves. They did produce some berries, although not many, which were large, juicy, sweet and had very red flesh.

Now that I have some more space on my allotment, I intend to grow strawberries in the ground next year rather than in containers. Hopefully by potting up the runners from this year I will have plenty of new plants for my planned strawberry bed, for only the cost of the compost I've potted them in.

Unusual Autumn Fruits

This week I have come across several unusual edible fruits. I'm always interested in alternative foods (including but not restricted to those plants which crop well without any particular human attention), because a diverse food supply will offer more resilience in times of unpredictable and extreme weather conditions.

I had read about but never seen the fruit of Akebia quinata, assuming that in this country our climate isn't warm enough for the plants to produce it, let alone ripen it, so I was astonished when Jenny (a work colleague) showed me the fruit she found on an Akebia 'Silver Bells'. The firm, fleshy, white capsule opened to reveal a dark purple, sausage-shaped fruit consisting of seeds surrounded by edible pulp, similar to the inside of a pomegranate. I broke off a section and sucked the pulp from the seeds (apparently the seeds cause digestive discomfort if eaten so I spat them out). It was very sweet, with a subtle floral taste, but definitely more of a novelty fruit than a dietary staple (even if it was available in quantity) because of the fiddly nature of trying to eat the pulp without the seeds. Perhaps sieving the fruit would be a better method.

I was also happy to see fruit on the young Ugni molinae 'Butterball' plants at work which have been growing on in a polytunnel.

I'm familiar with these berries and love their sweet and spicy strawberry flavour. Ugni is in the myrtle family and also has aromatic foliage. Its only drawback is that it grows slowly, but even a small plant will produce a reasonable number of berries when grown in a glasshouse or polytunnel.

Berberis thunbergii is another shrub which produces edible red berries at this time of year, so I tried some from this well-laden bush. They tasted better than I expected, and although rather bland, dry and mealy in texture they had a pleasant hint of sourness.

I also recently came across some small plants of Gaultheria procumbens, or Wintergreen and bought one to grow on in a pot of ericaceous compost.

The leaves have a strong, characteristic wintergreen smell when crushed and can be chewed for the flavour (although not swallowed). The berries are edible and have soft white flesh which is slightly sweet with a hint of mint flavour.

(Whenever I try something for the first time I only taste a small amount just in case it doesn't agree with me).

Making lingonberry jam in Sweden - picking and eating the 'red gold of the forests'

In 'The Scandinavian Kitchen' by Camilla Plum, berries get a whole chapter of their own; they are the star ingredient in a host of mouthwatering, jewel-coloured dishes which demonstrate the importance of berries in northern European cooking. I love trying to understand a culture by exploring its food, so it was wonderful to discover fruiting lingonberry bushes on a walk in the forest in southern Sweden last week while on honeymoon. The berries were almost too easy to pick, tumbling off the bushes so readily we often had to recover them from the moss below.

Lingonberries (also known as cowberries) are in the same genus as the cranberry (Vaccinium) and grow in similar peatland conditions. They don't make for very good eating when raw and unsweetened but when made into jam they are very versatile and can be eaten with meat, with fish or with dessert. The berries contain a high level of benzoic acid, a natural preservative, so they keep extremely well, and they are also high in anti-oxidants and vitamins.

We picked several handfuls of berries (only a small amount in jam-making terms) and followed Camilla's straightforward recipe for raw lingonberry jam, maximising the flavour and beneficial nutrients which would be lost if the berries were cooked. I simply added an equal amount of sugar to the berries, mashed them a little and stirred several times a day until the sugar had dissolved. 

I think I used slightly too much sugar (I was without weighing scales in a self-catering cabin and measured by volume rather than by weight) and so it took about five days to dissolve, producing a jam sweeter than I would have liked, with only a hint of the lingonberry bitterness, but we ate some with our elk steaks and it was a very good match for the flavour of the meat.

We brought the rest of the jam home in our suitcase (hence the intention of making only a small quantity) and intend to keep it until Christmas, to use as an alternative cranberry sauce perhaps!

Planting a bed of useful perennials

There was already a raised bed built from old railway sleepers in the garden when we moved into this house last November. Deep and square it seemed ideal for growing a few vegetables suited to a small space; spring onions, radishes, salad leaves and so on. The apple tree at the back of the bed had been planted in a rather wonky way (not by me!) but at least that meant it would lean over the patio rather than the soil and wouldn't cast too much shade.

In spring I sowed some rows of seed, marked them with sticks and waited for shoots to appear. After the initial promise of good weather early in the year things went downhill and my continuing efforts to grow annual crops in the raised bed never seemed to come to much. Most seedlings were eaten by slugs. The ones that did grow got stretched by the late afternoon shade and they were soon overtaken by weeds as the rainy days of summer turned into rainy weeks and months.

So, as of a couple of weeks ago I was faced with a bed looking as it does in the picture above. The bindweed had engulfed everything and I had no choice but to clear it all out and start again. I pulled up most of the plants and dug through the soil several times to remove as many of the bindweed roots as possible. I left in the Hemerocallis plants either side of the apple tree, as well as the oregano, chicory, salad burnet and bronze bugle. Although generally I am a no-dig gardener (perhaps rather obsessively since attending an inspirational workshop at Charles Dowding's place last year), perennial weeds have to be an exception, especially bindweed, as I refuse to resort to chemical means of control. This inevitably means that there will be some bindweed roots left behind (it's almost impossible to get all of it out), but I have resolved to be vigilant and pull up any shoots as they appear, in the hope that this will keep things under control and eventually weaken the roots.

I have a rather utilitarian approach to my garden and unless a plant is useful to me (edible, medicinal, nitrogen-fixing etc...) it doesn't get in. Happily there are plenty of plants that are beautiful as well as useful and books such as Plants for a Future by Ken Fern are a constant source of inspiration. I had a few herbs ready for planting which I bought at Frome market and a collection of recently purchased bargain plants from a local garden centre plant sale which made a suitable starting point for a herbaceous bed of useful perennials, so in they went. I planted some lupins near the apple tree to get the most benefit from their nitrogen-fixing potential, and placed everything else according to height.

The planting included:

Herbs

Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca)
Goats rue (Galega officinalis)
Anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum)

Edible perennials

Ice plant (Sedum spectabile 'Brilliantissimum'
Campanula poscharskyana
Campanula persicifolia
Hemerocallis (unknown variety)

Nitrogen-fixing

Lupins

Back-garden Festival

Tea-light lanterns, bunting, tents, guitar and a sweet voice, lamplit disco and little chairs around a fire. All of these and more we found at Mean Man Festival 2012, in a Swansea back garden that slopes down to the beach road, where friends had organised their home-made festival for the second time. Arriving in the dark we found our way into the garden by the side gate and put up our tent by torchlight. Down candlelit steps and earthen paths we made our way to the bottom of the garden where a fire blazed in the centre of concentric circles of laid red-brick.

The tree canopy above us was lit by lamp and firelight against a dark and starry sky. We took our seats on tiny chairs and listened to softly-sung, bitter-sweet songs, drinking wine and watching the flames, woodsmoke in our hair.

Then came the disco, dancing on a slippery-damp dance floor beside the shed-stage. We slept in tents, drifting off to the sounds of the sea and the passing cars.

For breakfast we sat round the picnic bench by the house, with cups of tea and soft-boiled eggs from the resident hens, talking about the early-start bargains bought by those who managed to get up and get to the car boot sales. For the second night of the festivities there will be carpet on the dance-floor (non-slip), Mean Man olympics, the cake competition and more music. Let the festival continue...

Camomile at the allotment

This year I'm growing Roman camomile (Chamaemelum nobile) at the allotment. I like camomile tea but have only ever made it from tea bags, and herb teas from tea bags often seem to me to be a poor imitation of teas made from home-grown fresh or dried herbs. My camomile plants have been flowering for some time now, but I've been waiting for a rare moment of sun to pick some flowers for tea.

Camomile tea can be made from the flowers of Roman camomile or German camomile (Matricaria recutita), which both have a wide range of effects on the body with generally calming and digestive actions. I was actually a little surprised by the taste of the tea I made from fresh flowers yesterday; not immediately pleasant, it was slightly bitter but with a sweeter aftertaste and after a few sips I got used to the flavour. Some of the digestive effects of camomile can probably be attributed to that bitterness.

There are plenty of other reasons to grow camomile in the garden or allotment. It is an attractive yet unassuming little herb, low-growing and unshowy, with fragrant, feathery foliage and white and yellow flowers which are loved by beneficial insects. It is easy to grow from seed and even easier to propagate from cuttings.

Camomile is also an excellent companion plant - it seems to act like a health tonic for other plants growing nearby. I've planted it in between my artichokes (for space-saving reasons as much as anything else) so it can grow in the partial shade beneath the grey-green architectural leaves, and both species seem quite happy with the arrangement.

Aztec Broccoli

Also known as huauzontle, aztec broccoli is a new crop for me this year. It's a member of the Chenopodium genus along with true spinach, quinoa, good king henry and fat hen. I love trying different or unusual vegetables and growing them myself always adds an extra dimension to tasting something for the first time, so when I came across this one on the Real Seed Catalogue website I knew I would have to give it a go.

I sowed the seeds in modules in early May (although they can be sown directly into the ground) and they had germinated within a week, quickly growing large enough to be transplanted into my allotment. Weeks of rain followed, during which many of my plants and seedlings were devoured by hordes of slugs and snails enjoying the wet conditions - I could barely bring myself to look at the huauzontle seedlings in case they had all vanished. But no! They were barely touched and continued to grow on throughout the gloomy weather, giving me some succulent pickings of mealy green leaves to use raw in salads.

A few weeks ago the dense clusters of flower buds on each plant grew large enough to be harvested, taking the top three inches or so from the flowering shoots, including leaves, just before the flowers open. I steamed the 'broccoli' until tender and was pleased to discover that the flower buds and leaves held their texture after cooking, giving a very pleasant 'bite' unusual in a cooked green. The flavour is difficult to describe, not really like broccoli or spinach, huauzontle tastes very green, fresh, almost grassy with a hint of citrus.

The more flower buds I pick, the more shoots are produced, so hopefully the plants will carry on cropping for as long as the weather stays warm enough. Already a favourite, I can't believe how it easy this has been to grow with little attention from me and no noticeable pest or disease problems. Apparently it's a common crop in parts of South America so I'm looking forward to finding and trying out some interesting recipes - huauzontle fritters anyone?

How not to grow garlic!

The garlic bulbs I've harvested this summer were planted last autumn, when I still lived in Bristol. Because I had no ground to grow anything in at the time, I tried growing garlic in compost in wooden wine boxes outside our flat. The photograph shows the result of my efforts with a standard-sized bulb alongside for comparison.

The garlic bulbs produced are disappointingly small and only some of them have divided up into cloves within the bulb. This year I will be doing things differently, growing garlic in the ground on my allotment, but I think it's worth looking at where I went wrong last year and how a better crop of garlic might be produced from container growing.

Firstly, the garlic cloves I planted were from shop-bought garlic intended for cooking, not growing. I have had success in the past growing garlic I bought from a market stall, but I grew it in the ground not in a container. This year I'm planning to buy some bulbs sold specifically for growing on, although hopefully I will be able to use some of the cloves I grow for planting in future years.

Secondly, I am aware that I tried to grow too many cloves for a small space. Perhaps the bulbs would have developed properly if I had planted fewer of them and they had more room to grow. The container was certainly deep enough for growing garlic, but by planting too many cloves there may not have been enough nutrients in the compost to sustain their growth. (I recognise this tendency in myself to plant and sow too densely with other crops too - I find it difficult to thin out sowings and often underestimate planting distances when setting out plugs. Hopefully, recognising it will help me to correct it!)

Also, I planted some winter salad crops (like winter purslane and rocket) between the rows of garlic, so although there was no weed competition maybe there was still too much competition from my other crops, especially as it was all in a container!

It's possible that not all of the bulbs divided into cloves because the weather wasn't cold enough through the winter here. I've read that garlic is best planted in the autumn so that the cold winter temperatures stimulate the bulb to divide. Last winter was very mild in this area so despite my autumn planting it seems the garlic did not get that stimulation.

So lessons learnt for planting garlic this year - buy suitable garlic, get the spacings right and don't try to plant other crops too close. I can't do much about the winter weather except hope it's cold enough!

Drying Herbs to Make Tea

As my Calendula officinalis plants on the allotment are producing so many gorgeous flowers at the moment I've decided to harvest them for drying to make tea. The recent improvement in the weather has helped with this considerably because flowers are best harvested when they are dry, ideally on a sunny day. I'm usually able to fill a bag with flowers whenever I go to up there as picking the flowers encourages the plants to produce more in their efforts to reproduce and set seed for the next generation.

On a small scale, I find the best way to dry herbs (flowers and leaves) for making tea is to lay the plant material out on paper in a cardboard box and keep the box somewhere dry but away from direct sunlight. I've been turning the Calendula flowers over from time to time to help them dry evenly, usually once or twice a day when I remember to. Gradually the petals will darken in colour and curl up, starting to fall away from the flower base as they dry out. Once the petals are completely dry I'll gather them all up and store them in a container somewhere dry and dark. Hopefully I'll have enough Calendula tea to be able to give some away as Christmas presents.

Calendula is an anti-inflammatory and anti-fungal herb and can be used externally (as a lotion, poultice or balm) to treat skin infection or injury, or internally. Drunk as a tea it helps with indigestion and menstrual problems and it has a lymphatic action which can help clear up skin problems. The tea is simply made by pouring just-boiled water onto one or two teaspoons of flowers and infusing for ten minutes or so. The infusion takes on a delicate, sunshine colour which is very warming and brightening when made from dried flowers in the darkness of winter.

I've also been harvesting peppermint for drying. Before the plants start to show signs of flowering I cut them back to the base and lay out the stems in boxes as with the Calendula above. As the leaves dry out they become crumbly and come away from the stems easily, ready to store for winter use when completely dry. The mint plants will carry on growing and should give me another crop or two before the cold weather comes.