Hens and chicks are herbs

A friend, who has been project chairperson for the Master Gardener's demonstration Hardy Cactus and Succulent Garden (first a Michigan State University demonstration garden, now transplanted to the property at the Easter Seals office in Flint) for many years, used to tell me there was very little to do with succulents in a herbal, "useful", sense.

Of course we all know about the lightning folklore concerning Sempervivums, and that Aloe Vera was a proven soothing medicinal herb. And that Yucca roots are both detergent and food, And that Opuntia pads and fruit are desert food.
But Hens and Chicks? Sempervivums?

Hens and Chicks, a.k.a. . House leeks (Sempervivum tectorum), are hardy evergreen succulent herbs. They are exceedingly simple to grow, thriving in heat, cold, drought and poor soil; seemingly independent of human concern. That old saw, "thriving on neglect," fits them to a T.

I've read that they can be grown indoors in clay pots, like other cactus and succulents, but the only time I tried it, they stretched to the wan light of my midwinter window and lost their charm. If my son would take his tender succulent trees from out my limited grow light space (I'm succulent-sitting while he works on his basement renovation) then I might try again to raise indoor Hens and Chicks.

And only just because I have finally read a herbal use for them that I might actually try, aside from the French Emperor Charlemagne's decree, based I'm guessing, on earlier Anglo-Saxon, or earlier, lore, that his subjects should grow them on their roofs to ward away lightning strikes.

According to an old herbal calendar that I was cutting up to recycle the artwork into gift tags, Hens and Chicks leaves, crushed, serve as a facial, and are soothing to bumps and bruises. Use seems to be topical as in poultice, tincture wash, and salves. Like the Aloe Vera, the leaf can be cut vertically and the mucilage applied directly to the skin.

The calendar also provided a recipe:

House Leek Foot Bath

1 cup hot water

1/2 cup House leek leaves

1 gallon warm water

2 Tbsp. Epsom salts

Puree the leaves in a blender with the hot water. Pour into a foot bath, then add water and epsom salts. Soak the feet for 20 minutes.

Mrs. Grieve, in her A Modern Herbal, a classic English herbal encyclopedia edited by the many times neglected Mrs. C.F. Leyel, and published in 1931 (that you can now read online), describes many traditional western herbs, and I just looked up Hens and Chicks, a.k.a. House leeks. (Another Master Gardener, Judy, gave me her copy when she was cleaning out her bookshelves. I love its breadth of knowledge. And it makes a heck of a doorstop.)

Here are some factoids:

Leac is Anglo Saxon for 'plant'. The Latin Semper (forever) and vivum (I live) were easy, the interesting epithet however, tectorum refers to its location of choice - the roof.

Cool legend - it protects homes from sorcery as well as fires and lightning.

Linnaeus stated it preserves thatched roofs in Sweden.

Plenty of topical uses. Parkinson tells us the foot bath above might be just the thing for warts and corns, used nightly, with the inner leaf applied as a plaster.

The Mrses. Grieve and Leyel go on and on listing a plethora of historical useful uses for our cute little Hens and Chicks. You can look them up, but I'll stick with the foot bath use as my Hens and Chicks touchstone.

For Sedums, there is a whole another entry in The Modern Herbal. Who-da thunk it?

If you are one of those modern gardeners committing to permaculture in your yard, feel free to plant a hardy cactus and succulent garden - they're HERBS!

Easy-Peasy Fragrance Flavored Jams and Jellies

I admit it, I'm pretty lazy!
Today I finally got around to sending this message I'd promised to my herb garden volunteers on Tuesday, and the thought occurred to post it here ... two birds with one stone?
So here it is:

Hi everyone,
I looked everywhere for a recipe in a handy file to cut and paste! This is as close as I came to the recipe I used for the Rose Petal Jam you sampled on Monday, from Phyllis V. Shaudys' Herbal Treasures (Storey Books). Phyllis Shaudys attributes the recipe to Euell Gibbons in his classic Stalking the Healthful Herbs.
Remember, the best smelling roses are also the best flavored roses!

Rose Petal Jam
Copied from "eat them roses"
by LOUISE RIOTTE
Mother Earth News
March/April 1971

"Roses offer another bonus because besides being beautiful: You can eat them and there are few things more delightfully different—or easier to make—than Rose Petal Jam. Since you do not cook the petals you faithfully capture all the flavor, fragrance and color of the fresh roses . . . and serving this jam has added immeasurably to my reputation as a cook!

"Here's how: Simply take your freshly opened roses—any color—grasp as many petals as you can, hold them between your finger and thumb and snip the white bases (which are bitter) from all of them at once with a pair of scissors.

Blend one cup of petals in a blender with 3/4 cup water and the juice of one lemon. Blend until smooth, gradually adding 2-1/2 cups of sugar and keeping the blender running until all sugar is dissolved. Reserve.

Now stir one package of powdered pectin (Sure-Jel) into 3/4 cup water. Bring to a boil and boil hard for one minute, stirring constantly.

Pour the pectin into the rose-sugar mixture and continue slowly running the blender until all ingredients are thoroughly mixed. Pour into jars, cool, seal and refrigerate. This may also be frozen and is wonderful on muffins or hot biscuits some cold winter day when the sky is overcast and you are longing for a bit of bright June sunshine."

I like her writing, don't you?
Anyway, finding the Scented Geranium jelly recipe was easier. I hand this one out when I teach a class:

Easy Herb Jellies
(Not Recommended as an activity for children.)

Scented Geranium Jelly
1 18-ounce jar apple jelly
about 2 cups fresh scented geranium leaves

Method:
1. Remove lid from jelly jar. Microwave jelly one minute at a time, on High, just to melt , not boil (3-4 minutes total). NOTE: Please be careful, the jelly is hot (!) and the label of the bottle can become loosened, leading to slippage.)

2. Put leaves in 4-cup Pyrex measuring cup, reserving the four most decorative leaves for later. Place those four leaves in four small jelly glasses.

3. Pour hot jelly over leaves in measuring cup. Let stand a few minutes to cool, and to infuse the fragrant essential oil into the jelly.

4. When jelly appears to be starting to reset, remove the wilted leaves with a fork. Pour jelly over leaf in each jar, adjusting its position with a toothpick. Cap the jars and refrigerate.

(Note: I recently began to skip heating the jelly in the jar and just melting it right in the measuring cup. Easier. And you can also strain the leaves in step 4 using a messier but quick method of pouring through a metal strainer.)

Lavender Marmalade

Made in a similar fashion, using marmalade and culinary quality lavender buds.
Instead of the double infusion, simply add the melted marmalade to 2-4 teaspoons of lavender buds, and pour into the jars without removing the herbage.

Rose Petal Jelly

Also made in a similar fashion to the scented geranium recipe.
For the best color and taste, use your darkest, most fragrant rose petals.
And for food safety, only use roses you are sure were grown without pesticides.

For rose petal jelly, gather a colander full of rose petals in the morning as soon as the dew is dried.
Pour the hot jelly over 2 cups of petals in the measuring cup, then add more petals. They melt down instantly. When the jelly starts to reset, strain out the petals through a metal sieve. Pour the jelly into jelly jars, cap and refrigerate.

Note: Try your own combinations! I’ve made Lavender jelly with good results, adding a purple blush with the addition of a spoonful of grape jelly. Strain the buds out of that one. Mint makes a nice jelly. But my experiments with Pineapple Sage in grape jelly was not a hit. Be prepared for some comments from the family.

I should add this caveat that I talked about during our conversation: it's great to experiment, but be sure to confirm with a reliable resource that the herb or edible flower you are using in your recipe is, indeed, edible.

Monday in the Backyard Herb Garden

Recap of our volunteer work day at the county extension demonstration herb garden:
Sharron and Gloria met me in garden to work, we worked from 9-1:30 with a small learning break. Mike brought 12 pails of compost. We spread it and dug some of it in.

We planted:
1 very small ginkgo tree (a bare rooted whip I purchased at Genesee Conservation District last year and grew in a pot)
1 white common yarrow (Flint Yard and Garden plant sale)
3 Achillea 'Terra Cotta' yarrow (Bluestone Perennials)
3 Dianthus 'Bath's Pink' (Bluestone Perennials)
onions in 'compost bed' (donated by Pat Whetham)
several seed packets in "compost bed": arugula, swiss chard, kale, dill (seed from Meijers), french sorrel(seed from JLHudson Seedsman).
10 calendula seedlings in culinary circle (seed from Michigan Herb Associates) .

We paused for some herb learning time:
I brought herb butter to sample on a sliced baguette.
(Recipe: whipped butter, lemon zest and fresh lemon juice, and minced chervil, chives, and a little winter savory. We discussed using and freezing herb butter wrapped in waxed paper and shaped in a log as shown in the photo.
This butter we sampled would be great served with poached salmon or chicken, eggs, or on steamed Michigan asparagus.)



I brought bottles of my dried chervil, parsley, chives, and french tarragon to compare with fresh herbs. All these herbs are ready to use fresh from the garden right now. In each case, the fresh samples I picked would be miles better to use right now than last summer's dried herbs.
We also talked about lovage and ginkgo.

I brought some useful books:
For identifying plants: The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers- Eastern by Neiring and Olmstead (Knopf)
For i.d. plus information on medicinal uses of plants: Peterson Field Guides Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants, by Foster and Duke, (Houghton Mifflin)
A great little book on using herbs: The Herbal Pantry by Tolley and Mead, (Potter)

I'd like to say a special thanks to Kathy who the painted Herb Garden sign. The color is what I'd call a sort of French lavender blue - it looks great! I'll have to take a photo of it next time I stop by the garden.
Special thanks also goes to Mike for hauling more buckets of compost, and for working on the drainage tile quest. These additions to the garden will be a big improvement.
And loads of appreciation goes to Gloria who led the way double digging that compost into the bed where we planted the yarrow.
Thanks goes in advance to Karen for offering to be our 'watering angel' for the seeds we just planted.
Finally, big thanks to Sharron as well for the hard work on Monday - we always comment the garden looks better after a work session. Sharron offered to map the garden when she can get there on her own because we are always tired out after working on our gardening projects.
The working volunteers are what makes the project good.

Rainy day

It's damp, drizzly, and Monday morning, when I should be working at the demo Herb Garden at the Extension, so I thought this would be a good time to talk about that project.

We had a good initial meeting two weeks ago at the Extension office. I had received a list of trainee volunteers from the last Master Gardener class, and had passed around a volunteer sign up sheet at the April M.G. meeting, so I had a lot of potential volunteers. I sent e-mails to 10 and 9 showed up for the meeting. We are already doing better than last year!

Terry reserved a room for us so the cold weather wasn't an issue. For introductions we talked about why each of us wanted to work in this project - to learn about herbs was the common response, and what our assets were that we could bring to the project. All except my gardening friend Sharron are Master Gardeners and most are also involved with other gardening volunteer projects. For example Gloria is a former florist who is also working on a raised bed herb garden for seniors in her town. Mike has a small farm, selling compost, mums and pumpkins in the fall, just put up a greenhouse and planted herbs in hope of getting into
business wants to learn about the plants he's growing.

Kathy offered right away to spruce up and paint the Herb Garden sign. Margaret offered to bring a Mideastern chicken and rice herbal dish made with garam masala that she makes for our lunch one week. Mike offered to bring tubs of his compost and he has a line on some old drainage tiles that we could use in the Tea bed for restraining the mints. Sharron has graphic art talent and will finally make me a good map of the plot.
Doesn't this sound like a great group?

As a group we decided to meet on Monday mornings to work in the garden with an eye to having it in good shape for the Genesee County Master Gardener Garden Tour at the end of June.

We toured the garden, and I noted that some of our Master Gardeners hadn't even been back there yet. Terry printed up copies to distribute of a nice Extension bulletin that I'd found on the Internet, from the University of Kentucky, on growing culinary herbs, which is a good place for new herbies to begin learning about herbs.

Back indoors I had a snack ready to share, of course, tiny heart-shaped lavender short scones (biscuits, really), that I made that morning, with a delicious Queen Anne's Lace jelly that I had purchased from Donna Frawley who spoke at the Herb Symposium two days before.

We ended the meeting with a project. I brought bottles and bags of dried herbs from my garden and also from last year's Extension herb garden. We discussed making herbal tea (tisane) from dried herbs as we passed around sample herbs. I discussed my favorite herbal tea book for beginners The Herbal Tea Garden by Marietta Marshall Marcin (Garden Way, 1993).
We made our own personal herbal tea blends and each of us made two teabags to take home, using paper tea bags that you fill yourself and seal with an iron. (I got them from Nichol's Garden Nursery which you can find online.)

I dug up some more names, and sent some more e-mails out, and got no responses. (Howd'ya like that?) Last Monday we nine met in the garden and set to work. Luckily the fall cleanup went well, so the two to three hours were mainly spent cleaning up the debris of winter.
I brought dandelion tea to sample, and talked about dehydrating the leaves of the young dandelion for a spring tonic tea and the roots which I grind for a mineral rich winter tea. I brought along a package of a commercial health food store tea called Dandy Blend to compare with my bottle of home ground dandelion root. They look and taste a lot different!
Dandy Blend had a cute picture of a dandelion on the label and it is very tasty and good for you. But it is pricey, on par with instant coffee I'd guess. The label of Dandy Blend calls it Instant Dandelion Beverage, but lists roasted barley, rye, chicory root, dandelion root and beetroot. It tastes like Postum which is chicory, I think.
Dandelion root, dehydrated and ground, has a bland flavor. I rather like the Dandy Blend better but like I said it is spendy, so my idea is to mix it half and half with my ground dandelion root.

I think I'll try to do a herb oriented demonstration like this every time we meet, and the volunteers who want to know more about herbs can learn that herbs are just plants that have a use.
Growing herbs is no different from growing flowers and vegetables.
And there is no secret to using them - but there is a secret it seems in today's busy, packaged food oriented society to using herbs, and that is to learn something you want to try and then to actually DO it.
Like the Nike ad suggests.
Only... the weather has to cooperate!

Now for some photos. Here are Calendula flowers drying in my dehydrator. The flavor is so minimal with calendula petals, and retaining the color and shape are important. The dehydrator does a good job in this instance.


A closeup of a herbal tea (tisane) blend: the flowers are of pineapple sage, Salvia elegans.


I 'garbled' the dried leaves from the stems over a clean bedsheet. You can grow a large quantity of herbal tea plants in a very small amount of space and with
minimal expense. You can be confident of how they were grown and how they were harvested and processed. You can have fun making your own custom blends.
So why buy commercial?


Added Note: While I was looking through my photos for something else, I ran across this one of my dandelion project. So I'm adding it later here in this post where it belongs, with the dandelion tea tale. Which may be stepping on Blogging Ethics but I'm doing it anyway.

What you see is my bag of dried leaves, a tray of dried roots and crowns, and my dedicated to herbs coffee grinder with ground root.

A Local Hero

Anyone who has ever brought a turfgrass sample to the Home Horticulture help window at the Genesee County Extension, or seen the sample turfgrass plots there, or who has asked for help on the Master Gardener Plant and Pest Hotline, or who has Ask(ed) a Master Gardener a gardening question at the Flint Farmer's Market or a myriad of other venues, has probably met and spoken to, or otherwise assuredly been helped by one of my local heroes, Jim.

He is a model for us all in how to grow older gracefully. Jim lives his compassion by active community volunteering. He always has a hug and an encouraging word for the rest of us.
Jim shares his wisdom by maintaining a vital interest in everything, with his dogged pursuit of continuing education, and then in his turning around and giving back his knowlege, for free, to the community.

Jim has had a setback and this note came today from Terry on the Master Gardener list-serve:

Genesee Master Gardener Volunteers:
An absolutely wonderful medical update on MG Jim Fearon's condition: Jim was taken off the respirator yesterday afternoon, and is breathing on his own, awake, alert, and talkative! He is being transferred out of intensive care late this afternoon. These are amazing developments, and his family and friends are so very thankful for your continuing thoughts and prayers!

All I can say is, stay with us, Jim. We need you here. Spring is coming and our world wouldn't be the same without you.


Jim is the handsome guy on the right in this photo:

The usual suspects: Don, Ruth, Me, Sue, Phil, Mary, and Jim.

We couldn't have asked for a better day

Our October landscape clean-up day at the grounds of the county Extension was lovely - that kind of crisp Autumn day in Michigan with sunny primary colors of blue and green, with beginnings of red and yellow that we all can imagine from calendar photos ...
But the companionship of nice people working together gave me a real boost ... better than a flu shot for the upcoming winter!

Carol and her daughter Mindy brought a cauldron of homemade chicken soup to warm on the grill and Vickie's Junior Master Gardeners added their cleaned and chopped freshly dug vegetables from their garden to the pot, and by noon or so we had a Harvest Soup feast. Delicious!

I brought home the cooking tip of adding Jerusalem artichokes to soups and stews, and to reciprocate, here is my recipe for the boursin-style herbed cheese spread that we ate on rosemary foccacia bread:

Herbed Boursin Cheese Spread

2 packages Philadelphia cream cheese
1 pound unsalted butter
1 clove garlic, crushed and minced
and a variety of fresh herbs, stems removed and leaves chopped:
baby chives, oregano, thyme, basil, 1 large sage leaf, 1 stem of rosemary
freshly ground black pepper

Beat the butter and cheese together until creamy, and stir in the herbs. Refrigerate overnight to meld flavors, and allow to come to room temperature before serving.

(By the way, for those of you with "inquiring minds", this is NOT a recipe I have ever served at home... it is what I call a "refreshment table" recipe, due to the cholesterol content. I figure adults can make choices even in buffet lines. You can make this cheese spread with low fat ingredients, but it just won't be the same.)

Finally, a note of public thanks to all the great volunteers who worked in the Backyard Herb Garden - you are all wonderful to contribute your time to this project and please know it is much appreciated. Thank you!