Growing Your Own Pharmacy

Herb gardens can be planted in all sorts of styles and arrangements. Most common are the kitchen herb garden, for culinary purposes. I plant a wide variety of herbs, but not just to season sauces. That’s really just a fringe benefit. My herbs are grown primarily for medicinal uses.

This will be our third year here at the farm to include herbs in our list of garden fare. Like each year, this year’s garden will be broadened based on last years successes and pitfalls.

Here is a (nearly final) list of what we’ll be planting this year:

Angelica

Basil (multiple varieties)

Borage

Burdock

Calendula

Catnip

Chamomile

Chives

Cilantro

Cumin

Dandelion (I don’t cultivate this, I harvest it as it grows naturally in the yard)

Dill

Echinacea

Feverfew

Goldenseal (Harvested responsibly from the countryside)

Horehound

Lavendar

Lemon Balm (aka Bee Balm)

Lemongrass

Marjoram

Mint (a couple varieties)

Mugwort (I’m going to try again!)

Oregano

Parsley

Plantain (I harvest where it grows wild-everywhere!)

Pyrethrum

Rosemary

Sage

Savory

Sheep Sorrel

Spilanthes (Native American toothache plant)

Thyme

Valerian

Wormwood

Yarrow

Spilanthes

Feverfew

 

Dill

Basil

Many of these I’ve grown before, most with good luck, some not so much. A few of these I have never grown before, but every year is an experiment. I’m looking forward to it!

Organization. Hopefully.

I have been working hard preparing for Spring. I know, I know. It sounds like I’m jumping the gun or must not care a lick about Christmas. Not so. Alongside my seed catalogs lies my knitting projects for my family. Planning in advance is just smart.

It takes a massive amount of planning, over the course of a few months, to prepare for those few weeks in Spring where we try to get all of our seed in the ground at the right time. We don’t do just one crop, we do about 40 different varieties of vegetables each year. Each year I add more…it gets to be a lot to keep track of.

Our 2012 Early Spring Garden

I have looked high and low the past few years for some type of farm management printables or programs. To no avail. I can find it for the “big boys”, and only for monocroppers but not for us. So instead of lamenting any farther, I have begun to make my own. At first it started small, keeping records of kidding dates/difficulties, etc. What vegetable was planted where. Now, in the style of ME, it is turning into a full fledged operation.

If anyone feels like they have any need for papers like this, let me know and I’d be happy to share. However, I have no idea how to get what I’ve made on the blog. I might do it on Facebook if there’s an interest in it.