Valerian

Flowering Valerian

Although it will be a couple of seasons before we can harvest any of the root, we'll be gently plucking beautiful blooms to make flower waters and essences, which have benefits all their own!  The leaves and stems also carry benefits of their own - didn't want to leave them out :)

Valerian is known to be one of the most relaxing herbs available.  Some call it nature's Xanax or Valium.  In today's hectic world, who couldn't use something like that?  

Some of the benefits of Valerian are:

*Calming nervous tension

*Improving sleep quality

*Encouraging drifting off to sleep

*Lowering blood pressure

*Easing PMS symptoms

*Treating muscle cramps

*Great treatment for IBS 

*Heals wounds

*Soothes and heals ulcers

*Soothes and heals eczema

*Eases irritability

Although Valerian can safely be taken long term, many studies have shown, and most doctors will tell you that one should stop taking it for about a week every 6 weeks.  So take it for 6 weeks and then take a week off, then resume as normal.  If you're interested in learning more about this, simply let me know and make sure I have your email address and I'll go into more detail :)

Valerian is also a great candidate for a good old fashioned tonic wine - the kind your great grandma used to keep in the pantry and break out to sip out of a tiny cordial glass.  

The drug industry (Big Pharm) nixed the use of tonic wines waaaaay back when they first figured out that the healing qualities of herbs could be coaxed out of the plant parts and used widely in the mainstream - wine was too unpredictable and would create slightly different tonic strengths depending on the amounts of tannins, alcohol percentage, and many other factors of the wine itself.  

This was not good for Big Pharm, as they needed to ensure exact proportions in order to administer doses of drugs to patients.  It was just too difficult to get the consistency that they needed.  

The good news?  I am an herbalist - not a doctor.  I don't use a prescription pad to get you access to FDA approved medicine with exact amounts of active ingredient and fillers and who-knows-what-else... I use the old folk methods along with tips from older and up-and-coming lay herbalists alike to ensure that I am using the best and safest methods available to naturally coax the medicinal benefits from the herbs that we'll be working with.  

We purposefully left out a couple of herbs this year - like St. John's Wort and Yarrow.  This is because there are possible drug interactions and side effects that I would rather not deal with at this stage.  My point here is that I am using very safe herbs - ones that if the concentration varies a bit from batch to batch, nobody is going to get hurt.  

So we'll be bringing back tonic wines, as they are a very effective method of extracting medicinal qualities from certain kinds of plants and plant parts (again - if you want more info. on this, just be sure I have your email address and ask away - I am happy to elaborate but don't want to bore everyone to tears on our blog!).  Perhaps more about tonic wines in another post.

On to my day - lots to do today... and we should be seeing tiny little sprouts popping up within the next few days... I can't wait to get pictures for all of you!

Have a splendid day ~ more tomorrow!!!