Author: Susun S Weed

(NOTE: The IHHN is pleased to present the writings of Susun S. Weed as part of our Newsletter.)

I always say the gardener's best revenge is to eat the weeds. I've been doing it for thirty years and can testify that my health and the health of my garden has never been better. Here are a few hints for gardeners who'd rather eat their weeds than hate them (and for non-gardeners who are adventurous enough to try out nature's bounty).

View your weeds as cultivated plants; give them the same care and you'll reap a tremendous harvest. Harvest frequently and do it when the weeds are young and tender. Thin your weeds and pinch back the annuals so your weeds become lushly leafy. Use weeds as rotation crops; they bring up subsoil minerals and protect against many insects. "Interplant" (by not weeding out) selected weeds; try purslane, lamb's quarters, or amaranth with your corn, chickweed with peas/beans, and yellow dock, sheep sorrel, or dandelion with tomatoes. And, most importantly, harvest your weeds frequently, regularly, and generously.

Overgrown radishes, lettuces, and beans are tough and bitter. So are weeds that aren't harvested frequently enough. Give your chickweed a haircut (yes! with scissors) every 4-7 days and it will stay tender all spring, ready to be added to any salad. If you forget a patch for two weeks, it may get stringy and tough and full of seed capsules. (All is not lost at this stage. The seeds are easy to collect – put the entire plant in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for 2-3 days and use the seeds that fall to the bottom of the bag – and highly nutritious, with exceptional amounts of protein and minerals.)

Unthinned carrots and lettuces grow thin and spindly; so do unthinned lamb's quarters, amaranth, and other edible weeds. Wherever you decide to let the weeds grow, keep them thinned as you would any plant you expect to eat. Here's how I do it: in early spring I lightly top-dress a raised bed with my cool-method compost (which is loaded with the seeds of edible weeds). Over this I strew a heavy coating of the seeds of lettuces and cresses and brassicas (cultivated salad greens), then another light covering of shifted compost.

Naturally, weed seeds germinate right along with my salad greens. When the plants are about two inches high, I go through the bed and thin the salad greens, pull out all grasses, smartweeds, cronewort, clear weed, and quick weed (though the last three are edible, I don't find them particularly palatable). And, I thin back the chickweed, mallows, lamb's quarters, amaranth, and garlic mustard and other edible wild greens.

Keep those annuals pinched back. You wouldn't let your basil go straight up and go to flower, don't let your lamb's quarter either. One cultivated lamb's quarter plant in my garden grew five feet high and four feet across, providing greens for salads and cooking all summer and a generous harvest of seeds for winter use.

When a crop of greens has bolted or gone to seed in your garden, you pull it all out and replant with another crop. Do the same with your weeds. We eat the greens of garlic mustard all spring, then pull it out just before it bolts (making a horseradishy vinegar from the choicest roots) - often revealing a generous crop of chickweed lurking underneath.

Some of my favorite garden weeds:

ANNUALS

Amaranth (Amaranthus retroflexus)
Young leaves, old leaves, even non-woody stalks are delicious as a cooked green; chop and boil for 30-40 minutes. Serve in their own broth; freeze leftovers for winter use. Use instead of spinach in quiche (you may never grow spinach again). Collect seeds throughout the autumn by shaking seed heads over a lipped cookie sheet; or by harvesting and drying the entire seed head. Winnowing out the chaff is tedious but soothing. There is a special thrill that comes when you toss the chaffy seed in the air, and the breeze catches it just-so, and the seeds fall back into your tray, while the prickly chaff scatters "to the four winds."

Chickweed (Stellaria media)
Young leaves and stalks, even flowers, in salads. Blend with virgin olive oil and organic garlic for an unforgettable pesto. Add seeds to porridge.

Lamb's quarter (Chenopodium alba and related species, e.g. Chenopodium quinoa)
Young leaves in salads. Older leaves and tender stalks cooked. Leaves dried and ground into flour (replaces up to half the flour in any recipe). Seeds dried and cooked in soups, porridge.

Mallows (Malva neglecta and related species)
Leaves of any age and flowers (the closely related Hibiscus flowers too!) are delicious in salads. Roots are used medicinally.

Purslane (Portulacca oleracea)
The fleshy leaves and stalks of this plant are incredibly delicious in salads and not bad at all preserved in vinegar for winter use.

BIENNIALS

Burdock (Arctium lappa)
Roots of non-flowering plants harvested after frost make a vinegar that is deep, and richly flavorful as well as a world-renowned tonic. Petioles of the leaves and the flowering stalk are also edible; for recipes see my book Healing Wise.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria officinalis)
Year-round salad green. Leaves used in any season, even winter. Roots are harvested before plant flowers. Seeds are a spicy condiment.

Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota)
Leaves finely chopped in salads. Flowers are beautiful edible decorations. Roots of non-flowering plants, harvested in the fall, and cooked.

PERENNIALS

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinalis)
Leaves eaten at any time, raw or cooked, but especially tasty in the fall - not spring! Roots harvested any time; pickle in apple cider vinegar for winter use. Dandelion flower wine is justly famous.

Sheep Sorrel (Rumex acetosella)
Leaves add a sour spark to salads. Cooked with wild leeks or cultivated onion and potato they become a soup called "schav."

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica)
Young leaves cooked for 40-45 minutes and served in their broth are one of my favorite dishes. Seeds can be used in baked goods, porridge.

Yellow dock (Rumex crispus)
Roots pickled in apple cider vinegar are tasty and a boon for enriching the blood. Leaves, especially young ones, are eaten raw or cooked.

Susun Weed
PO Box 64
Woodstock, NY 12498
Fax: 1-845-246-8081
----------------------------------------------------------------Visit Susun Weed at: http://ww.susunweed.com

For permission to reprint this article, contact us at: mailto:susunweed@hvc.rr.com

Vibrant, passionate, and involved, Susun Weed has garnered an international reputation for her groundbreaking lectures, teachings, and writings on health and nutrition. She challenges conventional medical approaches with humor, insight, and her vast encyclopedic knowledge of herbal medicine. Unabashedly pro-woman, her animated and enthusiastic lectures are engaging and often profoundly provocative.

Susun is one of America's best-known authorities on herbal medicine and natural approaches to women's health. Her four best-selling books are recommended by expert herbalists and well-known physicians and are used and cherished by millions of women around the world. Learn more at http://www.susunweed.com

http://www.susunweed.com/disclaimer_readme.htm

www.herbshealing.com/weedforum/ Susun Weed's Wise Woman Forum - an open space for discussion. This place is for you to share your questions, concerns, and comments with other wise women like you. Take a moment to register and become part of the community. Enjoy!

TO TOP

Plants, Seeds, More!

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Book Review

Peaceful Thoughts An Interactive Journal in Positive Thinking for Children and Their Parents
Written and Illustrated by Robin K. Thumann, M.Ed., M.S.W.
Peaceful Thoughts Press, 2003
$19.95
reviewed by Martha Nord

This is a book to DO with a child over a period of time. It is good tool for parents or other significant adults and children to use together to talk about big concepts and values, 18 in all. The author intended it to be used with children ages 4 to 10, but I think some older children would enjoy it as well when done with a caring adult. Each 2-page spread has a little poem about a particular concept, an illustration to go with it, and excellent discussion suggestions for the adult and child to talk about together. While the poems are not great children’s literature (I find them sing-song-y and simplistic), this book is an excellent way for adults to bring up and discuss these important values/concepts. There are many excellent stories available in children’s literature to illustrate each concept. It would be well worth the adult’s time to find a good children’s picture book to go along with each value in this book. When I did the pages about “Our Earth” with a 10-year-old, I read the book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. The book Elmer by David McKee would be one of many excellent stories to read with the pages on humor. A little time spent at the library would result in many excellent books to read along with this one. “Doing” one page a day – reading the poem, talking about the picture, reading an additional story that illustrates the value, and doing the discussion questions would be a meaningful way for adult and child to spend time together and help a child grow in wisdom, peace, and happiness.

I recommend this book if the adult is willing to make the commitment to doing the pages thoughtfully over time with a child. The values/ideas presented are: togetherness, family, people, friendship, caring, forgiveness, thankfulness, courage, bravery, determination, peace, freedom, knowledge, change, caring for our earth, humor, planning, and preparing for rest. It is a good resource for caring adults to have available to use with the children in their lives.

Martha Nord is coordinator of the Children’s Task Force (CTF) of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington. - http://www.uubloomington.org
http://www.bloomington.in.us/sjuucb --

The Seven Chakras

In this issue we begin our exploration of the seven charkas at the root. As with all things posted here in the IHHN Newsletter, if you have comments or other information you would like to share, feel free to submit your article for our consideration.

The Seven Chakras
The Color of the Base Chakra is Red and the corresponding note is C. Kundalini: Root, Survival Chakra: Located at the base of the spine. Source of your primal energies. Contains the primary 8 cells that are the only cells in your body that do not change in your lifetime.

Note - Crystal Bowls can be used to Align and Maintain chakra balance

-Apart from the physical body a human being consists of a spiritual body, and this spiritual body is composed of vibrations of light which are structured in a way so that they create different centres. These centres are each structured in a beautiful pattern, and they are located as follows:

The Root Or Base Chakra

The root chakra, or the centre at the end of the spine by the loins, is the centre which radiates a white, divine light, when seen from the highest spiritual level. This centre is the centre for the material life, it is the centre that roots the subtle divine consciousness in the material life. Consequently it is the basis for human existence in this physical world, and if it is blocked, you will have a human being that feels rootless in both his spiritual and his physical existence.

Every human being has a joint physical and spiritual existence. The karmic development causes an oscillation between the spiritual and the physical dimensions, and when this process goes of positively, then you feel equally at home in both places, and feel that you are able to do what you have to do in both places. The root chakra makes you able to manifest your existence wherever you are, and its delicate white light emits vibrations that has to do with mother's love. In mother's love the physical and the spiritual existence is united in a sublime way. In this form of love, where you e.g. can imagine a woman nursing her baby, the demands of the physical world are united with the highest form of spiritual love.

That is why this event is so important for human beings, and therefore it is important that the period of nursing is not shortened, for in this period both the mother and the child will have stimulated, developed, and cleansed their root chakras, and this gives the newborn child the possibility for a basic development, which is far beyond any other educational means.

When the mother nurses her child, the lights from their root chakras are united, and their energies are mixed together; thereby the bond, which the child needs to have to the Earth, to the material life, is strengthened, making the seperation from the spiritual realms, from which it recently has left, easier.

If the period of nursing is shortened unnessarily, or if it is completely omitted, then what can happen is, that the child cannot accept that it had to part from the spiritual realms, and it may become restless. Many children today suffer from what is called hyperactivity, and this is due to a restlessness, which originates from this.

When the energies or vibrations from two people's chakras are mixed, the following takes place: the lightwaves from the one chakra affects the lightwaves from the other chakra, and depending of the purity of the chakras, these lightwaves are mixed in a way, so they create different figures. If you look at two people, e.g. a mother and a child, who have the lights from their root chakras mixed, you may see delicate figures which looks like white flowers or white crystals. If the contact is positive - if e.g. the mother is nursing her child with love, or at least with a positive will to feed the child - then beautiful figures may appear, and the figures created by the lightwaves from the chakras become more beautiful, the more love there is between the parties.

This was some more general information about the mixing of vibrations from two chakras. But now to the other main chakras.

Next issue will feature info on the Hara Chakra

--Channeled by Birgit Klein -
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Fueling Around: The Story of the Veggie Van
By Joshua Tickell

It was an idyllic August morning in Southern Germany when I first saw a farmer pour vegetable oil into his tractor. I watched as Florian lifted the heavy jug of yellow liquid, balanced its lip on the tractor’s filler hose, and then poured the vegetable oil directly into the fuel tank. The sun was still below the horizon and the morning dew seemed iridescent in the half-light. Still sleepy, I wondered if I was dreaming or if Florian was crazy. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE

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Click Here for a "New Dimensions" radio program interview featuring master percussionist and performer Layne Redmond. She teaches workshops and performs internationally, powerfully blending ritual with virtuoso playing. She is the author of When the Drummers Were Women (Three Rivers Press 1997). This program was hosted by New Dimensions' Associate Producer Jeff Wessman.