Sage (Salvia Officinalis)...

... yes, Sage is an easy herb to plant for your organic  garden ....

... just in time for spring planting, that's it  ... if you are in Australia

I just bought another heap of Sage seedlings .. I love Sage .. I still got some nice plants in my garden, but I wanted a few more. Not only does Sage look nice, but it makes good companion planting for the garden as well. The main reason obviously is for using the herb as a kitchen or medical herb.

How nice is it, to be able to grow your own medicine.

Lets lay down the virtues of Sage:

Sage ( Common) Salvia Officinalis ( German > Salbei )

Lets start in the garden, Sage as a companion plant and aids Rosemary, and the other way around. Yes, I have them alternating in a garden border row. Sage goes well with cabbage, it is protective against cabbage butterfly or moth .. not sure, what is it?

Anyhow, Sage aisd cabbage and many other vegetable in general, making them more digestible. Sage is also useful as a tea, to water vegetables with, but never water the very young vegetable plants, only more mature ones.

Have a look now at the possible healing powers:

Sage - Salvia in Latin means "to save", that already is a good start and it certainly is one of the great panacea (remedial) herbs.

It is useful to have at hands at all times, thats why it should be grown in every garden. Generally known to be good for gargles, sore throat, breath cleansing, light infections, sleep, mild depression, as an antiseptic and many other interesting indications which we will all talk about.

Using Sage as a tea:

Sage is a general tonic, and will taste nice if you drop a few leaves into your black tea for general consumption.

A word of care here, Sage is a herb with volatile oils, which is great against infection, however if you use pure fresh leave Sage to drink as a tea, it should be boiled for 3 minutes to boil off the oils, whereas, if you use it to gurgle, you have to let it steep for 10 min's and make sure to use a lid on your cup or pot. For most other application, Sage is used as a dried herb.

Sage is easy to be used as a dried herb, that way you can use it as a tea without boiling.

A general dose would be 1-2grams of dried Sage leaves to a cup (200ml) of hot water, the direct action is astringent and even more important it is, what is called an Anti-sudorific.

This is an interesting function, which makes Sage a very useful tea for Menopause and hot flushes and nights sweats.

Anti-sudorific, actually means that it reduces or even inhibits sweating.

In my experience as a herbalist practitioner, I have used Sage regularly for women with menopausal hot flushing symptoms. Obviously, I always used it in conjunction with diet advice, esp. staying of sugar, salt, coffee and tea, and a good general well balanced diet, free of processed food. In 75% of cases, this advice was enough to keep the hot flushes down. In more severe cases, additional herbal remedies in tincture form were used.

This anti-sudorific property has some other great uses, such as for treating sinusitis and post nasal drip, which is excessive mucus, frequently caused by an allergy, which may be seasonal or persistent throughout the year.

For young mothers who want to wean off their babies from breast milk, Sage is the perfect tea to stop the flow of milk.

Generally speaking it is good for any condition where there is fluid involved, which needs to dry up, that's why it is even good in the early stages of colds and flu.

Because of this drying effect, it should not be used for longer than 1 week without supervision, but during that time, 3 to 4 cups of the infusion ( tea) can be taken daily.

Other functions may be hard to prove, such as the general tonic effect on the liver and digestive processes, and as mentioned before, as therapy for depression and as a brain tonic and for better mental functioning or capacity.

A good way to try it out would be for mental fatigue or mental anxiety ... let me know if you have any success.

Try it also for headache by adding some Rosemary and Peppermint.

Externally it works best as fresh plant infusion, as a gurgle for sore throat ( antiseptic) and mouth ulcers, it may also be used as douche for vaginal discharge.

For skin irritation, including eczema, use it in your bath, in combination with a handful of rolled oats, kept within a stocking, which is pumped, to squeeze out the oatmilk, very soothing as well as anti-septic, works great, fantastic for itchy skin as well.

There is a bit of history to this herb as well, it has a reputation as a preventative against the onslaughts of old age ( I better get stuck into it), and the ancient Egyptians used sage as a brain tonic.

Not bad for a common garden variety herb, and on top of that, it is easy cultivated, you can propagate is from seed or just by buy seedlings. Sage likes a well drained sunny position, once established it doesn't need much water, just perfect for my garden and climate ( South East Qld ).

Harvest the plants for drying just before they start flowering, dry them and store in an airtight container. Always prune off the dead old wood.
Are you wondering how to preserve the fresh leaves?

Just chop fresh leaves finely, put into ice cube trays covered with water and freeze, will keep for many month.

It is also used as a hair tonic, shampoo and in cosmetics.

Sage is great in cooking as well, all the usual meat, fish, pork and poultry dishes, it used to flavour sausages.

Funny with herbs, isn't it .. and not only with herbs, with other remedies as well?

Why is something going out of favour?

It's like certain herb qualities are forgotten ... don't be fooled, there is nothing wrong or not working with sage, it's a truly great herb.

Some more simple therapy recipes:

Coughing or Hoarseness - 1level teaspoon of dried Sage to a cup of hot water with a teaspoon of Mananuka Honey.

In the old days, (whatever that means) Sage was boiled in half water, half wine, esp good against colds and flu.

A very weak Sage tea stimulates sweating, a strong Sage tea- the required dose, stops sweating.

Another recipe as a good standby herbal throat gurgle remedy, is to use a handful of the fresh leaves, squeezed and macerated in clear spirit for 10 days. Filter and store in a bottle. Use 1 teaspoon in a glass of water to gurgle.

Note - Caution: Not to be taken in pregnancy or while breast feeding.

Please leave some comments ... have a good day out in the garden harvesting your herbs :-)

Article by .... Dieter L. - for the useNature Magazine - Herbal section - Find a Herbalist - click Herbalist Directory

Warts and all ...

Warts, small noncancerous growths on your skin, are caused by the human papilloma virus.

Warts are an extremely common problem, and good that we have many natural ways to make warts go away.
Once again, look around your garden and you may have the right herb or plant growing at your doorstep.

I have to admit I had some warts as a kid and was subjected to an array of natural strange treatments.
The first remedy my mum always instructed me on using was to break off a dandelion flower and dap the broken stem with the milky sap onto a wart on my hand. I think, it sometimes worked, yes, but sometimes they seemed to re-appear on another spot on my hand. The trick obviously was to do it everyday for a prolonged time.

Actually, Dandelion sap has been recommended as a wart cure since at least the late 1700s.

The next trick, in case the dandelion didn't work was to take a specific kind of big black snail and let it move over the wart. I wasn't really font of that at all. I think it worked only because I had an aversion against the snail treatment and wanted it to stop.

Next in line was my grandmother, she was special, and a bit of a herbalist and even could speak warts and other afflictions away. She was well known as a Wart and Shingles Charmer. You may find it hard to believe, but even Doctors in the neighborhood recommended my granny to patients with Shingles ( herpes zoster ). Shingles is a painful afflictions and patients willingly tried everything to get rid of it, and it seemed to work.

Today.....  I find it interesting that my grandmother talked away afflictions which seemed to be based on viruses.
Her treatment was obviously some kind of faith healing, and in my case it definitely worked. She talked all my warts away. But she combined it with an interesting type of herbal treatment.

As I recall, I had to wait till the full moon was out, sitting on a window and I had to say a specific rhyme, sorry can't remember, but that was not all ... I had to wave a little twig of Rosemary around my hand as well. And that was not all either,   and even so my warts disappeared, I had to do the same thing again one month later, but this time just sitting on the window waving the Rosemary.

Obviously, as a kid, I had no idea what was going on at all, I simply believed my granny and that was it. Today, I think there was actually more to the treatment than just faith healing.

Having studied Hypnosis and NLP - Neuro Linguistic programming, many moons ago, I realized that my grannie used one of the most powerful anchors to stimulate my senses and with that repeated the whole treatment and installed faith simply with the aid of a  strong aroma. I don't think it was important that it was Rosemary, what was needed was just a powerful aroma.

In case any of you are unsure what an anchor is, it is simply something which you remember with any one of your senses, and which will bring you back to a memory of an actual or suggested memory.
Years ago, a good example to explain, was the blackboard at school, and someone scraping the fingernails down the board. If this makes you still react, you know what an anchor is. I think today they don't have blackboards at schools anymore, probably all white boards or computer based gadgets :-)
Another good example is, just imagine biting into a lemon, does that make you react somehow? OK.. that's an anchor.
The strongest anchors work with the sense of smell.

What beats me, how did my grandmother know this, or was it pure intuition?

And to finish this long story, my granny wanted to pass that knowledge on to my dad, esp. the spell for the Shingles. That spell had to be applied in person, and was not permitted to be passed on to the patient or to be spoken, and if it would be passed on wrongly, one would forget the spell, it would be lost forever.
My granny passed it on to my dad, but he didn't really believed in it, and when someone came to him for a shingle treatment, my dad just told him the spell, and guess what, it didn't work and after that my dad couldn't remember the spell anymore..  
.. isn't that a nice story ..:-)   it's true ...

Now, I think someone should research faith healing in combination with NLP type of anchors .. I think that could be developed into a real treatment ..

Back to warts, these days  freezing or laser treatment probably works best, but although highly contagious and recurrent, skin warts appear harmless and respond well to herbal remedies.

Herbal Remedy

Milkweed

My herb of choice to treat, would be Milkweed, and  like dandelion, milkweed has a milky fluid that works well when applied to the wart two or three times a day.

Milkweed comes under many different names, such as:

Radium weed ,  Petty Spurge and Cancer Weed, and yes, it is used for sunspot skin cancers, works well ... the Latin name is:
Euphorbia peplus, and the stem when broken produces a milky corrosive sap  used to burn off warts or sun spots.

Fresh aloe gel can be applied to aid healing.



.... let us know your favorite wart healing remedy ...

Chamomile

The first Herb to discuss will be the very common and well known Chamomile.

Chamomile can be grown in most areas, even as a lawn. Most people simply go to the supermarket and buy Chamomile as  teabags. This is certainly very handy, but it doesn't compare with the freshly dried herb and flowers. However, if you have nothing else than teabags on hand, that's fine, just use double strength, yes... that's 2 teabags :-)

Boil water, let it come off the boil for a minute, than pour it over the bags, jiggle a bit and place a lid on the cup to make sure the essential oils and aromas are not disappearing into thin air. Let it steep for 7 to 10min., if you don't like the taste, add a bit of quality honey.

Now, most people would use Chamomile to calm down a bit, it is nice to drink before going to bed. Indeed, Chamomile is classed as a sedative, but interestingly that's not all, it has some great probably unexpected uses.

Anyone who ever had a bit of Gastritis, knows how irritating this can be. Stomach ulcers obviously are even worse. I am not claiming that you can cure a Stomach - Gastric Ulcer with Chamomile tea, but it certainly will settle your stomach.

If you have any stomach complaints, here is what you do:

At night,  brew up some Chamomile tea, if possible, use the real thing, if not, teabags will do, remember - use double strength. Same for lose Chamomile, use 2 heaped teaspoon full of tea, and add a teaspoon of honey. Pour the tea into a thermos flask, and put it next to your bed, together with a cup. Set your alarm clock 30min before you have to go up. next morning, when you be woken up by your trusty alarm clock, fill your cup with the Chamomile tea and slowly drink it up. Lay down in your bed on your back for 5min, than turn to your right side for 5 min, on to your stomach for another 5 min and to your left for a further 5 min. and just a few more minutes on your back again before you finally go up. Do that for a few days or a week or even longer...  it really does help. This practice is called a Rollkur ( roll cure ) in Germany.

Why does it work?  First it is the mildly sedative effect and secondly, Chamomiles action of disbursing dead bacteria from the linings is of great benefit.

Has it got any other function? Sure has,  it's good for babies, colic and just to settle them, use only a small dose for brewing the tea, and than give only a teaspoon. It can be combined with other herbs as well to form a synergistic action. For Colics, it can be combined with Fennel Seed tea.

Chamomile, the specifics:

Action: Nervine, carminative, antispasmodic, sedative, anti-inflammatory, antiseptic, diaphoretic.

Systems beneficial affected or Good for: The Brain, Nervous System, Stomach, Uterus, and  generally soothing the whole body, great for stress.

A classic remedy for indigestion in combination with stress.

Great for pain and cramping associated with the menstrual cycle, and the trick here is to add a sprinkle of Chilly powder to stimulate circulation.

Chamomile contains the amino acid "tryptophan", which is a sedative, will help with sleeping difficulties, esp in combination with a herb called Vervain, another herb containing tryptophan, try it in warm milk if you are not allergic to the milk, that would give you a triple tryptophan sleep inducer, sounds fantastic.

For a more precise dosage, you should take: 5grams for 100ml of water -  this can be doubled for specific treatments such as discussed above.

Here are some more old house recipes.

For sore or tired feeling eyes: moisten and warm up 2 teabags on top of a kettle, and palce them on your eyes.

Toothache: Do the same again with one teabag, place it on the outside where you sore tooth is and hold it in place by a warm woollen scarf.

Irritable children: A cup of chamomile tea as atonic once or twice a day.  (or maybe you need it more)

Hangover: Chamomile tea may offset the effects of alcohol, it certainly can quieten a squeeze  stomach

Note:

As with any Herb or plant, some people may be allergic to it. If you are allergic to ragwort pollen, you may be allergic to chamomile, both are ground covers and may be picked together.

Herbs with volatile oils  should never be boiled, the active ingredients will simply evaporate.

Feel free to comment or ask questions ... or add your favourite use for Chamomile.

To find a Herbalist view >> Herbalist Directory

Herb Blog Introduction

 Herbs have been around forever ..
Herbs have medicinal properties ..
... and herbs have been the initial preferred medicine of choice by ancient Doctors.

Herbs form the basic of many modern medicines - prescription drugs, by example, digitalis derived from a plant / herb called commonly Foxgloves.

This blog is mainly about holistic health support application with common herbs, which you may be able to grow yourself or buy fresh or dried at your Supermarket. 


Herbs can be amazingly powerful, it all depends on the right application. 

All of the Herbs will be well known, which often gives the impression that they are not valuable in treating certain ailments.
However by using these Herbs within their specific range of application will give the expected results.