Organic pesticide-free posies are tasty additions to salads, cake décor, and even savories such as fried squash blossoms. Florals add a stunning beauty to any dish. Grab your basket and add a bouquet to your culinary creations: impatiens, marigold, gladiola, daylily, cornflower, daisy, carnation, and viola. My favorites are peppery, fresh-flavored nasturtiums, which are so easy to grow, have a lovely aroma, and their yellow, red, and orange-bright blooms are the color of happiness.
This sweet tasting herb is excellent in savory dishes. Basil truly grows like a weed, and you should cultivate it right on the kitchen windowsill so you can snip basil leaves to add to your Thai or Italian-inspired dishes. Give your basil plants plenty of sun and lots of water and you will reap a mighty bounty to share with the neighbors. Old wives and hedge witches claim basil protects while it brings prosperity and happiness to any gardener’s home. Basil helps steady the mind, brings happiness, love, peace, and money, and even protects against insanity. (What more can you want?) The benefits of this plant are as plentiful as the plant itself; it can be used for manifesting and attracting love and on the highest vibrational level for abetting psychic abilities, even astral projection.
Allium, also known as chives, is blessedly easy plant to grow anywhere and everywhere—on the kitchen windowsill or in the garden patch. A member of the onion family, this is a lovely case where the entire plant—bulb, leaves, and flowers—can be eaten. Plant the bulbs six inches apart, water them, and you can pretty much ignore them after that as all they require is water. A plus is that this relative of onion has insect repellent properties, so you can plant rows of this beside veggies and fruits and the bugs will stay away. They propagate quickly, so you can dig up mature bulbs, separate them, and replant them. One tip to remember is that chives do lose their flavor when dried, so use them fresh. The flowers are a lovely surprise to add to salads for their edible beauty, and many a kitchen gardener uses chives in all manner of dishes as it is good for weight management and is a plant of protection for both home and garden. Chives were used by healers of old in amulets to ward off evil spirits and mischievous fairy folk. Fresh cut bunches were also hung beside the sickbed to speed healing, especially for children. If you see a home surrounded by rows of allium, you know they hold to the “old ways.
Balm also goes by the equally lovely Latinate name Melissa. From Greco-Roman times, this relative of the mint family has been held to be a significant medicinal. You can grow lemon balm with ease from seed packets in almost any kind of soil, but it likes shade in the afternoon to prevent wilting. This is one of the happy plants that will “volunteer” to spread in your garden, and it can be used in your home to bring love to you and to heal after a breakup or divorce. It can also be employed as an aphrodisiac. Infusions and teas made from lemon balm make good on the offer the name implies as it can soothe the heart and any lingering upset, blue moods, or aches and pains from trauma, both physical and emotional. I suggest we all grow as much as possible and let some go to seed for those new plants that will pop up in unexpected places in your herb garden. An herbalist never complains about a plentitude of balm; anyone who makes much use of lemon balm in brews and cookery will enjoy an abundance of love.
You could say that thyme is a classic herb, so much so that the venerables, Virgil and Pliny, sang the praises of this medicinal mint relative over two thousand years ago. While thyme loves Mediterranean weather, it can grow elsewhere from seeds and cuttings. Good for the stomach and especially effective as respiratory relief, thyme induces sweats to remove toxins and reduce fever. Thyme honey tea is truly a sweet way to make the medicine go down, so much so you will find you drink it even when hale and hearty. Thyme is also a culinary plant, making it a delightful additive to savory dishes. When I lived in a warmer clime about ten years ago, I planted wooly thyme in among the flagstones of my front yard and let it spread as much as possible. By the hour when I came home from work, the sunny eighty-plus degree sunny weather had warmed the thyme, creating a perfumed walkway; coming home was a heavenly experience.
It has been believed for centuries that thyme brings courage and both inner and physical strength. Even when you are facing seemingly insurmountable odds, spells and smudging featuring thyme can get you on track and bring you to your goal. I think the greatest of all aspects of thyme is to rid your home and family of melancholy and overcome despair after extreme difficulty and loss. If your loved ones have experienced a catastrophe, try thyme for rituals of magic and restitution. I have no doubt that practitioners of green witchery will be singing the praises of thyme for at least two thousand more years.
Sleepy Thyme
This herb improves your quality of sleep; gather and dry thyme it to use in sachets so the divine fragrance freshens linens and laundry. A little bag of this dried “thyme tucked in your pillowcase makes for sweeter sleep. As if all that is not enough, the plant itself also repels bugs and pests but attracts honeybees! As we all know, deep sleep is a great healer.
Thyme has so much to offer, including relief for colds, coughs, and congestion; above all, it is an antimicrobial and antispasmodic. One cup of tea made from a teaspoon of dried thyme leaves steeped “in boiling water will bring much healing energy to you and your family.
This is one of the most relied-upon of all herbal treatments for mild to moderate depression, PMS, perimenopause symptoms, and general immune and mood boosting, It is so popular now that you can find the extract in capsules at most pharmacies, grocers, herbal supply stores, and the like. Take three to six hundred milligrams per day to brighten your days. You can also find St. John’s Wort as a tincture if you prefer a liquid extract.
