Antidepressants Blog

Fresh herbs can be used wherever dry herbs are called for in a recipe, and in most cases the flavour is vastly superior. Drying any plant removes a lot of its vitality, oils and vitamins; but if you wish to use chives in mid-winter, you must either dry or freeze the fresh herbs to maintain a continuous supply.

Very high quality dried herbs are now packaged in Australia. One firm is Somerset Cottage, the family business of Rosemary Hemphill, the author of Spice and Savour and Fragrance and Flavour. In general, when dried herbs are called for in a recipe and you wish to substitute fresh herbs, use 3 times the quantity listed.

You can dry your own herbs in many different ways. The best and easiest way for the home gardener is to lay out the fresh-cut leaves or flowers on screens made by stretching those left-over ends of nylon net or terylene curtaining (or even clean hessian) over one or two old picture-frames. Tack the material around the outer edge, and put the frames where air can circulate under as well as over the drying herbs. A dry shelf in the laundry (if it’s not too sunny), or in a storeroom, or even on top of that old cupboard in the garage (not where your car exhaust fumes are going to hit the tray), are all good places to dry the herbs. Never dry them in the sun; you will lose almost all their goodness.

You can also dry herbs tied in small bunches hung head downwards from tacks along the edge of a shelf, or from brackets, or underneath overhead cupboards in your kitchen. I often have bunches of lavender or the scented geraniums drying like this hung from the black iron brackets of my herb shelf in the kitchen. This way you can get some of the perfume while they are drying. Never hang them in a spot where steam or condensation will get to them.

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Valeriana officinalis VERBENACEAE

An unassuming,, small herb, valerian gives very little outward evidence of the value it has always had in herbal therapy. You might pass it by altogether and not comment on its tufts of droopy light-green leaves. Even the flower stems are not really attractive, looking anaemic and skinny, with a pale head of creamy pink tiny blooms in the late spring.

Valerian has two important qualities: the strong sedative powers in its roots; and its ability to stir up and increase phosphorus activity in the soil around it, and provide rich mineral content for the compost bin.

The herb has been known and used for thousands of years. Sedative plants are rare amongst common herbs, and if your diet is right and you live as naturally as possible, if you are happy in your work or in the home and life is not too frustrating, you should never need a sleeping draught made from valerian root. However, illness involving severe pain, an accident, or any crisis that keeps you worried or tense so that sleep will not come night after night: all these depleting circumstances can find you in dire need of a safe, natural sedative like valerian.

Valerian grows on banks and near stone if possible, and Chaucer called one variety “Setewale”, wryly commenting on its rather unpleasant odour and taste. Nature has put out her warning signals here, so don’t use this herb lightly. Unlike sleeping pills and many synthetic drugs, valerian will cause neither addiction nor side effects, and it does not have narcotic properties. There is no immediate effect—you do not fall asleep five minutes after the first dose; it has a slower far-reaching action, promoting healthy nerves that do not feel the slings and arrows so much. Once again, natural medicine reaches not only the symptoms but the cause of the bodily discomfort, the jangled nerve centres sending frantic, anxious signals instead of calm relaxed ones.

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Parsley can be very slow to germinate, and no doubt much of its reputation of being hard to grow stems from this. It can take anywhere from five days to eight weeks, and must be kept moist all the time. An old English phrase says it goes nine times to the Devil and back before it germinates; and he likes it so much he keeps some of it. I have always found it much easier than its reputation suggests, if a good potting mixture is used in the seed box. This gives the shoot no hard crust of soil or sand to force its way through, and my parsley seedlings have never taken longer than 14 days. Soaking the seed in warm water first is also recommended before planting, but I have found a simple way to get the same effect. Sow your parsley seed on soil that has been soaked with water, cover with about i inch of seed-box mixture, then place the box out in the hottest sunny spot with a sheet of clear polythene plastic over the top in which a few air holes have been cut. Leave the box out all day, and your parsley seed should by nightfall have got the message. Next day and afterwards, just give it the usual seed-box care.

Ample nitrogen is needed for parsley to produce abundant leaves, so keep the compost content of your soil very high, with any animal manures you can lay your hands on, too. It will grow well in a trough or pot, and unit-dwellers will find it a herb they can have success with: a sunny or partially shaded balcony suits it very well.

The leaves dry easily in a luke-warm oven. Rub them through your hands to crumble them when dry, and store for convenience near your food preparation area in the kitchen, to remind you to use parsley with a liberal hand.

So many recipes abound where parsley is used that here I will give you only a tasty seventeenth-century one.

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Garden, or sweet fennel, is a perennial, a tall rampant-growing plant some 3 to 4 feet in height. It closely resembles dill in appearance, and the two should never be sown close together; they will cross-pollinate and their flavours intermingle and deteriorate. Fennel is best planted on its own, in calcium-rich soil, away from the formal herb beds, in a spot where its gangling leggy growth will not overpower other plants, and with space all around it, not cramped by shrubs or trees. It thrives best in rather rocky, sandy soils, being undemanding of extra feeding. Overfeeding can make the herb more susceptible to aphis attack, and to young snails, which find shelter in the leaf stem junctions. Plentiful water in the early stages is essential. After this period, ordinary watering should suffice. The plant may need staking or tying if exposed to strong winds.

Harvest the seeds when they turn from green and plump to brown and dry, and save them for pickles, chutneys and flavouring borsch soup. You can also do as our grandparents did; chew fennel seed to allay hunger pangs. The seeds were often carried to church and prayer-meetings; and when little Willie’s stomach started to rumble during the sermon, fennel seeds were an unobtrusive way of damping down his need for Sunday dinner. So gain a twofold benefit from fennel: if you want to slim, chew some of the seeds not with but instead of lunch.

Leaves of fennel are sometimes placed on the bottom of the pan when baking bread in Italy. A few seeds sprinkled on the top of pastries or bread rolls before cooking give a delicate aniseed flavour and a delectable aroma.

A traditional recipe for fennel is to use it with any oily fish, as in the following recipe. Fennel grows naturally near the seashore round the Mediterranean, once again showing Nature’s provision for counteracting the disadvantages of one food by ensuring its opposite or complementary ingredient is near by.

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Sanguisorba minor ROSACEAE

This plant I call the “fountain herb”, because it grows just like the fountains on those old bird-baths; the outside leaves lie down towards the ground and the new leaves spring upright in the middle. It is a perennial, and stays green and fresh all winter, a boon to the herb gardener.

If you are a vegetarian and like your salads all the year round, plant salad burnet. Its cool cucumber flavour and delicate green leaves add a fillip to those winter greens when other salad vegetables and fruit are not so plentiful. You will be doing your health a favour, too, for burnet, like borage, is a general blood purifier and tonic, with a cooling relaxing effect. It helps to reduce the indigestibility of cucumber, and is often used with or instead of this vegetable for people with digestive troubles. The chopped leaves can be added to herb vinegars too.

The plant grows easily from seed, and will self-sow if in the right conditions. It is quite a small, compact herb, some 12 to 15 inches high, in a tidy little rosette, and would be very suitable for a window box or small pot, and ideal for home-unit dwellers who want to grow a few herbs in a limited space. Pull off the old leaves from underneath if you wish to keep it tidy for pot cultivation; but if it is in the open garden the old leaves will just decompose happily out of sight under the fountain of new leaves.

The flowers are not impressive: long slender stems with a tight knot of tiny green florets at the tip. Keep these nipped off unless you want seed to start off new plants; the flavour of the leaves is better if the plant is not allowed to flower.

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