The Gardener's Companion to MEDICINAL PLANTS

An A-Z Of Healing Plants And Home Remedies.

A fun yet informative little book, (A5, Hard cover, 224 pages), with recipes and how to prepare remedies for plants such as, Yarrow glycerin to aid digestion and ease the symptoms of hay-fever through to Sweet violet syrup traditionally used for a sore throat or cough. Along with twenty-two other recipes including Calendula lip balm, Liquorice sweets and Rosehip syrup.


Aside from the multiple entries for recipes and how to use plants for their medicinal properties there is also chapters on their Growing, History, Weeds as Medicine and Drugs from Plants among others.

The photo on your left is one example of more than 270 plants listed, that occur throughout the book and includes the botanical and common names of the plant and which parts of the plant to use, leaves, flowers, etc. It also has traditional uses and medicinal discoveries.


 If you are in anyway interested in the medicinal use of plants and herbs or just curious then I'd suggest this would be a useful, fun and informative addition to your library or as a gift to a friend or colleague.

To give added weight to the authority of this book it has been produced by The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and written by Monique Simmonds, Melanie-Jayne Howes & Jason Irving.

Another review you might find helpful. Garden Drum. 

Available from Booktopia and other leading book stores,

Cheers

Stewart.

Right tool for the job

For something that, in my mind, was going to be a simple job, slowly turned into much more but I got it in the end.

I'd had these two backhoe/tractor tyres in the veggie garden for some time now after a work friend picked them up and dropped them off for me.

The goal was/is to make a cheap raised bed out of them but I wanted to cut the sidewall out of the tyres first so as to increase the growing area available.

I'd had a few feeble goes at removing the sidewalls with hand tools with no success and ended up walking past them for months hoping for some magical solution to come along and bite me. None did.

A few weeks ago now it all got the better of me and I started adding some serious thinking to getting the sidewalls removed.

Eventually I decided that a reciprocating saw was the answer. Which, as it turns out was the solution I was looking for. The problem was getting the right reciprocating saw for the job.

As you can see in the video I started off with a cordless Ryobi reciprocating saw proving that I had the right tool but sadly the Ryobi burnt out just after where the video finished.

Back to square one

I returned the Ryobi to Bunnings and hit up the local hire company, Master Hire, who supplied me with this little rip snorter from Hitachi.

Carved it up like a hot knife through butter. I'd finished inside of half an hour, job done.

I just need to line the inside of the tyres with a food grade plastic to prevent any nasty chemicals leaching into the bed and possible being taken up through the plants root systems.

Twelve Apostles

This has absolutely nothing to do with veggies but it does have everything to do with me having a blast in a helicopter flying over the twelve apostles on my recent holiday to Victoria.

If you ever get the chance to take a helicopter flight over the twelve apostles then I highly recommend you do it.

 

Get that garlic planted.