Herbidacius!

 

I’m not growing any vegetables this year. There will be plenty of fruit, I expect, because the fruit part of the garden is pretty self-sufficient and requires minimal input from my good gardening self. Vegetables, on the other hand, are very time consuming and I’ve decided that this year I shan’t have that time to devout to growing stuff that can often be very fickle about putting on a good show. 

What I HAVE decided to grow this year are a lot more herbs and flowers. I want to encourage more insects into the garden, but preferably not ones that are going to bite me, because that would be most ungrateful of them. Or slugs. Slugs can stay away unless I can encourage a decent hedgehog population to move in. I’ve never seen a hedgehog in the gardens here. I don’t know if it’s because they are particularly good at staying hidden or there just aren’t any in the vicinity. I sometimes wonder if I ought to offer up the garden as a release spot for hedgehog rescue charities. Anyway, by growing more flowers and vegetables, I am hoping the population of butterflies, moths, and assorted bees etc might improve. 

Will this year be the year I get back into bee-keeping? I don’t know. Lord Malarkey presented me at Christmas with a top class bee house. This is it…

There is an observation door on the side which means you can see what’s going on inside the house. I hope I don’t open it one day and find a bee doing something private, like having a shower or reading the newspaper on the toilet. The bee house needs to be coated with a suitable, bee-friendly stain/varnish before I decide on the best situation for it in the garden. 

There is a good chance of me signing up to do a home herbalist course this year. As you know, I do like a bit of studying (just an excuse to buy new stationery, really) and I’ve found a course run by an education company called Betonica. I’ve used their website for herby information before and have liked what I’ve seen. And whilst I have many books on the subject of herbalism, I think it might help also by firstly, giving structure to my studies and secondly, by being part of a like-minded community. 

When I took Nell for her walk this morning - an extreme sport given the state of the pavements and roads covered in black ice - my brain went on an extraordinary flight of fancy regarding the study of herbalism. Really, it should have been concentrating on keeping me in an upright position, but instead it started thinking about learning about herbs from a scientific point of view, growing more herbs, using those herbs as foodstuff, healers, cosmetics, cleaners, and maybe growing enough to take to a plant sale to sell to other people. Or I could photograph the herbs in an artistic way, or draw or paint them and turn those drawings into textile art or pieces of exquisite embroidery. Maybe sell those, too, or give them as gifts. Or maybe I could use the herbs to create plant dyes, learn to spin my own wool and use my looms to make fabrics. And the flowers? Again, some are edible, some can be used for cosmetics. They are good for all sorts of art works, they can be propagated and sold on, or I can just use them to keep a steady stream in the house, which cheers me no end. 

You see, this is what happens. I have an overly-ambitious train of thought which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes not. My mum insists on referring to my shepherd’s hut as my new ‘workshop.’ Maybe she has a point. A herbal workshop. Hmmmmm…