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The Sacred Gardener
Golden Lake, Ontario
 
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The Sacred Gardener School

By Steven Martyn November 14, 2017 June 13, 2020

  Learn more about The Sacred Gardener School

Wild Food Workshop
The Mystery That Surrounds Us
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sacredgardener

Seeding earth wisdom since 1989. Home of The Sacred Gardener School.

The Sacred Gardener
Plantain: Traveller’s Talisman, part 1 ....once Plantain: Traveller’s Talisman, part 1 ....once I realized that the problem was my stomach, and there was likely a bleeding (maybe infected) ulcer, and that it wasn’t my liver or gallbladder, my intuition immediately brought me to Plantain. No, not the banana, but the lowly herb. Sometimes, when we think “I know”, it gets in the way of our intuition telling us what we really need. It’s always amazing when you think you know a herb and have used it for years, but then realize a whole new side of her. This has happened to me many times. Just like people, when they join in to heal or change something, whole new sides of them emerge that we have never seen. When I called on many of my herbal healers for help with Lyme disease, I came to know Teasel, Bee Balm, Boneset, Dandelion, Burdock, Cleavers, Sarsaparilla and many others, in a new way because of the more acute situation. These plants and thousands of others have so many hidden gifts to offer us when we are in need and ready to receive them. These herbs are gifts from the Gods to both sustain our health, and heal us in an acute situation. Plantain, Plantago major has followed in the wake of colonization as a healing balm. A balm to heal the wounds to the Earth inflicted by horse and cart, and heavy soled shoes. And, a balm for wounds to human and animal alike. The juice, tea or poultices of the green leaf has miraculous properties as an antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and analgesic. Ribwort is one of Plantain’s common names, and a key to its traditional use. The ribs, which run the length of the leaves, signify how she pulls out toxins, stops bleeding and heals wounds. She pulls the pain and the toxins from the cut and sews it safely closed, free of infection. Thankfully, I’ve know plantain for many decades, and used her topically for every kind of bite to take both the pain and the itch away. As well as for boils, burns (sun and fire), rash (including diaper rash and shingles), mastitis and other infections. But, I had never worked with her myself for internal problems. #plantagomajor #plantain #herbalhealing #intuitivehealing #herbalmedicine #herbs #plantsasmedicine
Remembering summer magic In the Angelica Patch.... Remembering summer magic In the Angelica Patch..... This plant has hollow stalks, and when we harvest them, we have a drink of pure angelica waters. Flowery and refreshing, she'll connect you with the divine. She grows tall, leaving a shady understory, which our kids (and many kids at heart) have enjoyed days on end wandering around in. Here Steven watches Andrew take the plunge. One of many possible wild adventures one could have here at The Sacred Gardener School. Our early bird ends February 1! Thanks to @galcaponephotography for capturing this moment in time. #herbalmedicine #herbs #angelica #harvest #sacredgardener #sacredgardenerschool
The snow’s been slow coming this year. The feeli The snow’s been slow coming this year. The feeling that a big snow’s on it’s way has been creeping up on us, and then it came. Such beauty, and a sigh of relief with the building up of what will bring nourishment in the spring when it melts. #winter #snow
😂😂 😂😂
Echinacea, Snake Root and Snake Oil Recently I st Echinacea, Snake Root and Snake Oil Recently I started thinking about ‘snake oil’ and I knew even before I started looking I’d found gold. This term is seldom used these days but was still in common use when I was growing up. “Snake oil” basically means something is fake. My Grandmother, who was born in 1900, used it with regularity. She grew up with ’snake oil’ as the name of an actual product, a liniment, and lived through the takeover of naturally based medicines by pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry was born in the late 1800s and grew up in the early twentieth century. In the initial stage of this boom, many medicinal products were in fact just traditional medicines, such as herbs, that had been processed and packaged up into pills or liniments. So I wasn’t surprised to find snake oil is in fact a traditional North American and Chinese remedy. As the doctrine of signatures might suggest, rattlesnake works very well for poisoning, inflammation and arthritis. It was also reputed to be able to turn around an ornery ‘rattlesnake disposition.’ In the 1880s the first patent on a herbal snake oil was registered by a Dr. Meyer. It contained Echinacea, known then as ‘snake root’ and was sold as panacea; a cure-all. Having harvested bulk herbs to make commercial products for thirty years or so, it’s easy for me to see that as the product’s reputation and sales grew it would be difficult to keep up with the harvesting of these special plants. In the case of Echinacea not only is harvesting seasonally dependent, but only the older roots are traditionally harvested for medicine. In a flood of interest and income it seems inevitable that less scrupulous folk would generate look-alike products of lesser quality. There were no quality controls and so it’s likely in the fervor people would even sell just the mineral oil itself or the oil infused with more available but less effective herbs. Thus, “snake oil” came to have its modern meaning and connotation. https://thesacredgardener.ca/echinacea-snake-root-and-snake-oil/ #snakeoil #echinacea #echinaceaangustifolia #makingmedicine #herbalmedicine
New Year's Meditation One of the gifts that spen New Year's Meditation One of the gifts that spending time with people in their last days can bring to us is perspective on possessions. So, I’ve been meditating on the nature of ‘possession’. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve done this or likely the last, because this tree, from which so many forms of colonization grow, keeps bearing fruit of insight for me. On the one hand I can justify feelings of possession and attachment by saying they are an evolutionary necessity. That in order to form pair bonds to raise children and form stable communities we must feel a degree of possession. But in another way, in the moment when I watch myself possess, it doesn’t feel necessary, right or mature. I can see it’s a contrived behaviour that grows from fear. We’re taught to placate our fears by surrounding ourselves with possessions. We ‘possess’, to shore-up what we imagine is our life, against the surging tide of uncertainty and death. But it’s futile, because when the tide actually turns we find our sandbags are full of straw and floating away with the tide. The origin of the word possess comes from french and essentially means “to sit as a master”. So clearly possessions have always been about power-over. In reality our ability to possess is a complete illusion. And with this insight it follows that anyone who would take the idea of possession seriously, must be fully delusional. Yet our whole culture, and much of our personal time and energy is devoted to this imaginary concept. It’s the barb that keeps us struggling on the hook of modernity. Even our language is possessive, so trying to think or write about things in a non-possessive way is like sailing into the wind. It can’t be done directly, we need tack. And because this backward way of thinking is built right into the language, we can assume its been there from the inception of English culture, and every other culture whose language uses possessives. To realize this is to begin to see how we’ve been semiotically programmed for thousands of years to think this way. Read more: https://thesacredgardener.ca/new-years-meditation/ #meditation #possession #minimalist #minimalism #lettinggo
The Shadow of Silviculture (or growing ‘tree gar The Shadow of Silviculture (or growing ‘tree gardens’). When we live in the bush or on a farm, cutting trees is a reality we must face or we will be overgrown. I hate cutting trees, and have a hard time with it, as I do with killing animals for food. But I consider both a necessity in the North, where the ground is frozen for half the year. Mostly I cut standing deadwood for the fire, which is its own ‘taking’ but it doesn’t hurt so much. Unlike in the intensive silviculture areas such as the Madawaska Forest Garden, and here at Golden Lake where I have to cut healthy trees. I put it off as long as I can, often considering and negotiating with the trees for many years, and then I do a bunch all at once. Why would I have to kill a healthy tree? Well, with silviculture, (growing forests), it’s the same as why you have to pull some ‘weeds’ in your garden. True to my wildculturing garden philosophy, which leans toward letting everything grow as long as it can and as big as it can (before seeding); before it’s harvested to enrich the ground it grew from. The same holds true in a forest garden. In the garden, I need to weed a few times over the growing season. With the forest garden it seems I have to cull some trees every ten years! Or a few times over the eighty year design of this successional polyculture garden. Because it happens so seldom it’s a big deal for me doing the needed cutting. Of those that had to go there were at least two really big healthy Sugar Maples that had benefited over the last twenty five years from the clearing I made for the polyculture forest garden. In that time, some of the nut trees, at the back or north edge of the clearing (receiving the most direct sunlight), had seriously grown, and leaned into the opening, to the point that a Heartnut, Butternut and Carpathian Walnut were completely over-canopied. These trees were not only getting stunted from the lack of light but also getting lopsided, reaching out horizontally to the south for the sun, making them destined to topple at an older age. #silviculture #trees #forestgarden #forest #polyculture #polyculturegarden #permaculture #sugarmaple #ottawavalley
Thank you to everyone that takes the time to send Thank you to everyone that takes the time to send some love, whether it's to us or anyone you're feeling grateful for. So needed and welcome, always. Let's do it more. #gratitude #givethanks

sacredgardener

Seeding earth wisdom since 1989. Home of The Sacred Gardener School.

The Sacred Gardener
Plantain: Traveller’s Talisman, part 1 ....once Plantain: Traveller’s Talisman, part 1 ....once I realized that the problem was my stomach, and there was likely a bleeding (maybe infected) ulcer, and that it wasn’t my liver or gallbladder, my intuition immediately brought me to Plantain. No, not the banana, but the lowly herb. Sometimes, when we think “I know”, it gets in the way of our intuition telling us what we really need. It’s always amazing when you think you know a herb and have used it for years, but then realize a whole new side of her. This has happened to me many times. Just like people, when they join in to heal or change something, whole new sides of them emerge that we have never seen. When I called on many of my herbal healers for help with Lyme disease, I came to know Teasel, Bee Balm, Boneset, Dandelion, Burdock, Cleavers, Sarsaparilla and many others, in a new way because of the more acute situation. These plants and thousands of others have so many hidden gifts to offer us when we are in need and ready to receive them. These herbs are gifts from the Gods to both sustain our health, and heal us in an acute situation. Plantain, Plantago major has followed in the wake of colonization as a healing balm. A balm to heal the wounds to the Earth inflicted by horse and cart, and heavy soled shoes. And, a balm for wounds to human and animal alike. The juice, tea or poultices of the green leaf has miraculous properties as an antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and analgesic. Ribwort is one of Plantain’s common names, and a key to its traditional use. The ribs, which run the length of the leaves, signify how she pulls out toxins, stops bleeding and heals wounds. She pulls the pain and the toxins from the cut and sews it safely closed, free of infection. Thankfully, I’ve know plantain for many decades, and used her topically for every kind of bite to take both the pain and the itch away. As well as for boils, burns (sun and fire), rash (including diaper rash and shingles), mastitis and other infections. But, I had never worked with her myself for internal problems. #plantagomajor #plantain #herbalhealing #intuitivehealing #herbalmedicine #herbs #plantsasmedicine
Remembering summer magic In the Angelica Patch.... Remembering summer magic In the Angelica Patch..... This plant has hollow stalks, and when we harvest them, we have a drink of pure angelica waters. Flowery and refreshing, she'll connect you with the divine. She grows tall, leaving a shady understory, which our kids (and many kids at heart) have enjoyed days on end wandering around in. Here Steven watches Andrew take the plunge. One of many possible wild adventures one could have here at The Sacred Gardener School. Our early bird ends February 1! Thanks to @galcaponephotography for capturing this moment in time. #herbalmedicine #herbs #angelica #harvest #sacredgardener #sacredgardenerschool
The snow’s been slow coming this year. The feeli The snow’s been slow coming this year. The feeling that a big snow’s on it’s way has been creeping up on us, and then it came. Such beauty, and a sigh of relief with the building up of what will bring nourishment in the spring when it melts. #winter #snow
😂😂 😂😂
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