Fennel – Foeniculum vulgare: This is a valuable herb which is becoming more rare to find these days. It used to grow in abundance near railway tracks, and along the sides of the roads in what used to be called hedgerows. Fennel tea is good for the eyesight. It can be used, cool, to bathe the eyes. Fennel Tea is also helpful in losing weight, because Fennel is a natural diuretic. You can make Fennel Tea by using a quarter of a cup of fresh herb, and topping the cup up with boiling water. Allow the fennel tea to cool a little, then drink. Fennel tea is a naturally sweet-tasting tea which aids good digestion. Just a teaspoon of fennel tea can be given to babies with colic. Good to take Fennel Tea before a meal, or in place of that coffee.
Many other valuable healing herbs have been lost from our environment – Comfrey, called ‘Knit-bone’ and ‘All-Heal’, is the Queen of all healing herbs. Comfrey has been conveniently banned in many countries, simply because drug companies wanted to own, and manipulate for their own use, the healing power of Comfrey.
Pesticides and Herbicides Kill Our Healing Herbs: These things are extremely toxic, bad for the environment, and cause diseases such as cancer, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, parkinson’s, and heart and circulatory problems. They are also bad for the environment generally. Another reason that they are harmful to us is that the world-wide use of pesticides and herbicides is killing off many of the valuable medicinal plants, called ‘weeds’, which used to grow naturally on waysides and hedgerows in all so-called ‘civilized’ countries. I believe that this is no co-incidence. The same makers of pharmaceuticals are often related to the companies which make pesticides and herbicides, or are just the same firm anyway, with a different brand name. They do not want us to be making our own herbal remedies, using Comfrey, or using homeopathy, or any other alternative medicine. Their herbicides kill off all the good weeds and leave their weak type of grass behind. And those grass seed companies, and producers of agricultural food seed, are just another branch of this collaborative empire of control: Many of these same companies have vested interests in the companies which genetically modify our vegetable seeds, and grass seeds, so that they will not reproduce again all by themselves.
Commercial grass mixtures are another evil, as far as the regeneration of the natural herbs goes, because commercial mixtures for grasses do not contain the variety of ‘stray’ plants in them, but are deliberately engineered so that they will not even seed to regenerate their own grass again. Once you destroy the natural grasses on your soil, and replace them with these commercial mixtures, you will need to keep buying that commercial grass seed each year to keep a good head of grass on the land. A Maori woman on New Zealand ‘Country Calendar’ a couple of weeks ago, Channel One TVNZ, complained about the paddocks of grass which had been planted with this commercial, weakened grass seed. Her paddocks of grass which still had the original old grass on them, complete with all the stray ‘weeds’, were self-perpetuating, and regrew year after year without needing any fresh seed on them.
Relying on commercial grass seed which is engineered to die out, rather than reproduce, is not a sustainable type of agriculture. This benefits only the pockets of those international giants, the seed-sellers who market their ‘stuffed’ product. Apart from needing to buy more grass seed from those companies each year, the wide variety of natural herbs, such as dandelions, plantains, self-heal or prunella vulgaris, chickweed, and many others, are non existent in these seed mixes. These natural herbs, or ‘weeds’, all have an important part to play in keeping soil healthy, and in providing a variety of natural medicines for animals to eat. They are also of enormous value in making herbal medicines for people.
to be continued……