Helen Lehndorf

Category: Herbs

  • fennel from the river

    (Above: My favourite selfie, out foraging beside the river.)

    In autumn, I forage for fennel seeds. Along the Manawatū river, the fennel plants are plentiful. This year, it’s been such a warm autumn, there is still fennel in flower as well as the older plants going to seed. I find fennel such a beautiful plant in all it’s stages: the bright green fronds of early spring, the sunny yellow umbels of summer…then the handsome dried seed heads of autumn.

    (Above: A ‘fennel tunnel, fennel tunnel, fennel tunnel’ < a little phrase from my foraging book.)

    Fennel is an enjoyable thing to forage for because each plant is so laden with seed heads that it’s easy to forage enough for the pantry in just a couple of walks. I fill up this 500ml jar and it lasts me a year of curries and pickles and tea.

    (Above: yellow fennel flowers going to seed.)

    I take secateurs with me and snip some of the seed heads that look grey and dry. Although they are probably dry enough off the plant, I leave them on a tray on my kitchen table to dry more…just to be sure they are totally dry. Then I rub the seeds off over a large bowl.

    (Above: the fennel seed heads drying a little longer at home.)

    I have an interest in Ayurveda. Fennel seed is highly-valued in Ayurveda for it’s digestive properties. In some Indian restaurants, they offer tea spoons full of tiny coloured sweets as a digestif after your meal. These are sugar-coated fennel seeds.

    (Above: The fennel seeds fresh off the seed heads before I sort through and get all the little bits of flower head out.)

    Here is a recipe (well, more a proportions guide) to a digestive tea I make with my foraged fennel seeds. I get the fenugreek from my local Indian supermarket and the licorice root powder from Pure Nature. Fenugreek has powerful digestive properties and can help regulate blood sugar, too. Licorice powder aids digestion and adds sweetness to the tea blend. Ginger helps with digestion also and tastes wonderful.

    Digestive Tea

    One part fennel seeds

    One part fenugreek, seeds or leaves

    One part licorice root powder

    One part ginger powder

    This tea is great to have first thing in the morning to awaken your digestive fire, or agni as it is called in Ayurveda. It’s also good to drink about an hour after a meal to calm the stomach, prevent flatulence, help with digestion.

    *

    I have an avid interest in folk herbalism so I tend to mostly make medicinal things with my foraged finds.

    Autumn is a lovely time for foraging…less chance of getting sunburn and so much to see everywhere! I’ve been enjoying looking at all the different fungi friends who emerge this time of year, picking up windfall eucalyptus leaves for eco-dyeing and harvesting mullein for making winter medicines with.

    What have you been foraging or harvesting?

  • witch sticks & autumn harvests

    (Above: Our kitchen table is a busy surface with often-changing bowls and baskets reflecting what is going on in the garden and the foraging season: things drying or waiting to be processed.)

    Autumn is my favourite season and, as a permaculture household, a busier season than summer with our labours to ‘capture and store’. There’s lots of picking and gathering and then kitchen work processing everything.

    (Above: Last sunday morning’s harvest chore was bottling a box of apples from our friend Bev’s orchard. These will turn into crumbles or top our porridge this winter.)

    Last week I gave my potted white sage plant a prune, ready to overwinter it in the greenhouse. White sage is a desert plant, native to the American southwest and Mexican northwest, so it doesn’t love the Manawatū winters.

    In the summer, I put it outside in full sun then prune it down to almost sticks at the end of summer and put it in the greenhouse where it sulks the winter away…but it (just) survives. Mine is about six years old now.

    (Above: white sage prunings, cotton thread. It’s on the sofa because I made the witch sticks while watching something in the evening. I do a lot of processing tasks (this, peeling fruit, cutting up herbs for tea, seed saving jobs) on the sofa…which might seem a bit odd…but I don’t see it as much different from knitting or hand-sewing in front of the TV. Does anyone else do this?)

    The prunings can be turned into what I call ‘witch sticks’ for burning by folding up the leaves on the stalk, weaving and rolling them longways and then tying with cotton thread. (Never use synthetic thread: it will melt and emit toxic smoke.) When the leaves have all burned down, you can burn the stalks, too.

    (White sage is a plant sacred to Indigenous people in USA and Mexico, so if you want some…have a go at growing it rather than buying imported sage. White sage is overharvested in the USA particularly. In ‘A Forager’s Life’, I write about alternative plants to white sage for making cleansing/burning sticks.)

    (Above: I got eight decent witch sticks, plus some smaller bits and pieces of stalk…all of which can be burned. Here they are drying on my fire top.)

    I see a lot of ‘how-to’ articles about making cleansing/burning sticks around…but they often forget a detail which I think is important. For them to burn well and safely, don’t wind the string around and around the bundle, securing only at top and bottom. This will mean your stick will fall apart as the thread burns and you could have a higher risk of embers dropping off it. Instead, tie it tightly with small pieces of string at regular intervals, like in this photograph:

    (Above: please forgive my ‘dirt manicure’ as garden writer Gayla Trail calls it. I scrub* my nails regularly but folks who ‘touch soil’ (which is ilke ‘touching grass’ only more grubby) every day struggle to have photogenic hands. ((I have to buy a new nail brush every couple of months…so intent is my endless scrubbing.))

    Do you have a favourite season or are you one of those calm, rational people who loves them all equally?

    I’d love to hear what kitchen or garden chores you’ve been doing lately. Let me know below.

    “As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas or colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see.”

    -Vincent Van Gogh

  • Communitea

    Communitea

    Over recent years, I’ve started making large amounts of what I call ‘communitea’…herbal tea blends made from whatever I can find in the 4412 postcode of Palmerston North…the postcode I live in. It’s an exercise in locavorism and sharing and fun. I dry things foraged and grown, cultivated and gifted, rub and snip them into a tea blend and then give most of it away at community events, like garden working bees, crop swaps and garden education activities. Some of the plants that I’ve used include: nettle, various mints, calendula, violet, rose, dandelion, lemon verbena, lemon balm, chamomile, kawakawa, plantain, pineapple weed, elderflowers, Mexican marigold, rose and more!

    Plants from a summer foraging session drying on a basket

    I get a real kick out of sharing small bags of the dried tea and telling folks that it’s from plants that are growing all around them!

    What plants which grow around you do you like to make into tea?