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    Treat Yourself Natural
    Treat Yourself Natural
    Treat Yourself Natural
    Ebook230 pages1 hour

    Treat Yourself Natural

    By Sof McVeigh and Kirstie Allsopp

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “Full of brilliant ideas” for harnessing the natural goodness of plants through the seasons for self-care and gift-giving (Kirstie Allsopp, from the foreword).
     
    This is a source book for mind, body, and soul, as well as a testament to the natural power and beauty of herbs. Overflowing with ideas from the pretty to the practical, it contains many projects that use the gardener’s bounty through the seasons.
     
    Our gardens contain much of what we need to keep mild ailments at bay, and it’s fun giving it a go—instead of nuking the dandelions in your lawn, pick them and use them. Or plant marigolds, not just for their cheerful color, but to make wonderful skin oils with them. You’ll find recipes for invigorating body scrubs, relaxing bath salts, and just-plain-fun bath bombs—as well as tips for what to look for in your garden or home that can be used to make health-giving tonics or soothing balms. Take a leaf out of the wisdom of country lore—new research shows much of what they were talking about made sense—and put it to use for mild ailments.
     
    Whether you want to give something practical for the home, indulgent to enjoy at bath-time, or to complement a delicious dinner, there is a present that will suit everyone.
     
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 16, 2013
    ISBN9781446361054
    Treat Yourself Natural

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      Book preview

      Treat Yourself Natural - Sof McVeigh

      Introduction

      Within this book I hope you will discover how easy it is to harness the natural goodness of plants that can help us feel better, look better and have a healthy year. Sprinkled throughout you’ll find lashings of common sense and a splash of fun, seasoned with a healthy love of nature and all that it can offer us. Not to mention many wonderful and easy recipes, so you can see just what Mother Nature has in her store cupboard.

      I think creating things is hard-wired into us, whether this may be making a delicious meal, writing a song or painting a beautiful picture; making something leaves us with a sense of contentment that is hard to beat. I love making things but I know how busy all our lives can be, so these recipes are simple and straightforward, enabling you to achieve maximum results with a great sense of satisfaction – yet you won’t have to spend all day on them.

      A large part of this book is about using plants that are readily available – or free, such as nettles, dandelions and hawthorn berries. I hope it will encourage you to get out there and to keep your eyes open, so you can discover the many widely available plants that you can use for your health – with the added bonus that they’re not costing you anything.

      With this in mind I have laid the book out ‘Season by Season’, so you will know at a glance what to gather and when to gather it. So in the bountiful spring months you can pick abundant fresh leaves, in the summer it’s the pretty flowers, then in autumn comes lush berries and hips. Even in the cold, quiet winter months there are bulbs and evergreen herbs to use.

      Within each season you’ll find useful tips on using nature for your wellbeing relevant to that season. So in summer there are ideas about travelling, and in winter there are suggestions on what you can do to beat the common cold. In autumn I cover burns as it’s the bonfire season, and in spring I touch on the benefits of bees and their produce as they sleepily re-emerge.

      I hope you will feel empowered to explore the wonderful world of making remedies, either for yourself or as gifts for your friends and family; I think there is nothing nicer than a lovingly made homemade present. Some gift ideas you’ll find in here include ginger chocolates, lavender bath salts and, for some lip-licking goodness, try making the chocolate lip balms.

      Or just treat yourself to a soothing chamomile bath, followed by a rose oil body balm; what else could be more relaxing? Why don’t you give it a go, and while soaking in the bath, see what other remedies you’d like to make. I think you’ll be surprised at just how easy they are and how much fun you’ll have.

      Plants

      In every culture across the world you will find a long history of using plants for health and wellbeing, and many of the common medicines we use today are derived from them. This is because plants contain many active compounds and chemicals known as phytochemicals: some of these are beneficial to our health, some are not, and others are poison. Moreover, different parts of a plant can contain different phytochemicals: so the root of a plant could be used for one thing, the berries of the same plant for another, while the leaves may have no use at all.

      Most of the plants I have chosen for this book are common and plentiful, so it is easy to forage for them, like dandelions and nettles. Others are well known plants and easily available, like mint and lavender. I have also included a few berries that you can gather, such as the classic blackberry and the abundant elderberry. Finally, there are a few less recognizable plants, like lemon verbena or lady’s mantle; these are easy to grow and make lovely additions to a garden or a windowsill.

      To garden or not to garden

      Over the past 10 years I have become an avid gardener in order to grow a ready supply of plants from which to create my natural remedies. I enjoy the cycle of nature, marvelling at its resilience and its ability to bounce back from whatever is thrown at it. Nature will tell you what will work in your garden, not the other way round, and I love this refusal on the part of nature to be controlled. I garden organically, so using weeds comes naturally to me – I actually have rather a lot of these in my garden!

      If you like gardening, I recommend keeping a small patch of your garden for healing plants grown specifically for treatments. I’ve created my own area – grandly naming it my Medicinal Garden – in Devon in south-west England; this has been a great source of information on plants, along with a hefty dose of trial and error. Some plants have flourished, such as pot marigold and chamomile; some have taken over, such as wormwood; while some have not fared so well, like my rather sad-looking arnica.

      If you are not a gardener don’t worry, most of the plants in this book can be found on common ground where you can forage for them (see Foraging) or most of the herbs can be bought in pots in supermarkets. For the other plants, a trip to a local garden centre is a good idea, or you can buy dry herbs from most health stores.

      Foraging

      Over the past few years, the pastime of foraging for plants has slowly been gaining momentum – a welcome return to the human hunter-gatherer instincts that must be deeply rooted somewhere within all of us; the process connects us with nature in an almost primeval way.

      If you are not sure how to start foraging, try joining a foraging group in your local area – they are springing up all over the place. Or just go for a walk, with a good guidebook and a knowledgeable friend to provide advice. Once you start looking around, you’ll be amazed at just how much you do recognize; try foraging first for blackberries then build your confidence from there. With a good lashing of common sense, nature’s bounty can be yours for the taking.

      When I say ‘for the taking’, I do mean within reason: all good foragers respect nature. They know not to over-pick or over-gather, always leaving some for the bees and birds, as well as enough to regenerate the plant again for another year. At the same time, with certain plants such as the rose and elderflower, you will not want to pick too many flowers in the Spring or you will not be able to harvest the hips and berries in the Autumn.

      In our far more urbanized and intensively farmed landscape there are undoubtedly fewer wild areas, so share what you find and leave more for another year. If you are gathering plants or berries to use in the recipes in this book, please be absolutely certain you know what you are picking; there is no room for trial and error, and alongside nature’s goodies, there are also many poisonous plants and berries. The golden rule of foraging applies at all times:

      ‘If in doubt, then leave it out’

      Homeopathy

      Homeopathy has been in use since the eighteenth century, and is based on the principle of treating ‘like with like’. This means treating ailments with miniscule amounts of natural substances to trigger the body to heal itself and restore balance. My background is in homeopathy, so throughout this book I have added some common homeopathic remedies that may be useful for treating minor ailments.

      Supplements

      Plants contain a plentiful supply of vitamins and minerals, often within an intricate and complex combination of biologically active chemicals. Nowadays these vitamins and minerals have become available as supplements, and it is perfectly possible to just ‘pop a pill’ to boost our diet with these essential compounds.

      Indeed, the manufacture and sale of supplements is now a huge industry, so large that the new name ‘nutraceauticals’ has been coined for this sector, covering anything from diet pills to muscle-building potions. With so much money at stake, it is no wonder that we are bombarded with information on how these supplements will solve all our health problems; the fans of supplements also argue that the soil in which our food is grown has now become so denuded that we need them to supplement missing nutrients.

      However supplements are expensive, and sometimes it is difficult for the body to digest, use and assimilate all the vitamins and minerals in them. The human body has evolved over thousands of years to use the plants around us for nutrition, while supplements have been around for less than a hundred years. Whether these modern alternatives are capable of replicating the vast diversity of the hundreds of phytochemicals, and the intricate balancing act these chemicals play within the plant, is still not clear.

      I am not against taking some supplements at certain times of the year, or for certain conditions if recommended by a nutritionist, but in general I prefer to have fun making my own good health from what nature has to offer. It’s easy, so why don’t you give it a go, too?

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