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Tag: Medicinals

Garden Pharmacy – Fish Mint

Our local farmer’s market is a brilliant display of ethnic diversity in food. There’s East Asian, West Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American, Pacific Islander stalls. I can buy fresh bamboo shoots, banana flowers, yams, red eggplants, cassava, abika, kang kong. It’s where I found fish mint, a little pot of it for a dollar, from someone who spoke so little English that all I got was that it was…

Plant with large, lance-shaped bright green leaves.

Garden Pharmacy – Bitter leaf

My Burundi neighbour introduced me to bitter leaf. It’s a well-known, widely cultivated culinary and medicinal plant in Africa. She uses it for her diabetes, and when I started looking I found quite a lot of research supporting its folk medicine reputation, especially as an antidiabetic.

Ginger plant - green stalks with strappy alternate leaves. Dark, composty ground. White ginger rhyzomes with pink tinge where the stalk emerges just visible.

Garden Pharmacy – Ginger

Give ginger the right conditions and it thrives so well that it’s not hard to keep a year round supply sufficient for making curries from scratch, adding to stir fries or tea, making pickled ginger for rice paper rolls and sushi, taking in a care package for pregnant friends, and crystallising for seasickness lollies or treats.

Garden Pharmacy – Davidson’s Plum

One of our Coffs Harbour Davidson’s Plum trees has bourne its first harvest. Davidson’s Plums are full of good stuff but the big claim to medicinal fame is a compound called ‘anthocyanin’. Anthocyanins do a number of generally healthy things but the one that really interested me was the way they improve gut microbiota.

Garden Pharmacy – Lemon Myrtle

My usual use for lemon myrtle is as a treatment for coughs, colds, runny nose, stuffy sinus, hayfever. The essential oil in lemon myrtle is 90% citral, the same essential oil that gives lemon grass its lemon scent. Citral is antimicrobial – antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral – and it’s also anti-allergic and anti-inflammatory.

Garden Pharmacy – Aloe Vera

It was a very nice outcome from this bit of research that aloe vera actually does work to repair sun damage “stimulating hyaluronic acid and collagen production” – which is what the labels on expensive little bottles of cosmetic serums say too. I think I need to plant more.

Garden Pharmacy – Turmeric

I put turmeric in my tea every morning. Just a half a thumb sized piece of fresh turmeric, sliced fine, tea poured over it. Add a little grating of black pepper because the piperine in the pepper makes the curcumin in the turmeric useable, and I have my tea with milk. It sounds odd but it tastes really good – a little chai slant on ordinary black tea. And I…