Gardening For Organic Herbal Tonics
Friday, July 10th, 2009More and more people are becoming aware of the drawbacks of industrial food growth methods, and at the same time there is a growing understanding of the power of natural healing substances in many circumstances. As a result, many people are turning to organic herbal gardening for medicinal plants.
Organic herbal gardening provides an alternative to pharmaceutics. This substitute option has a long history, but has been overshadowed in recent decades by an over-reliance on technological and scientific quick fixes.
It’s impossible to fully substitute modern pharmacy with natural products derived from organic herbal gardening, but there are a great number of common illnesses that can be effectively cured, or even prevented, with the use of natural remedies.
Often, people who turn to organic herbal gardening to cure ailments such as colds, headaches or menstrual pain already grow their own vegetables at home, but this is not a necessary precondition. You can simply grow medicinal plants, which usually take up less space than vegetables.
There are other things that the types of persons attracted to herbal medicine often value highly. Top of the list is the kind and quality of their food intake. A lot of this is because of scares about the damaging side effects that chemicals used in food making may have, but it is also widely accepted that organic food is better quality.
In fact organic gardening is going through a renaissance, but not many people are yet aware that the same principles that can be applied to organic food are also valid for plant-based medicines. And fewer yet know how easy it is to grow herbal remedies at home!
Often herbal remedies have been grown commercially under organic conditions, but the enterprising gardener can add a series of curative plants to the produce in his backyard, garden or windowsill and, armed with a good treatise on the subject, self-administer the results.
There are several ways to consume organically grown medicinal plants. The easiest one is simply to eat them, whether raw or cooked, and many therapeutic plants are part of normal kitchen usage, such as garlic or pepper.
They can also be used for more topical applications, after having been mixed and made into pastes, creams or lotions, e.g. for applying to the skin. Herbal teas are another popular way of consuming herbal remedies, with chamomile being the most common and well known.
To start organic herbal gardening for the purpose of improving your health, you can either start from seeds or buy seedlings from specialist shops, either by going there in person or by buying over the internet.