Rosehip tea

Walking tonight we saw that the rosehips were becoming ripe, so we thought we would bring some home to make tea with them. How lovely it was, and they are really no trouble to sort out, although you do need to get rid of all the little needles in the middle of them first as they irritate the gut if you are not careful.

First of all you need to cut them in half, take out the pips, then clean out the fibres and needles, then thoroughly wash them. After that it is just like making a herbal tea which has to be left to steep for a while, put your rosehip cleaned halves into the cup, and put water over them, although we slowly simmered them in the water on the stove just to see how different it tasted. It was a lovely light tea for a late Summer early Autumn evening. A thought was that it would be very nice chilled in the fridge, so that will be something to try tomorrow.

The fantastic thing about this fruit is that you can collect all through the winter, right up to about February, and it is very high in Vitamin C, so superbly good for you. I can see that I am going to be drinking a lot of it.

Eat your greens

Now that I grow my own, I am eating far more greens than I ever have, my mother would be proud of me! They seem to taste so much sweeter and less bitter than the shop bought varieties which I have always found difficult to eat. I am not sure whether this is because we eat ours so quickly after picking, and if we bought them they would of been no where near as fresh?

Chard its something that we thought we would try and grow in our first year, and it has been a true success for us.  The leaves are amazing, and we have so much of it that we really don’t know what to do with it all. Something we have to learn is how to grow the right amount and put enough seeds in, not to over do it, we are becoming a bit all Charded out!  I never knew that chard leaves grew so large, well to be honest I don’t ever remember eating Chard or seeing it in the supermarket.That is something to consider when growing your own, how many more varieties of foods you can grow, which you just wouldn’t normally see to buy, and to be honest that is such a shame, Chard for instance is lovely. We have been eating it like spinach either in a salad raw, or lightly steamed, absolutely delicious.

For years I found greens totally unpalatable, and now think it is a conspiracy to make them horrid in someway by parents, my home grown ones just seem so much nicer to eat than I remember. This is to the point that we are making a choice to eat greens in salads for a change, and not just cucumber and the normal salady bits we would use.

The other big leaves that are taking over the garden are the rhubarb plants, how big do they grow, well they are too big for our little garden I can confirm that! But I can’t wait to eat the stems in a lovely crumble of sorts, rhubarb is such an old fashioned type of fruit that you just don’t really see in the supermarkets either, it’s the same with gooseberries, and one of my favourites greengages. They are on my list for when we get a bigger space to grow our own.

I know that by learning more about wild foods and growing my own I am expanding the variety of foods that I am eating, and this has to be better for my body, and it is nice at this time of year when you get a chance to really feast on your earlier labours. I think I might get a taste for harvest time!

Water and being positive

When we installed our water filter for the flat a few months ago it made such a huge difference to our water consumption, we actually started to enjoy drinking it! We couldn’t believe the difference in the taste, and we now take our own water everywhere with us, often taking up to 2 litres in Sigg bottles each! But this also had me starting to look further into water, and those who read my other blog will know that I have recently been on a rant about the potential fluoridation that is going to happen in the UK. I am slowly over time becoming a true advocate of a pure and simple lifestyle, with all of its associated ties! One of them being how important pure water is to us, and how important it is that it is always available.

Our bodies are on average 70% water, we start out life as a fetus of nearly 99% water, and then slowly dry out to about 50% in old age. Therefore water is a vital component in a quality life, and without pure water our bodies are struggling on a daily basis to get by. Many of us don’t drink anywhere near enough water, and effectively dry ourselves out, otherwise known as dehydration, but we don’t even consider the consequences to our bodies in doing this. I wonder if we all had available to drink pure water, not the contaminated rubbish that comes out of our taps whether our health as a nation would be far  better than it is.

Another amazing thing I recently read was how water holds a message! Masuru Emoto writes in the Hidden Messages in Water how when he exposes water to positive messages, and music how the crystals that he saw formed were beautiful. In comparison the water that had negative words and music shown to it had unformed crystals. It is an amazing book which shows how water is a powerful medium that is being contaminated by our negative thinking, and toxins on a daily basis. I advise you to look into having a purer water supply, I think it would make all the difference, we have noticed it, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t.

Irradiated foods

Some things scare me, and this is one of them! I read that more foods in the US are about to be irradiated and with no labeling at all, it has been agreed recently by the FDA. It is difficult enough to get natural foods from supermarkets which haven’t been tampered with in some way now, but at least they are labeled so that you know to what level. But the thought that you could be buying foods which are effectively useless for the human body nutritionally is just awful, and is effectively a death sentence.

People are inevitably going to become sicker and sicker over a period of time if they can not get nutritionally dense foods which support the body systems to work properly. There are already so many health issues due to the poor foods that are available, and this is just the final nail in that whole food chain coffin. Why would the FDA do this to the American people? I think the only people it can benefit is the pharmaceutical companies who are going to have an absolute field day offering medications to help suppress the diseases that this is inevitably going to cause. What a great way to kill people off, by not only creating a Codex which will stop the growing of organic foods in all countries bit by bit, but also irradiating what good and natural food is available.

The worrying thing is, that which tends to happen in the US is often taken up by the UK as well, hey it’s the same companies influencing our governments.  Growing your own food without pesticides is probably going to be something you can’t even do under the Codex. What is going on, please ask yourselves, what are our governments trying to do to us? These attacks on our health and personal wellbeing are not going to stop, they are getting more and more. Fluoridation of the water supplies is in effect mass medication! Would you want to take something which is toxic to the body, I know I don’t. Alan Johnson the current Health Secretary (in loose terms as I am not sure what credentials he actually holds to enable him to have that term) is investing masses of our taxes to fluoridate our water, another attack on our health.

The fact is that little bit by little bit our choice to purchase or grow natural, unadulterated food and water is lessening all the time, with government consent. A government which is bankrolled by the tax that we pay! What happened to our say in all this, or is our health all coming under corporate control?

Candida and natural healing

So many of my friends have headaches, woolliness, feeling heavy and sluggish, tiredness, and just plain feeling under the weather that it is hard to miss now. They all complain of cravings, particularly of sugary and carbohydrate rich foods, and all are trying to lose weight. When I talk to my friends so many of them have symptoms of Candida and yet their doctors don’t tell them these symptoms are all linked, but they go about separating their illness up, so that they can give them medicines for each one. Mostly they are given antibiotics for the Thrush, a cream for the Athletes foot, are told to cut out certain foods for the bloating, all of which get rid of some of the immediate issues. But they never resolve the overall problems, in fact mostly my friends have these same symptoms over and over again, with only a few weeks of respite in between.

The more I learn about this, I see how common a problem is really is, antibiotics are not helping by killing off all the badly needed bacteria, and other suppressive medications are making the whole situation far far worse. Nutrition is another issue with the amount of sugary foods people generally eat, in fact it is a cycle which just gets worse as the cravings and tiredness increases.

It is normal to have some Candida present in the body, but when it gets out of hand its because there is an imbalance in the digestive and metabolic processes, it gets out of hand in people who have a weak immune system, and it creates a further weakening of the immune system.

The things that tend to cause and make this condition worse can be alcohol, yeast breads, complicated meals with many ingredients which leads to food fermenting before it is digested, antibiotic use, food that is sweet, or very salty, foods that are mucus forming, stale or rancid.

Our lifestyles are creating this problem, many don’t realised that by eating meat they are consuming vast amounts of antibiotics, the same with milk, so you might be eating a healthy diet and still eating medications that are unnecessary for you to be consuming. Vast amounts of foods have sweeteners and sugar in them, this is also making the issue of Candida worse.

To help heal the body more naturally of course a naturally derived diet is vital, when you are growing your own you know it is purer and without pesticides, and the feed you give your animals is hormone free. Garlic has exceptional anti-fungal properties eat this before each meal to support your body, for Thrush douching with garlic teas, or Pau d’Arco during the day significantly helps. Pau d’Arco is excellent for helping control Candida, and is something which can be drinken daily to help keep it in check. Chlorophyll in greens help to purify and stop the spread of bacteria, along with them consider taking wheat grass or barley grass which are an effective treatment for yeast overgrowth. Seaweed contains many minerals which help to build immunity, and have a rich iodine content, this iodine helps to deactivate the yeast.

We never give the time over to heal ourselves nowadays, always expecting to be healthy immediately, but healing this takes time, and is a change in lifestyle. We get little signs often for years that the body isn’t very well, Athletes foot is ignored and seen as a hindrance, Verucas, Thrush, but they are all signs of a body out of balance trying to heal itself. Look out for the signs and heal them, and they won’t lead to bigger illnesses longterm.

Healing with Wholefoods is an excellent book if you are looking for more information, by Paul Pritchford.

Eating on the move.

HI all, its R’s turn to write, I know I don’t do it very often as I’m a busy guy. Don’t get me wrong, D’s a very busy girl too, in fact she’s probably busier than me as she’s the one doing most of the blogging. So D’s taking a break tonight and I’ll be the one to entertain you.

For those of you who’ve been following our blogs to date, you’ll know we’re into wild crafting and foraging and today was no exception. I was out today with FD1, thats the dog by the way, and we were out for a bit of a long walk, it was only long because I decided to take one of the deer trails through a local wood, and was so happy walking through the thick brush that time just elapsed. As we were walking around the trails, lunch time soon approached and I was getting fairly peckish to say the least, I’d already had a couple of apples from one of the feral apple trees on the common as we’d walked to the woods, but thankfully years of knowledge was put to practice as I started my meal with a good handful of plantain seeds. These are the broad leaf plants that grow in abundance along path ways and fields. Its easy to collect the seeds especially when they are green, simply take hold of the stem at the bottom and squeezing quite hard with thumb and forefinger you pull upwards, the seeds will pop of in to your clenched fist. The seeds are a little bitter raw but make for a pleasant starter to a wild food salad.

Next up was a few green hazel nuts, here in Surrey they often go by a colloquial name of Cob Nuts, although under ripe by most peoples taste, the white raw nuts are quite sweet with the texture of water chestnut. I only had about 10 of these due to not wanting to waste a valuable source of ripe nut later in the year. I had no nut crackers, and the easy way into these tasty little pods is by hitting them on the pointed end with a stone, you’ll need to rest the blunt end against another stone as an anvil to strike upon.

Having feasted on these 2 items, My palette wanted something sweeter and blackberry’s are just starting to become ripe now, no need to tell you how to collect these, 2 handfuls later and I was getting quite full. If only I’d brought a brew kit with me, as a cup of tea after that lot would have rounded of a nice free feast.

On the walk back, I couldn’t help but graze on a few tufted vetch pea pods, these are different to the common vetch in so much as you can eat then as Mangetout and not have to worry about letting them develop the pea in order to eat them. If you do want to eat them when they hit pea stage my advice is save them for steaming, as I find the pods start to get a bit tough by this stage. As it is I was selective and only picked the Mangetout ones, these are quite sweet with a slightly nutty taste.

Any way once home I finally got my cup of tea, after an afternoons running around in town and house work and the such like, D came home. Time for another walk! This walk was shorter and more direct, along the way D picked all of the above for a ’super green smoothie’ in the morning. So fresh Blackberries, a few Tufted Vetch pea pods, Plantain seeds and fresh young leaves, Dandelion leaves, a couple of young Mallow leaves as well. The only exception was the Hazel Nuts, we didn’t collect any for the smoothie, but we did eat a few whilst walking. The great thing is this was only a few of the many edible plants out there that have either been forgotten about or are not commercially viable.

I think its great that these plants aren’t known as food to most people as it leaves a huge amount of fresh wild and organic foods for me and D to enjoy at our leisure and are completly free. My only fear is that some day in the future, some government will ban the wildcrafting and foraging under some draconian legislation, due to them wanting every one to eat pesticide ridden produce in order to contol us. Until that day comes, free wild food will stay firmly on my menu. R.

More Pendulous Segde

We keep finding lots of Pendulous Sedge whilst out walking, something I wouldn’t of originally noticed I now see everywhere we walk, particularly keeping an eye out where it is slightly damp area. Amazing how once you are aware of something, how you easily come to recognise it.

Anyway today we collected just over 1 and a half pounds of it, to go with the other half a pound we collected the other day which we have been drying in the greenhouse. The sun has done a lovely job in there and we have found that it is a great place for drying out the herbs as well. We have just been laying it in bowls to dry out nothing complicated, and it has done really well, even in what has been wet and slightly muggy weather for some of the time.

We are about to go out and pick the Lemon Balm from the garden, the healing properties of it are meant to be fantastic, but I haven’t had a good chance to read up on that yet, as I have been pursuing light far more. The healing power of light is amazing, and I can’t stress enough how we should be getting out of our boxes far more in the day and getting it on our skins.

Light and the UV in it, is vital for helping the body to make Vitamin D, which is needed for the absorption of calcium, and other minerals that the body needs to help it keep our bones strong, healthy, and keep rebuilding. It is no wonder that so many of us are getting a softening of our bones, when all we do is work in boxes all day, with filters on the windows of the offices, to prevent the rays coming through. Also so many of us just walk out of our houses in the morning, get straight into our cars, which in some cases have a filter on their windows, wear sunglasses, or contact lenses which block out the full spectrum of light, then into our working box, sit at our desks all day and even eat lunch at our desks, go home, and never see any real sunlight. It is all starting to make so much sense why so many of us are ill, not healing, depressed, and suffering from SAD, and I have changed so much of my lifestyle due to learning all this, but I like most people still have to work whilst making the transition.

It is an overall lack of light many of us are suffering from, and when we are ill, this lack of light keeps us from healing quickly. I read about the research which had shown how the UV in sunlight helps to sterilise wounds, but when wounds were covered over, they tended to end up with bacteria in them. This research was done back in 1877 and yet today we are told how unsafe the sun is continually and how we need to keep out of it, when its healing powers can be amazing.

Before penicillin there used to be clinics set up to purely work with using sunlight for healing, people were introduced to the sun really carefully over a period of time, taking care not to burn them. Auguste Rollier was a Doctor who opened such a sun clinic, all this was an accepted form of healing until medications came along. They healed many illnesses with these light therapies.

It is mainly people who rarely become exposed to sunlight who suffer problems the most from it, not people who are out in it all the time. If we are to absorb the calcium that we eat, then we need sunlight on our bodies, but daily we stop this from happening, and the less sunlight we have the less absorption we have.

Getting out in the sunlight has other beneficial affects as well, not only will it help to reduce your blood pressure, help to reduce your cholesterol, by just getting out in your lunch hours at work it will help your stress levels!

stay healthy

It suits those who run the world to keep us unhealthy, to feed us junk foods, to have us permanently drugged, and drunk, and hypnotised, we are so much more controllable that way, we don’t put up a fight against the things that they do. Not you? Are you sure?

We are daily encouraged to eat dead and lifeless foods which lead to long term illness, filling ourselves with denatured products which have not indication they came from a natural source. They are foods that attack our body systems, attacking us on all levels, leaving us a shell of the person we could be, making us tired, ill, and unable to think straight, in effect dumbing us down. We end up suffering from illness, and degenerating slowly into what is now not a wizened old age but one of real suffering, and pain. Half way through that now short life, we have children, from our already seriously degenerated bodies, then we fill them full of pharma products, otherwise known as vaccines, to protect them! But which in reality creates a further degeneration of the body. Can you see the cycle of degeneration? Can you imagine how full of health the next generation are likely to be if we don’t feed them properly? How easy is it to create slaves from people who are to dumb to know how to argue or think for themselves, and just go with the flow for an easy life due to being too tired or ill to do anything about it.

Often when people say they are eating healthily they are still filling themselves full of the foods which have been labeled low fat, labeled natural, and good for you! The fact it has a label should tell you everything you need to know, it is someone else’s opinion about healthy and it probably isn’t. How can it be, it’s in a packet! Those junk foods drug the body, with sugar, and toxic substances which dull down your senses, killing you off little bit by little bit, but giving you that all important feel good high for the moment. And they do break down the body so that it doesn’t work properly, just look at the amount of illness in the world created in what has been a time of over consumption of food!

And so for that illness that those who control the food system have given you, what do they do? They make pharmaceuticals which are supposedly to resolve the issues that they have caused in the first place. Except they don’t, they suppress the illness further, and continue to make you even iller having a knock on effect on even more of your vital organs. There are so many people permanently drugged nowadays that I wonder if anyone isn’t? When I talk to people they seem so spaced out, just so dumbed down, I have managers who I often tell the same thing to over and over again, I end up watching what they eat, and medications they are taking and it just all then makes sense.

And then the hypnotising effect of TV, what a fantastic medium for controlling us, tell us the message in a mulitude of forms then get everyone to everynight watch it over and over again. The messages becoming simpler, and quicker, so that people feel overloaded, on top of an overloaded working day. Any energy after all that? No probably not, and this is why we are moving towards living a purerlife! Realise what is going on across the world, and make a difference, come out of the food system that is set up to kill you off, make you ill, and tired of living, or having a choice, say no to the medications which are also killing you off, suppressing symptoms that should have a route of elimination, and a natural way of being cured. And turn the TV educate yourself and become alive with the life that is available to live, not the one which we are dictated daily.

Rainbows

Like most people I don’t really like it when it rains, FD1 our dog hates it, but across the fields sometimes we see the most beautiful rainbows and it makes being out it in so much worth the while. The mythological bridge that Norsemen would take to the next life.

What I didn’t know was that the drops of rain have to be between 0.01 and 4 millimetres in diameter and be dropping at an angle of 42 degrees! Light is such an amazing thing, and the differences in it are astounding once you start to really pay attention to it.

Different days bring different light, and when we visit our families we really notice the difference in the light where they live. These different lights must give you very different feelings on each day, not that many of us really get to spend that much time in it anymore. D

Blackberry picking

Just before we met up with one of my dog walking friends, we went blackberrying, we hadn’t realised that they were becoming ripe until the other day when we came across some bushes by accident. Many of us who tend to walk our dogs and use the woodland regularly had not thought we would be getting any this year due to the work of the local council.

The council have been clearing the woodland and common land down, they came over and for some reason cut down stacks of the apple, pear and blackberry bushes, telling people that they were making the area into more of a park! Not something most of us wanted to be honest, most of us who regularly use the area like the fact it is a woodland, not a sanitised park. They didn’t exactly use it much themselves, if at all, so how can they tell us what we want, when they have never asked those of us who actually do us it.

Anyway, after eating a stack of blackberries we still had 2 huge bags full. They leave their mark, staining the hands and mouth making it hard to hide what you have been doing. It’s funny really as we don’t want anyone else to find the bushes, but everyone will as they are where everyone walks, but they were like eating sweets. Makes you feel like a kid again, and i think that isn’t the first time in this blog that I have said that, I think the strawberries and blueberries that we have been collecting lately did as well. The most natural of sweeties, and they have tasted nothing like the shop bought ones, very sherbety! These bushes would make a great natural fence on a large piece of land, an edible one at that!

So blackberry crumble for tomorrow nights dinner I think, for me a raw one, and for R a cooked one, it doesn’t come any more delicious than that!