Lovely primroses

The woodlands are now covered in thousands of beautiful primroses, tiny little tulip shaped flowers, with teardrop shaped petals. They are dotted all over the woodland, and you can see where the deer have been eating them. We have been bringing them home to eat in our salads, this lovely flower is regaled in folklore as having mystical powers and has many medicinal uses. We will be trying to make some tea out of it by using our dehydrator and drying it out, much like the dandelions that we have noticed have started coming through.

This is the first year we will be experimenting with primroses, you can eat the young leaves and flowers, either raw or cooked, and we are planning on making them into tea. Their medicinal uses are for spasms, cramps and rhuematic pain, and their main ingredient is used in aspirin.

For the past few months we have only found a couple of mushrooms, and we have found wild foraging to be really difficult. So we are really happy that this is now happening, and quite excited, as each month brings new learning about the wild availability of food.

Where good health begins

Of course it begins with the soil, how can it not, if you don’t care for your soil, then any food that is grown in it is going to be impacted on, which inevitably is going to lead to your health being impacted on. Part of your family life should be growing your own food and caring for your health by doing this. We hand over the responsibility for our good health, when we hand over the responsibility for growing it to the large agribusinesses. They are not interested in growing food which heals us, which feeds us with high levels of nutrients, which is grown without poisons, they are only interested in making it look good so that it can be sold to make them profits.

But I don’t think enough of us are making the connection between the relationship of how our system provides food for us, and how ill we are, it is out of balance, and interestly enough so are we. If the soil isn’t nutritionally high then our food hasn’t been cared for, it can’t create life and it won’t help you to create your life.

It feels good to be outside..

It really does, we arrived back on our allotment to really get stuck into clearing off all the brambles, and weeds. We managed to clear it enough to start to dig over part of it, and cleared about 12ft by 8ft. So we are pleased, and it was so nice to see families down there, with the kids all mucking in, going backwards and forwards to the compost bins with the wheel barrow.

We have to admit we have been incredibly lucky with the plot, it is huge and will sustain us for a number of months if we plan it right, and the soil is fantastic. Full of worms, lovely and pink, even I was pleased to see them. The compost bin has been filled again, although we have been burning the brambles, but we added  the ashes to the bin as well, as it will help to add minerals to it.

Getting nearer to nature.

My tutor Ali bangs on about it, my own naturopath bangs on about it, and now I am reading Max Gerson and he is going on about it, and it’s the fact that we need to get back to nature, and I totally agree.

We are so distanced from nature now, and natural laws of living, we continually break them, in fact we probably don’t even realise that there are natural laws anymore. I think if we asked most people today what a natural law is I doubt they would even know what I was talking about, never mind how to live by them. In every aspect now we bend, or break natural laws, from the way we grow our food, to the way we process, manufacture it, store it, prepare it, to even the way we eat it. And that is just our food, can you imagine that this is in effect going on across our whole lives, particularly our own working lives are so busy that the most natural thing we probably do is buy a product with the word natural printed on it! We stay up late burning the midnight oil, we drink alcohol, do drugs, eat at the wrong times, never rest up, constantly set the next goal to achieve without taking time to enjoy the journey, never get real sunlight on our skins, cover ourselves in poisonous cosmetics, watch, read and listen to mind controlled numbing media messages, and think that another poisonous drug is going to resolve this absolute onslaught of breaking natural law.

But even we are finding living more by natural laws is difficult, it’s time consuming, in some ways we are busier than we would like to be whilst we transition our life over, we go out of our way at times to live it, and it feels a bit mad at times! Although we are feeling much better for it, our health is constantly improving, our motivation to continue builds each day, and energetically it feels the right thing to be doing. Is living more naturally the right thing? Absolutely, the more in tune with nature I become, with the whole way we are living, the difference in the way I feel about everything, and see everything becomes amazing. Living more naturally lets you become far more in flow with life, with the seasons, with what ultimately is the journey, I have never enjoyed the journey so much as I do at the moment.

SAD, and Gerson Therapy

I know I keep going on about SAD and getting enough sunlight, but that’s only because I know in the UK at the moment not many of us will be getting enough. Now even I have noticed how hard it has become to get out of bed, and to think straight, and just not feel tired. I know it’s because of the lack of sunlight and the general time of year. So I have been so happy at the fact that the days are getting longer and it will only be a month or so before I am again able to walk the dogs after work in the light.

I have been also supplementing with extra vitamin D for the first time, and I have really noticed a difference, so that might be something to consider for yourselves. I also found an article on SAD in Positive Health online which may also be of interest. http://www.positivehealth.com/article-view.php?articleid=2545

I’m still reading about Gerson therapy, the problem I have with studying is that I start reading one of the course books, then months later I am still reading the subject as one book has led to another and another, or I have gone off on other bits that have been influenced by it. I am so far behind in my course also because of the wealth of information on the internet, mainly I am blaming Mike Adams of Natural News, his site has me hooked daily and I end up reading it all. I am up to date with the latest health news thanks to him, but far behind with my course work!Not sure I am ever going to qualify at this rate.

Anyway back to Gerson who had me really thinking about how modern medicine doesn’t heal because medical practitioners tend to be specialists in a specific part of the body, well apart from your GP, which I think stands for Giver of Pharmaceuticals, generalist to say the least. I probably am doing a dis-service to a percentage, who I am yet to meet, when I do I will reconsider that comment, as I like to talk from experience.

Because most medical specialists tend to focus on their own specialist part of the body, how will they ever consider their work in a wider holistic context, if there is no problem after they have dealt with the problem in that area, then they would consider it a success. They only treat that one part they are a specialist on, never consider the wide implications of the health of the individual beyond that body part.

I can’t understand how anyone can just treat a part of the body and just the symptom that is showing itself, it is dangerous, and ignorant of how the body truly works, which is in balance with itself. The more I learn the less I understand modern medicine, and can’t understand how they can take a vow to not hurt people, when by attempting to heal people in this way it is inevitable.

And finally, we plan on going to our allotment this weekend, but as has happened everytime since Christmas day I have said this, something has happened to stop us. We really need to get cracking on with it, and not only clear it all, but dig it as much as we can. Maybe we will end up doing no dig gardening for speed, which apparently helps to keep the enzymes in the top layers of the soil in place. Now the snow is cleared we can get on with clearing our back garden down, and show how you can have a level of sustainability in a small one bedroom flat!

Co-operatives, igloos and depression!

Always endevoring to bring you a post that is the highlight of your day, it doesn’t get much more ecletic really! Firstly, a fab day out this morning again in the snow, taking parcels to the post office, I passed so many snowmen, igloos and other interesting snow sculptures, it’s a real shame that art is such a poorly looked upon subject matter. More weather creative outlets are definitely needed, and one of my dog chums M has built a huge 2001 monolith, about 8-9 foot in height. No mean feat I have to say, and it says a lot for us having more works of art around the place.

Now funny what you end up reading, over the weekend we picked up a magazine to have a look at, and we found an advert in the back of it, for a co-operative looking for more people to join it. Today we rang them and I’m really excited as I think it could be just what we are looking for. Financially it will be almost impossible for us to go alone in trying to afford a small holding, but this could be a better and more viable step. So a visit in March is now planned, we can’t get any time to do it before then! But it gives us lots of time to think about what we really want from it.

Finally I have been reading a rather interesting study that has just been released on depression in adolescents being caused by watching TV. It was called “Association Between Media Use in Adolescence and Depression in Young Adulthood”, and was conducted by Alan A. Primack, MD, EdM, MS; Brandi Swanier, BA; Anna M. Georgiopoulos, MD; Stephanie R. Land, PhD; Michael J. Fine, MD, MSc.

They studied 4142 adolescents who were not depressed at the beginning of study, and then followed up after 7 years of follow-up. Results of the 4142 participants (47.5% female and 67.0% white) who were not depressed at baseline and who underwent follow-up assessment, 308 (7.4%) reported symptoms consistent with depression at follow-up. Those reporting more television use had significantly greater odds of developing depression and this increased for each additional hour of daily television use. In addition, those reporting more total media exposure had significantly greater odds of developing depression for each additional hour of daily use.

Interestingly they did not find a consistent relationship between development of depressive symptoms and exposure to videocassettes, computer games, or radio. Compared with young men, young women were less likely to develop depression given the same total media exposure. Their conclusion is that TV exposure and total media exposure in adolescence are associated with increased odds of depressive symptoms in young adulthood, especially in young men.

Says a lot really doesn’t it for all of those people who are using the TV to placate their children by placing them in front of it, in the long run, it really is doing them harm. I do wonder though whether this is also to do with the lack of playing outside in sunlight, so an inevitable drop in Vitamin D levels, which is vital. Also the lack of proper EFA’s in most people’s diets will be causing a more depressive state.

Anyway in the past 2 days since it snowed I have seen children on my estate which I had no idea even existed! Where do children play out nowadays, I live right on woodland and it certainly isn’t there.

Reasons why we didn’t go to the allotment!

Not that we have to give anyone a reason for why we decided to stay home, again and didn’t go to the allotment, but each time we decide to take time off to blitz it, some sort of freak weather happens. We’ve had torrential rain, losing jobs, and now well stacks of snow, the like we haven’t seen in the SE of England for, well donkey’s years!

Just to prove it we have photographic evidence, it’s a bit like getting a letter from your mum to excuse you from doing PE!

Up to my knees in snow!

On top of the workshop roof, R cleared off 18″ of snow as we were starting to get worried about the snow becoming so heavy it would cave in! Our next door neighbour’s conservatory roof had started bowing! And my car is completely snowed in.

What was interesting was how many people we saw out walking, and one of our regular dog walking companions B, commented on how many people he had seen walking dogs that he had never seen in all the time he had lived here! It was nice to see whole families out playing together in the snow, the likes of which you so rarely see.

We hadn’t bothered going shopping and we started to understand how few of us have supplies in which would enable us to get through a real period of time snowed in. We have only just started on our sustainable journey and little of our food is grown really in the grand scheme of things, but it became clear how important food and water stores are, when this happens. The thing is that we rely on the supermarkets locally to provide us with food, and even these would have trouble transporting food in this weather. So I can imagine if this weather stays like this that things would start to become depleted pretty quickly.

It’s pretty awful really what the supermarkets have done to our ability to grow and supply ourselves locally. They and the corporate way of working now, giving us no spare time, has made it so that we rely on them, and in a crisis, because no food is grown locally, we really could be severely impacted by this way of life that in some respects we have been forced into.

Our choice to grow our own, has meant more for us to do, and having to give up other things in life. But it will mean hopefully in times when this sort of thing happens which prevents roads from being used properly to stock the shelves of supermarkets, we still can live our life.

Here is Racie after running her heart out in the snow this morning.

Racie!