I decided it was time to teach my youngest about herbs. After quizzing her I found that she knows quite a bit but it was time to incorporate some fun stuff. We are going to work our way through as many herbs as we can until winter arrives and our herb garden and wild medicinal plants have died back. For each herb she is journaling, coloring, and creating.
A while back I found this book:
You can find this for sale on Amazon - CLICK HERE |
It has a bunch of cute kid stories about herbs such as The Lion and the Wise Teacher about dandelions or The Star's Gift about lemon balm. It is a perfect addition to our herb study. We also subscribe to Herbal Roots Zine which focusses on one particular herb and contains crafts, herbal remedies, stories, etc... Those we'll save for when the plants are all gone and it's too cold to go outside. The rest is all mom. I created a "type" of herb curriculum that we'll be following until she tells me "mom, stop, I can't take anymore." LOL!
We started with Aiyana picking out a plant of her own to communicate with and she chose lavender. She started talking to it, asking it questions… once she understood that on a basic energetic level we are connected to all things, even something as simple as a plant we moved on to lemon balm, my favorite herb. It was the first herb I planted when we moved into our home 8 yrs ago and it has pretty much taken over a quarter of our yard (expected and wanted).
Unfortunately, our lemon balm has passed its prime for the season. It now has flowers and no longer has that strong lemony scent which means the oil content is low. My daughter is already somewhat familiar with the herb so it wasn't a problem, we just picked up the dried version from our local natural food store and worked with that.
What did she create? Tea. She loved making her own tea, can't say she loved the taste so much though. LOL! I told her as we move into other herbs she'll combine several for a much better tasting tea :-)
We started with Aiyana picking out a plant of her own to communicate with and she chose lavender. She started talking to it, asking it questions… once she understood that on a basic energetic level we are connected to all things, even something as simple as a plant we moved on to lemon balm, my favorite herb. It was the first herb I planted when we moved into our home 8 yrs ago and it has pretty much taken over a quarter of our yard (expected and wanted).
Unfortunately, our lemon balm has passed its prime for the season. It now has flowers and no longer has that strong lemony scent which means the oil content is low. My daughter is already somewhat familiar with the herb so it wasn't a problem, we just picked up the dried version from our local natural food store and worked with that.
No, it's not Lemon Ballom. LOL! We corrected that later. |
Next...
Plantain.
Plantain is perfect for bug bites and our mosquitos are now out in full force so my daughter will be making a plantain salve for those nasty itchy bites she always gets.
So, today we started with Lemon Balm.