And now it’s May!

I don’t know where time goes to these days. I seem to have spent the last three weeks in a blur of illness, recovery and frantic gardening/herb growing. When you’re not feeling well, everything is a greater effort – for me it was a sudden, excruciating pain in my neck. It was so bad, I took it to the doctor (haven’t been there in nearly four years!) and she wrote me a prescription for codydramol and told me it would probably get better on its own. She was more concerned with my weight and high blood pressure, so I’m taking steps to manage that through diet, digging, hawthorn and lime flowers.

Luckily I had an appointment booked the following day with my osteopath. He manipulated my neck for nearly an hour, freed the trapped muscle and removed the pain and told me I had a lesion between the muscle and where it joined onto the skull bone. He said it was damage normally seen from having your neck lifted over the washbasin in a hairdresser’s, but since I never go to one, we tracked it down to a combination of my new pillow and spending more time in my unsuitable home computer chair.

What really concerned me, was had I followed to the doctor’s advice and taken the codydramol, my neck would not have recovered by itself, but become more restricted as more muscle groups locked up and I would have had to have suffered the side effects of the codeine paracetamol combination. I love my osteopath.

Once my neck pain disappeared, my tooth started up again. Chris thought I should take it back to the dentist, but since his only suggestions would be antibiotics or taking the tooth out, I really wanted to do something different. Heather Nic An Fhleisdeir suggested I try sage, so I started taking a regular mouthwash of sage and calendula tea – swilling it around the affected tooth and then swallowing.

I normally don’t really like sage but this combination I could drink happily and it worked. Over three days, the pain disappeared and although the tooth is still sensitive, especially when I’m tired, it doesn’t throb and I can chew on it normally. Herbs have come up trumps again!

The other activities which have taken time and energy have been the April meeting of the Mercian Herb Group (a herb walk around my garden followed by elixir tasting in the kitchen) and the Easter Sanctuary workshop where we experimented with making lanolin from a fleece over and open fire. You can see photos of the lanolin making here and photos of the rest of the Easter break activities here. I’ve also put up photos showing all the trees and herbs in the Sanctuary.

Since then we’ve been at home preparing the garden for the vegetables I’ve been growing from seed or buying from the local nursery. Today, Chris has gone off to play with his kit car and I’ve been decanting some vinegars and making up a hawthorn tincture as well as planting more seeds. Maybe one day it will be time to rest again!