Revising the basics : winter colds and coughs (and a touch of family)

I seem to have spent the majority of this holiday season listening to other people cough, sneeze and blow their nose. I suppose it’s only to be expected at this time of year after a mild autumn has suddenly turned into a very frosty winter and everyone has been rushing around like mad things trying to prepare for their own family or personal celebrations.

Of course we all hope our immune systems are healthy enough to ward off whatever germs are around but you can help yourself by leaving button mushrooms on your windowsill for three days to drastically increase their Vitamin D content before you eat them. Helpful herbs are echinacea, and astragalus. Echinacea can be taken as a tea, tincture or tablets. Reishi or Shitake mushrooms also have immune strengthening properties and both the mushrooms and astragalus root can be used in stews or soups. (Remove the sliced astragalus root before serving.)

Remember that grief and loss can severely deplete your immune system, so special consideration should be given to anyone who is suffering at this time. Immune strengthening herbs should not be taken if you have an auto-immune condition such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia etc. as they might precipitate a flare-up in the condition.

Thankfully, my parents and their carers were all well when we visited on Christmas Eve and two of our children with their partners joined us at the farm for Christmas dinner. Only Stephen’s girlfriend, Sarah was suffering from the lingering effects of a dreadful cold and cough which struck her during their pantomime run during the third week of December. She had already been dosed with sage and thyme elixir and was given another bottle of cough syrup to try out when she left us last weekend.

Our poor daughter in law was the only person in her household to stay well over Christmas when her mother contracted tonsillitis, her father developed a serious chest infection and both her children and Richard went down with a dreadful cold. They were just getting better when they came to us for three days on December 27^th but the baby, Thomas was not well. Neither child ate as much as normal but Thomas still hovered up his carrots while James stuck with plain pasta shells and five clementines in one day!

Yesterday we travelled to Woking to visit all Chris’ family. His mother has developed pains in her back and is under the GP’s care. I didn’t dare offer her any pain salve to rub on but Chris’ father has felt the benefit of mullein root tincture for a back issue he developed several years ago. Every Christmas I make him some hawthorn cider vinegar to help with his heart issues. This year the colour was a beautiful stain glass red.

Perhaps now is a good time to revise the herbs which can help during these difficult times. At the first sign of a cold, I use dropperfuls of elderberry elixir (equal to 30 drops or ½tsp) every two hours or so for the first day then three times a day. For children I would substitute a dessert spoon of elderberry cordial.

Colds are the perfect proving ground for fire cider vinegar. I’ve got to the stage where I loathe the taste as a drink so take 2tsp in a shot glass diluted with water. Chris still prefers his with honey and boiling water in a mug. In between the medicinal mugs I’ve been offering an infusion of ginger, lemon juice and slices of orange. I can drink it straight but Chris has it mixed with honey or some spiced apple cordial which needs using up.

Today has also been stock making day from the remains of the turkey carcass. You can make stock from any bones. There is nothing more important than a nourishing broth for people with digestive difficulties or those recovering from viral infections.

Cover the bones in a large saucepan with water. Add 1-2 tablespoons of cider vinegar to help release the minerals from the bones. Add anti-viral herbs e.g. rosemary, thyme, sage, bay. (1 pinch of each herb plus 1 or 2 bay leaves) peppercorns for flavour, onions and leeks for pro-biotic stimulation of good gut bacteria, celery sticks (at least 3) for prevention of gout and help with arthritic or inflammatory conditions. DON'T ADD SALT.

Bring to the boil and simmer for at least one hour. If you are using large mutton or beef bones put aside 3-4 or more hours making sure the liquid level doesn't drop too much. If making stock in a cookpot/slow cooker, simmer all day on low.

Strain the stock and use to add a mixture of vegetables or vegetables and meat. If the bones have meat left on them, use it in the soup. Alternatively the stock can be frozen in small quantities and used as a nourishing drink or sauce base later.

If you are vegetarian or vegan, you can still make a nourishing stock by cooking vegetables, herbs, roots and mushrooms together for long periods.  Start by dicing at least half an onion per person and sweat in olive oil with at least two cloves of garlic. Add half a pint of water or vegetable broth per person together with a large handful of peeled and  chopped seasonal vegetables such as carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes, cabbage, celery, corn, turnips, potatoes and fresh or tinned tomatoes. Add one small handful of seaweed per person to provide seasoning and to strengthen the immune system. Finally add one ounce fresh, or one-half ounce dried mushrooms per person (any kind) together with dried or fresh herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, marjoram, and sage) and tonic roots (Siberian ginseng, astragalus, burdock, dandelion, chicory, yellow dock, American ginseng).  Bring to the boil and simmer for an hour. You may wish to remove the roots before serving.

Viral infections make everyone miserable. There are some simple actions which can be taken to make life less uncomfortable, but these must be carried out in conjunction with common sense and basic nursing care.

The secret of herbal help is to start taking it as soon as you suspect you are coming down with something. It doesn’t actually matter what form you take the herbs in, as long as you take them as soon as you can, ideally at half hourly intervals for the first 12 hours or so.

Cider vinegar: sage, fire cider, garlic, - dose is 2 tsp in water or as a drink with honey

Elixir: elderberry, sage/thyme, bergamot, – dose is 1/2tsp/1 dropperful/30 drops

Honey: elderberry, bergamot, thyme/garlic, sage – dose is 2 tsp, can be eaten, drunk or added to bread or other food.

Tea: elderberry, calendula, sage, thyme, Echinacea, bergamot – dose is 2tsp dried herb or 2 tblsp fresh herb steeped in just boiled water for 10 minutes with a lid. Add honey to taste.

Tincture: elderberry, Echinacea – dose is 1/2tsp/1 dropperful/30 drops

For colds

Classic Cold Tea

Use 1tsp each of dried peppermint, yarrow and elderflower (1tblsp if fresh)

Pour 1/2-1pt boiling water into a teapot of cafatiere and steep for ten minutes. Strain and drink every half hour. Sweeten to taste. If you don’t like the taste of peppermint you can use other herbs such as New England Aster, or bergamot. If you only have a herb in tincture form, add the tincture either 1 tsp or in drop dosage to the hot infusion.

Ginger and Lemon Tea

Grate or finely chop 1inch root ginger without peeling. Place in cafatiere or teapot and fill with just boiling water. Infuse for ten minutes. Squeeze the juice from half a lemon and place in a cup or mug. Pour the strained ginger tea over the lemon juice and add honey to taste. For an anti-viral chesty tea, add 1tsp dried thyme and 1tsp dried sage to the grated ginger root. Infuse together and pour over lemon juice and honey.

For Fevers

Make elderflower tea and serve hot. Elderflower is a diaphoretic which will make you sweat and kill the virus. This is especially useful for children. Boneset tea is also useful for bone-aching fevers. If you have a fever which won’t break, give vervain tincture – half a tsp or 30 drops.

For coughs

Before deciding what herb to use, you must be sure what kind of cough you are dealing with.

Dry, irritable coughs: cherry bark, ginger

Cold, hacking coughs: angelica, fennel

Wet, green, mucous laden coughs: elecampane root (especially good for children and people who suffer with asthma)

Deep seated infected chest infections: mullein

Ordinary coughs: sage & thyme, white horehound/hyssop/marshmallow leaf or root.

Cough Syrup

(recipe from Non Shaw and Christopher Hedley's Herbal Remedies)

1 l (2 pints) water

40 g (1 1/2 oz) dried herb or 100 g (4oz) fresh chopped herb

450 g (1 lb) sugar

Put herb in water, bring to a boil, let simmer 20-30 minutes, strain.

Clean out pan, pour liquid back into it, let sit on minimum heat until you only have 2 dl (7 fl.oz) left Add sugar, simmer until sugar has dissolved, pour into jars, label. (This takes time. 1 fluid ounce evaporates about every hour.)

A children’s cough syrup can be made from onions or elderberry and Echinacea in equal parts. For a “straightforward” cough syrup, use 2 parts peppermint, 1 part hyssop, 1/2 part thyme, 1/2 part horehound. For a cough syrup which can also be used as a drink, use hyssop, thyme, elecampane, white horehound, lemon balm and root ginger.

N.B. Do not use peppermint with children under 2 years. Honey can be used as a substitute for sugar, but do not use with children under 1 year.

Dose: 1 dessertspoon as and when or make a drink with 1 tblsp and sip.

If you have blocked sinuses, thyme can useful but horseradish is very effective as well. If you have continual sinus problems, read Jim Macdonald’s excellent paper.

I hope you escape the winter without succumbing to any nasty bugs but if you do, reach for your syrups, tinctures and elixirs, wrap up warm and get plenty of rest.

Hubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble or Surviving the perils of January

Our trials started in November when I was made redundant and we had to consider how to manage our finances to continue living as we wished.

In the middle of December Chris began a series of re-current kidney infections and I had to think about how to support his body to repel the invader, strengthen his tissues and organs whilst minimising the effects of necessary repeat prescriptions of antibiotics. I have used food and drinks as “vehicles of transmission” using what I have in the cupboards plus a few items purchased from supermarket and healthfood store.

These are some of the recipes I’ve developed.

Cranberries are reknowned for their effects in reducing urinary tract infections by reducing the ability of bacteria to cling to the lining of the bladder or urinary tissues. Luckily, being Christmas, fresh cranberries were on sale in the supermarket so I bought several packs to freeze along with some dried cranberries for when the fresh ones are finished.

Cranberry orange drink
1/2 pack of fresh cranberries
Chopped rind and pith of one orange
Small handful each of thyme, bergamot and dandelion roots
Cover ingredients with 2 pints of cold water and bring to the boil. Simmer, covered, for half an hour until the cranberries can be easily mashed. Strain through a sieve pushing through as much of the cranberry pulp as you can. Cool. Store in the fridge. To serve, pour juice into 1/3 of a half pint glass and fill the rest of the glass with water. Drink without sweetening with sugar or honey.

One of the best foods to nourish the kidneys is barley. Barbara Griggs in her Greenwitch Herbal gives a wonderfully simple method of making lemon and barley water.

Lemon and barley water
4ozs pot barley
Peeled rind of one lemon
1 litre of water (probably two by the time you’ve finished)
Put the weighed amount of pot barley in a large saucepan and cover with water. Bring to the boil and then discard the water and swill out the saucepan. Return the barley to the clean saucepan together with the lemon peel and 1 litre of water. Bring to the boil and simmer until the barley is soft and tender. You will probably have to add more water as time goes on so you are left with enough fluid to drink at the end. I cooked it for two hours and added another litre of water in the middle ending up with half a litre of gloop at the end.

Barley water is best served hot when the gloop becomes liquid. You can add honey for flavour.

Although the recipe is for the barley water, you can’t just throw away the cooked barley. The first lot went into an amazing vegetable soup with the last of my homegrown tomatoes, celery, onions, garlic and a couple of carrots. The second batch became a spiced barley pudding; delicious with cream.

Spiced barley pudding
4oz cooked pot barley
4 pieces of candied ginger plus 1tblsp ginger syrup
2 ozs raisins or saltanas
8 cardamom pods,
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ of a grated nutmeg.
3/4pt milk
Gently heat up the spices with the milk then add the cooked barley. Simmer for 30 minutes on a low heat, then serve. I found it didn’t need any extra sweetness, but you may wish to add syrup or honey.

When you’re suffering with a kidney or urinary tract infection you want something which will soothe the membranes and take away the itching/discomfort inside you.

Soothing tea
Take a pinch each of yarrow, calendula, marshmallow and thyme. Infuse, covered for ten minutes then strain and drink. Honey can be added for sweetness if desired.

I used to mix half of the soothing tea with half of the barley water and give it to Chris at least three times a day plus at least 3 of the cranberry drinks.

Of course, after two series of strong antibiotics when he went down with a cold last Thursday, the world came to an end and he turned into a blob for several days. I started him on a regime of 2tsps cider vinegar with 2tsps horseradish honey together with one tsp of elderberry elixir in a mug of boiling water three times a day. You can find the recipes here.

When the blob began to talk and walk again, I changed his medicine to my hedgerow cordial (elderberries/sloes/rosehips/nutmeg/cinnamon/ cloves/ginger) with added lemon juice three times a day. He also started taking raw garlic in honey on a piece of bread three times a day once he finished the last course of antibiotics.

After two more days, he started coughing. Of course I’d given my last bottle of cough syrup to my aunt just before Christmas, so I got him to make up a soothing tea while I dived into my hot cupboard to see what I could find in the way of cough herbs to devise a new syrup.

Soothing cough tea
1inch root ginger finely chopped or grated
1 pinch thyme
1 pinch bergamot
Infuse with just boiled water for ten minutes.
Chris was actually prepared to drink this without honey (which is unheard of!) but added honey for its soothing effects on the throat.

If you want a basic cough syrup, you use equal parts of white horehound, hyssop and marshmallow. I’d been intrigued by Ali English’s latest cold syrup and managed to find the following ingredients in the cupboard and larder.

Cough syrup
1 handful of white horehound
2 handfuls of marshmallow leaves
1 handful of hyssop
1 handful of goldenrod flowers and leaves
3 stems of New England Aster
Small handful of dried elecampane root (there wasn’t time to soak it overnight)
2 inches of grated ginger root
1 large dried homegrown chilli pounded in the pestle and mortar
½ a dried stem of mullein
Place all the ingredients in a large saucepan and cover with water (about 3 pints or so). Bring to the boil and simmer, covered, for about half an hour. I then added the ginger and chilli and simmered for another ten minutes because I’d forgotten to add them before and I didn’t want the syrup to be too hot. Strain the liquid and wash out the saucepan. Pour the liquid back in the pan through a muslin cloth because you don’t want any of the fine hairs from the mullein in the syrup. Reduce the liquid by slow evaporation for as long as you’re prepared to wait. (You should reduce until only 1/7th of the original volume remains but that can take all day, so I just reduced by half.) Measure the volume of liquid and add 1lb of sugar to every pint (UK) of liquid. I ended up with 1.5 pints so added 1.5lbs of sugar. (If you are making this for clients you should reduce original volume by 7/8ths and add 2lbs sugar per pint of liquid to ensure it keeps well). Return saucepan to a gentle heat and stir until all the sugar has been dissolved. Pour into sterilised bottles, seal, label and date. Store in the fridge once open.

The resulting syrup tastes quite good with a nice heat at the back of your throat.

One of my apprentices posed an interesting question when he was posting his annual review at the beginning of the month. He said, “Lately I’ve been pondering the question: ‘Do medicinal herbs work?’ It might seem odd for me to go to so much effort collecting, processing & preserving the above without having a definitive answer to this question! My best answer for the time being is ‘Yes. I think so. For me at least.’ […]I’ve attempted many times to actively heal personal ailments and those of the people close to me. Sometimes these attempts have proven successful […] but just as often they’ve resolutely failed.”

When Chris first became ill and I knew he needed to take the antibiotics, I felt a sense of abject failure. What on earth was I doing spending so much time with my herbs if I couldn’t address this major condition? When I was saying this to a friend, he gently said, “There was a reason antibiotics were developed. They save lives.”

Another part of me knows the kidney infection has arisen because of a congenital malformation which was addressed surgically some 22 years ago and may well have reappeared, so I am immensely grateful for our health service which means we have access to GPs, ultrasound scans and a consultant urologist I have faith in because he fixed the problem last time.

In reality, every illness and dis-ease is a journey both for the person experiencing it and anyone who is supporting that person in whatever way they can. Whilst I am unsure how well I can support the kidney condition, I know the progress of the cold virus was alleviated by all the potions I administered. Even Chris said he was grateful to have me around looking after him, something I couldn’t have done if I’d still been working.

Last but not least, how do you support the carer? Personally I’ve added ashwagandha tincture to my daily tonic to help nurture me through all the stress. I’m also really grateful I made quite so much spiced hedgerow cordial because it tastes wonderful as a hot drink with extra lemon juice. Yesterday, when it seemed I would also succumb to the cold, I added a tsp of Echinacea tincture and so far, it hasn’t developed.

Whatever the outcome of this particular challenge, I find it amazing I can go to my store cupboard and find what I need when I need it and I can turn so many different things into something which helps support others. I'm also incredibly grateful to be part of the wider herbal community who respond to requests for assistance with such alacrity and reassure me I am not in this on my own.