Medicinal Plant Cultivation | 10 MEDICINE PLANTS FOR YOUR GARDEN: Health benefits and Growing Guide

G'day and welcome back to the Weedy Garden. Did you hear that? It was a female voice. That's because I've got a special guest on the channel today. I've actually got a bit of news. A lot of people found that video I made the other day, Methiel, quite interesting, about medicinal herbs. I thought it was quite interesting too. I love the whole concept of medicinal herbs and growing your own medicine in your garden. So what I've decided to do, you see, see Elle, she's got a lot of knowledge about the herbs and I've got a lot of knowledge about the filming. So together we're going to make a little partnership and once a month we're going to be putting videos on my channel and they're only going to be concentrating on medicinal herbs. See, this is a special packet of seeds that I got from Survival Seeds. You can find them on my website, but today we're going to show you how to plant and grow all the seeds in this packet. And to start it off, I think Elle should start it because she's the one that's the expert. So one, two, three. Thanks for having me Weedy and lovely to meet you all. Today I'm going to talk to you about some medicinal herbs that I have grown before in my garden and I'll tell you about some of the beneficial properties of them. So the first one I'm going to start off with today is borage. So borage, predominantly I use it in my garden as a beneficial pollinator. I use it underneath my fruit trees. So all of the aerial parts of borage are able to be used in medicine. It's useful as an anti-inflammatory for things such as arthritis and also as an anti-inflammatory for the lungs. So borage is full of potassium and calcium. It's also high in vitamin C and vitamin A. So the young fresh leaves are fantastic to put into a salad just to boost your immunity during the growing season. All of the aerial parts can be used for the borage. It also has some really beautiful star-shaped flowers. I like the flowers just because of the colour and the way they boost a salad. They're edible and they're full of goodness. They're really, really pretty in drinks as well. You can use them as an edible flower. I like to use it predominantly underneath my fruit trees and I like to use it at the end of my vegetable rows because it creates a sort of pollinator highway from one end of the garden to the other. And it just sort of brightens the whole area up. Some plants I call occasional plants and borage is one of those for me. What I mean by that is they're the sort of things that you don't want to be having every single day. Sometimes too much of a good thing is too much and it's not a tonic plant per se. Tonic plants you can have every single day and it's of no detriment to your body. It's actually fantastic for you. Other plants such as yarrow or echinacea and borage are ones that you only have as needed and not on an ongoing basis. And to grow borage I'll hand you over to Weedy. So borage, I'm going to plant my borage here. I'm just going to take a few of these away so we can get in. I'll just put these, I'll put these on the compost later. And so I'll just make a bit more room here. I reckon this is a good enough spot as any. It's right next to my bees here and I've got dragon fruits and all my vegetables up just behind here. So that's nice. So when you're planting the borage by seed you want to just put it in the ground about half a centimetre to one centimetre. And then when it's come out of the pot and it's looking ready to go, so my little borage is going to be happy underneath here I think. Because the sun's going to be coming in here. It's going to probably grow up to be about this high in here. Alright, just a handful of compost soil is always good. Yummy, yummy compost soil straight from the soil factory. Give a bit of food there. I just give these little roots a bit of a tickle so they kind of get out of that going round and round situation. And put that down there in the soil like that. Oh, the plant's saying thank you, thank you. The soil is very moist at the moment so I don't really need to water that in. It's going to be happy right there. See look at that, it's in the morning sun here right there where it's sitting. But I might just move a couple more of these away to give it a bit more light. This plant won't mind. I might even just chop and drop around the borage plant right here. See I'm just making a bit of food for it already. That's it for this one, I'll go back to Elle. Thanks Elle. The next one's chamomile. Everyone's grandma has told them about if you want to get to sleep, have a chamomile tea. Generally it's the beautiful little white flowers that are the medicinal part of chamomile. What we want to do is if we're growing it, you pluck the flowers off and then you take about a handful inside and steep it for about 15 minutes and it makes this beautiful calmative tea. It'll help you relax and get to sleep. Additionally with that, it's really good for children. So kids generally like a cup of chamomile tea. It's sort of like flowery and aromatic and it's also good for little tummies and digestion. Especially with some yummy honey. God that smells good. Let's go plant the chamomile weeding. So when you're planting chamomile seeds, the little tiny seeds only need to go down 4mm or less. So you just put them on the top of the soil and just scrape the soil over them. So up here in the subtropics in the weedy garden, I can plant this any time from the autumn through to the spring. Okay, time to plant the little chamomile. And this one likes full sun, but it can also handle a little bit partly shade. The sun's coming in here behind me. In the wintertime, straight onto a little chamomile. And this is the Madagascar bean. That's going to grow up here, so that's not going to affect it really. So I think I'll put it right here, down with my worms. Oh look at the size of that one. Nice little earthworm there. Oh there's lots of them. Lots of earthworms underneath here. Hey, goodness gracious. Okay, nice handful of compost. It does smell nice doesn't it? Just give the roots a little tickle. Down in with the worms. Oh, another worm. Okay, she asked me what that was. Okay, back to you again Elle. And now we're back with Echinacea. Everyone has heard of Echinacea. If you're into herbalism, you've probably heard of it. And you know it's in a lot of teas and it's a fantastic immunity herb. So with Echinacea, it's the roots that you want. Generally you need to let it grow for two to three years. And you harvest it then and it's the roots that harness all of that beautiful medicine. You can chop them up, you can powder them, tincture them, or you can have them as decoctions or like very, very concentrated teas. One of the really cool things about Echinacea root is that when you chew on that root, it makes your whole mouth go numb. So it's really good for like sore teeth or infected gums. So one of the things about Echinacea is it does take a long time for you to get a return on your investment. You do have to sort of look after it for a couple of years before you can then process that plant. And I'm going to be honest, it can be a bit of a pain in the butt to dig up these root plants and process them and use them. Roots are much more difficult to use than aerial plants for me. Echinacea is, as I said before, it's a sometimes plant or an occasional plant. So you only use it on occasion as required. Say for example, you are starting to feel a little bit run down and you have a cold or something like that. You can feel it coming on. That's when you get the Echinacea out and you start using it. You only use it for say a week, maybe two weeks max. And then you give it a rest so your body can process it. So Echinacea is full of vitamin C, iron and it's full of antioxidants. Just like Borage, the purple coneflower of the Echinacea is a fantastic pollinator. Now it's off to Weedy to plant them. Okay, Echinacea. Echinacea is the roots, remember, we want to have. So I've got this net on here to keep the bush turkey away. So I'm just going to take that off because this garden bed is like full of goodness. And it's nice and deep and soft soil which means the Echinacea roots can go nice and deep in the soil because it's the roots that we want, remember. And I'm going to get my little thing here. Oh, look at that. Oh, going crazy in here. But I did put a lot of worm castings and worms in here. Probably don't need it for this because the soil is so good. But I always put a handful of compost in, right. So Echinacea seeds, they like to go down about four millimetres. And again, depending where you are in the world, you can plant them in spring, summer, autumn or winter. But in the subtropics where I am, you can plant the seeds anywhere in autumn all the way through to spring. Look how small this little Echinacea plant is at the moment. But you know how big they're going to get? They're probably going to get about this big when it's fully grown. And it's going to be sitting here for two or three years before I want to harvest it. So those roots can develop. See these little baby roots? They're the ones we're going to use for medicine when they get big. So we'll give it a little tickle. It's doing a little giggle when I tickle its roots. Oh, nice and down there. And I won't give it any water because if you could feel this soil, it's nice and moist. Look at that. Perfect spot. Lots of direct sun. And now back to Elle. And Feverfew. Feverfew has very similar flowers to the Chamomile plant. However, as its name suggests, it's fantastic for a whole heap of different medicinal uses. Feverfew, surprise, surprise, is great for fevers. But what you might not know is it's also a prophylactic or a preventative for migraines and headaches. Look at this butterfly just coming, trying to hang out with all of the beautiful medicinal plants and herbs. Since ancient times, picking off one leaf and chewing it is a daily prophylactic or preventative to stop migraines from occurring in a long-term basis. I think if you had ongoing sort of health issues with regards to migraines and headaches, you would definitely give it a go. In addition to maybe just having a leaf and chewing it, what you could do with Feverfew is use it, probably not as a tea because it's quite bitter, but you could chop it, dry it and create a tincture with it. The best thing to do with a Feverfew tincture would be to have just a couple of drops every day as a preventative and have it on an ongoing basis. It's now proven scientifically to reduce migraines. Feverfew is anti-inflammatory and it's good for things like arthritis. It's also, as the name suggests, fantastic for fevers. So if you create a Feverfew tincture, for example, you would use it for someone with a high fever or in the grips of a flu. And if you're into the woo, it's also believed to ward off evil spirits. And now, Weedy's going to show you how to grow it. Time for you to go in the ground, Feverfew. Hey, listen, I'm in my food forest here and if you ever dreamt about having a food forest and you'd like to have a food forest and you haven't seen this video, well, I'd recommend you see it because I'm giving away a food forest. Well, I'm not giving it away, you've got to buy a raffle ticket, but the lucky winner is going to get a food forest, so check out that video. So here, Feverfew, we want to have it in the nice sunshine, which it is, because the sun's up here, so there's going to be plenty of sun. I'm just going to get rid of a few of these weeds. So normally you know about chopping and dropping, but this one's pulling and dropping. See, I pull it and I drop it. So we dig our little hole. Feverfew is probably going to get about this high and it's an annual, so it'll drop its seeds and keep growing year after year. So, nice bit of compost. Give it that little tickle again. Can you hear that? That's the cow. Give it a little tickle like that so the roots can spread out. And the ground, like I said, the ground's very moist underneath here, so there's no reason for me to water this in. A bit of sugarcane mulch to keep the weeds from coming up. I love putting my little plants to bed. You can use all the Feverfew, the flowers and the leaves. I'm putting it down here underneath my little citrus orchard because the flowers are going to attract pollinators. They're going to pollinate my mandarin tree. So it's all going to be very good. Okay, that's it for the Feverfew. So back to you, Elle. Feverfew flowers are really cute and they're little and they look just like chamomile flowers. So it's quite easy to get them mixed up. But now I'm going to talk to you about one of my favourite plants, yarrow. I love yarrow and I think that every household should have it. Yarrow is an amazing wound healer and it can be used internally and externally in the body. Say you have a cut and you've sliced your finger during cooking or something like that. You simply get a little leaf from a yarrow plant and you put it on and that will help to stop the bleeding. Yarrow is amazing as a tea as well. It can be used internally to help break a sweat and then break a fever. So it helps with viral infections. I personally used this in a combination with mullein when I had COVID and I found that I was right as rain within a couple of days. If you're using yarrow internally, it's an occasional plant. You use it only when needed. So the best way to use yarrow externally is to put it into an infused oil. And then you can either create a salve with it or even just use the oil and rub it on the wounds as well. It's fantastic for any sort of skin issues or skin disorders. And personally, I love it for any sort of cuts and abrasions. I'll be showing you how to make a salve on an upcoming video, probably next month. One of the great things about yarrow is that it's a natural antiseptic. So it's great for gum issues, any sort of infections and it's antimicrobial as well. So it helps with the skin, which is one of the biggest organs of the body. It's really important to have in your household for your family. And now Weedy's going to show you how to grow it. Okay, time to plant the little yarrow. And because it's a really good ground cover and the roots are just going to go. All those chickweed's nice. I've got plenty of chickweed in the garden. So I'm just going to take this out and put my little yarrow, I think, down here in front of my pineapple. I might just chop a little few of these off. Can you see now? See, it just uncovered a little ant's nest here. Look, see. Ow, ow, ow. This is, oh look, a little witchetty grub. Witchetty grub is really nice actually. And again with yarrow, it depends on where you live. It's like you can plant it all sorts of different times. Okay, a nice bit of compost. And the yarrow's got beautiful little flowers. So when this gets established, it's going to be a nice little ground cover in here. Lovely little flowers in the springtime. In you go, little yarrow. Okay, so your yarrow's going to make a nice little ground cover just like my nasturtiums. But they're not going to be as high as my nasturtiums. They're going to only be about this high. But you can see how my nasturtiums are spreading out, making a nice little ground cover underneath my little mandarin tree. Oh, I like to put a little bit of sugar cane mulch around my little plants just to keep the weeds out. It stops the competition a little bit. Just until it gets going. Okay, one little yarrow happy in the ground. And then we'll go back to Elle again. Five down, five to go. Lemon balm. Now I know a minute ago I said that yarrow was one of my favourites. But lemon balm is one of my top five that you definitely need to have in your home. I think of lemon balm as the astonishing anxiety herb. It's full of aromatic volatile oils that help calm your nervous system. So if you can turn it into a tea or a tincture, what it does is it works with the central nervous system to bring everything down. Especially if you're in an anxious state. So lemon balm is great for little kids. And it's good for kids who are anxious about going to school or going to different events. It's good for calming the tummy as well. It's also similar to chamomile. Lemon balm is fantastic for digestive issues such as IBS or any sort of bloating or gas. Lemon balm can be used as both a tincture or a tea. And it's all aerial parts. It's also fantastic for attracting bees to your yard. It has these beautiful aromatic little flowers. And it's also known as bee balm. We call it the chill tea because it's a nervine and it helps to calm everything down. So like chamomile and passionflower, lemon balm is fantastic as a sleep aid. And you can have it about half an hour before bed to help you go to sleep. I love lemon balm so much that I grow it commercially for my business, Australian Medicinal Herbs. And I sell it as a tea and a tincture because I know how well it works. And you'll find the link to my website down below in the description. And now off to Weedy to show you how to plant it. See this beautiful lemon balm here? Doesn't like the full sun. Doesn't like the full shadow. Likes a little bit of both. So that's why I've got it planted underneath my magnificent dragon fruit here. And this one I got from Elle actually. And look how much it's growing. And I've already harvested this right back to the ground once. And it's time to harvest it again. It smells great. So I'll go and find a place down in my swales. I think I'll put it down underneath my mango tree. Up the front here the sun comes in this way. So I still get a bit of winter sun. Alright. Nice big handful of compost. Of course the lemon balm roots, they're not as invasive as the mint roots. This lemon balm's not going to kind of take over and start to wander. So we'll just tickle the little roots again. So this is just going to bush up from here underneath my, I was just about to say underneath my little mango tree, but underneath my big mango tree. So your lemon balm, these tiny little lemon balm seeds, you don't want to put them under the ground. You just want to sprinkle them on top of the soil and give them a little water. And again, nice moist soil in here so I don't have to water it in. Easy peasy. So back to you again, Elle. Thanks, sweetie. And here we go again with mugwort. Mugwort, as you can see, mugwort likes to take off. So if you put it in a pot, it will try to escape via the roots. It will also try to escape via seeds. So if you're going to grow mugwort, make sure you have it on a pot, but it's up on cement, on bricks, and so you can really control it because it will just go wherever it chooses to go. All of the aerial parts of mugwort are useful. It's often used in Chinese medicine as a moxibustion, and it's also used in other medicines as a tea, as a tincture. Mugwort is used to relieve menstrual cramping, and it's also used to help promote digestion. In the olden days, witches used to plant mugwort at the front and the back of their property for protection. It can be smoked and used for lucid dreaming or put into pillows underneath pillowcases for when you go to sleep to promote lucid dreaming. So just remember, mugwort is an occasional plant, so just use it when you need it. So up here in the Weedy garden, I've actually advised Weedy not to plant this one because I think he's learned from last time with the passionflower. Passionflower has those wandering little tendrils that will take off all over your garden, and it has taken off all of his garden. And I've told Weedy, let's not put the mugwort in here because it will take over. But if that's something that you really, really want, feel free to plant it yourself. Wormwood has antiparasitic qualities, and the reason I use wormwood and have it in my garden as a staple is I give it to my chickens as an antiparasitic. If you plant it in the middle of your chicken pen and you make sure that it's properly protected, your chickens can come and browse it and eat the plant as they need it. They're currently investigating the wormwood plant as an antiviral that will assist with COVID. It has antiviral properties. However, we still deem it to be an occasional use plant. So you can use it as needed. So say you've got a cough or a cold or something coming on or you're feeling your immune system is a little bit sluggish, then you might have a little bit of a wormwood plant. My suggestion would be to use it as a tincture. This is nice as an antiviral. It's helpful for things such as when your immune system is a little bit down and you sort of feel a cough or a cold or some sort of virus coming on, you could use the tincture of the wormwood as an antiviral supplement. It's a very, very bitter plant. I personally would not drink it as a tea and I definitely wouldn't eat it if I can avoid it. I'd definitely tincture this plant and then have it as an occasional. You only have it as you need it. It's the sort of plant that you want around, as the name would suggest, wormwood. It's great for you. Can I just interrupt for a second? Can I interrupt for a second? You sure can. Did I give you a fright? Yeah. I was zoomed in. I was going to say, the next thing you were going to talk about was the chooks, right? Yeah, the chooks. So I think I'll take it from here because this one's really interesting. And that's the reason why I've got this one growing here in the garden. It's mostly because of the chooks. Because all the antibacterial, anti-anti-plants, I've got so many of them. This one's for the chooks. Okay, do you want to come down and watch? Okay. I've got this netting ready. So I'm just going to plant that. So if I plant that in the chicken yard. So I've got the mesh thing ready. I ripped it out of the garden. So if I plant it in the middle of this. Yeah, that's sort of the perfect size. As long as you have the chickens not able to disturb the soil, that'll be fantastic. So basically we've got to put it in a spot where the chickens can't come in and dig it up. But when it grows up, it's going to stick its leaves out the mesh and the chickens will be able to reach it and it'll pick away at it. It's like you're planting medicine in the middle of their chicken pen. Exactly. And this is kind of getting full sun as well. In the winter time, the sun's up here. Coming in here, nothing stopping that. Bit of compost soil on top. Although this is probably pretty fertile soil because the chickens have been living in here. That's probably going to hold it. I can feel the joy of this little plant already in my hands. It's vibrating because it knows it's coming down into something just delicious. Nice and moist. I mean you can see yourself how moist the soil is. There's no reason for me to sort of flood it out. Just tuck that on like that. So that means that when this plant gets established, it can grow up here and it's probably going to be about this high I'd reckon. And the stuff that grows through here is where the chickens can eat it. So the chickens will kind of keep it inside this like a little hedge. But they won't be able to scratch all the worms that are in the bottom of it right now and disrupt it. So that's good. Okay, moving right along. So if you want to sit down and we'll continue, we'll have a look here. I'll just put this over here. Do we have enough time? There's enough time. Everybody knows sage and thyme as predominantly culinary herbs. But they also have fantastic medicinal properties as well. Sage for example is antibacterial and it's antifungal. And it's also very helpful to assist women that are going through menopause, manages symptoms. It's fantastic for things like managing the mood, the night sweats and some of the other not so pleasant things about menopause. You can use it obviously in a culinary preparation and eat it. Or you can make it into a tincture which I think would be much more effective. And if you're going to use it, use a tincture. Thyme on the other hand. Thyme is fantastic for the respiratory system. It has a whole heap of properties that when you use it, it can really help as a demulcent. And it also helps as an expectorant to get the gunk out of your lungs. Thyme, if you're going to use it internally, you would either use it as a tea. It makes quite a pungent aromatic tea with the volatile oils. Or you could use it in a syrup. And you can create a little bit of honey or a little bit of sugar. And you boil the leaves in that honey and sugar. And you stir and stir and stir with a little bit of water. And then that makes a fantastic cough syrup as well. It's very natural. It's been used for thousands and thousands of years. And it's deeply effective. I'll just interrupt for a second. There's a lot of information that Elle has shared with us today. And what I did, I made a little PDF. It's one of those little e-books again that you can download from theweedygarden.com. So if you hadn't written all this down, then you can just go and download that for free. And I'll leave a link in the description for that. And I'll also leave a link in the description for Elle's website. Okay. But I'll just pop down into Swales. And I'll plant these now. And then we'll come back and say goodbye. Full sun up here. And I have a feeling that the pineapples and the thyme are going to kind of get on well together. In my opinion, this is as good a spot as any. I'll just take away some of these weeds. So the little thyme gets a bit of room. And you know what I'm going to do now, of course. Big handful of compost. I'll dig a little hole. And I'll get my thyme. Careful, careful. In you go. It looks a bit funny, doesn't it? I think it's been growing crooked. But I'll just chuck a bit of mulch around that. Okay. So if you do want to have a lot of thyme in the garden, then just get yourself a thyme branch and rip off all the little leaves of it. You can probably give it a little scratch with your fingernail or with the back of a knife. And stick it in the ground. And wish it good luck. And it should produce roots and continue growing. I'm going to just find somewhere to put the sage. But I think I'll finish the video off. Let's go down to the swales. Of course, thanks for watching. That's a good enough time as any to end this video, actually. And so while I go down and plant the last little plant, the sage, down in my garden somewhere, I'd first like to say thanks for coming to the Garden Hill. Yeah, thanks for the great time. Yeah. There's a nice little bit of sun down here still, actually. It's really nice to have your own medicine grown in your own garden. And I wish that for everybody, actually. So even if you've just got one little pot and one little favourite herb, why not just plant it in your garden? Because our life is important. It is ours. And we have control of it. So enjoy yours. You've only got one.