Take a Fall walk with Emily Springer through the medicinal herb gardens at Meeting House Farm in Scarborough, Maine! 🌿
0:00 Welcome! We are going to do a little plant walk. It's October here in Maine and I thought it might be fun for you to see how we’re putting the gardens to bed and how we’re digging roots.
0:11 My name is Emily Springer, and we are here at Meeting House Farm in Scarborough. Let's start with Solomon’s Seal, one of my favorite plants. Many of you may actually have Solomon’s Seal growing in your garden and not know that it's a medicinal plant.
1:30 As we walk I'll just point out a couple of things. The first is that our grass has gotten really long. I don't think we've mowed in like, a month, and that's on purpose. We're letting the grass really get nice and strong before the winter comes. We also have a lot of leaves around, also on purpose for right now, we're going to mulch those leaves into our ground here, and then we'll use them as mulch on our beds.
1:55 I'm going to stop right here at our lavender. These are also a Czech variety called krajova, and they tend to do much better in Maine winters. We still have gorgeous Spilanthes over here.
3:00 We also still have Borage here and at our farm right now, we're cutting things back and really getting ready for the winter, but anything that's blooming we leave because it's food for our bees.
3:29 We’re gonna walk up here. We'll talk about ashwagandha.
3:37 So you can see, this is our Peony bed here, and we've already cut them back, and they're pretty much ready.
4:49 Calendula is still blooming.
5:59 We have some beautiful California Poppy still in full bloom. And check out our Absinthe bed. It's just lovely. We've been cutting this lately to make smudge sticks -coming soon to meetinghouse.farm.
6:22 Here we are with Echinacea, and I want to point out a couple of things. Let's dig an Echinacea, though, just so you can see the root.
8:21 Our next stop is with Valerian. And I also will point out we have quite a few plants that are totally past their prime, but we're not cutting them back because the bees are using them. With Anise Hyssop, we do not cut that back, because the finches eat at that all winter. So that will be food for the birds.
9:11 Okay, so Valerian roots are very fragrant, and there's lots of little bits, and they really take a lot to wash out. So I find the best way to do this is to put them in a clean wheelbarrow and soak them for a few minutes, and then in cold water, and then spray them with a hose, and then spray them again, and then soak them again.
10:21 Let's look at Elecampane now. Elecampane is definitely ready. We've already cut it back. It was completely yellow, and it's time to dig. This is the plant that a few weeks ago, about a month ago.
10:42 All right, this is an Elecampane root. See, it has a crown, and it also has these long roots that go out. What I do is harvest the long, lengthy roots and put the crown back in. So I will take clippers and just clip these off and harvest these and put that crown back in. And next year I'll harvest the long roots again, so I have a continual crop.
11:21 Over here, we have Astragalus. This is an immune booster, an immunostimulant. It's also a tonic. You can take it every day, and it's really helpful for people who live in lyme infested areas.
12:40 This is Solomon’s Seal in the sun. It’s actually dappled. We get a lot more production out of this bed than we would out of that shade bed and I'll just show you - so this one is all done, and I'll pop this out.
14:03 I think we actually have some Codonopsis here. Let’s just take a quick peek. Codonopsis is used in traditional Chinese medicine. And here's another example of a plant that's really dying back. It's looking the ends of the plant are. You can literally see the plant going down into the root. So this plant, any little bit of it left in the ground, will create a new plant. You can really take the whole root, and you'll still have Codonopsis again next year.
14:46 but the root tastes like carrot. And this is another immune support. You can see you could take all of that root and there will be little bits left in the ground, and you'll have Codonopsis again next year. And that's ready to go.
15:10 I'll just point out we still have some really beautiful Wood Betony. It'll bloom up until freeze. We’ve cut back all of our lemon balm.
15:32 Over here, we have a Chinese mum. If you look closely you can see it’s almost ready to bud out. And we pick these right before they bloom. And if we're really lucky it will get to that point before it actually freezes. And this makes an amazing tea.
16:05 Over here we have our Marshmallow field beds, and they've all been cut back. We do try to get most everything cut back and done by October 31. We always have a few little dangling threads, but for the most part this place is put to bed and it’s a nice time for rest until after March 20, next spring.