Herbal Workshops 2009

Firstly, I would like to thank all of you who came out and participated in the herbal activities in 2008 and made my year so enjoyable – I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. My new year resolution is to be more organised and ensure that we start to harvest the wonderful herbs we have growing in the Garden so that we have them available for you to use all the year round.

You will probably have seen the programme for the first part of the year that Gareth has put up on the website. I hope as many of you as possible will brave the weather to attend the Herbal ‘Intro talk’ on Sunday, 8th February at 11:30 (inside you’ll be pleased to know) – due to space and seating restrictions we have to limit numbers to 25 so let Gareth know if you’d like to come. I’m hoping to make it a lively couple of hours.

There unfortunately probably won’t be time to touch on the future herb programme on the 8th and I will go into that in depth on the second session ‘the herb team’ talk on 8th March. The purpose of that session is to recruit a small team of ‘herbies’ to oversee the herb activities at the garden like organising the harvesting and assisting me with the talks.

I am going to try to be at the Garden once a week (usually on a Sunday). The ‘team’ wouldn’t need to be there every week but they would need to be prepared to commit to specific dates on a rota and, if possible, ‘all hands to the pumps’ on medicine-making sessions – probably with a few planning meetings interspersed.

It would be wonderful to see the herbs right at the centre of some of other exciting events coming up for the Garden this year – if we can get organised it would be lovely to have some of our herbs dried and packaged up to sell on behalf of the Garden at the Redbridge Green Fair on 24th May. I’d like to get a little leaflet together to go with these giving some ‘traditional use’ information.

On the same subject, thinking about the future, I’m thinking it would be brilliant if we could start putting together a ‘Forest Farm Peace Garden’ herbal first-aid booklet – using photos of the herbs in the garden ready for harvesting and perhaps some of the group medicine-making sessions – so if anyone would like to volunteer to be official herbal activity photographer do get in touch. I would like to encourage any of you with old family recipes for herbal remedies or perhaps ways of using herbs medicinally that I’m not aware of to record these for posterity as part of this booklet – we musn’t let this knowledge die! As a part of this project I am going to buy a nice big notebook so we can record things at the herb sessions as we go along or think of them to collate and ‘pretty-up’ at a later date – this is YOUR herbal guys to get involved!

I’ll leave it there for the moment so let’s hope we don’t need a snow-plough to get through to the Garden on February 9th – I’ll try to make sure I’ve got a nice warming herbal tea brewing to welcome you!