Never Too Much Thyme

Thyme is one of those hardy herbs that just keep on going and going, kind of like the Energizer Bunny. There really isn't a season when fresh thyme isn't available. I've gone out to the garden when everything was covered with ice and picked a sprig of icy thyme to chew on (I taste a lot of plants when they're covered with ice - try mint sometime, it's great!)

So today I was checking out the garden, sunshine had coaxed me outside, and I noticed how nicely red many of the thymes are. Standard creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum), is sometimes used as a ground cover, but in the Ozarks we grow it along the edges of raised beds. Normally green in color, in winter it takes on a reddish hue. I throw a few sprigs into chicken when it's cooking.

If you've ever looked at the ingredients in Listerine, you may have noticed there are 4 ingredients besides water and alcohol: menthol, thymol, methyl salicylate, and eucalyptol. Translated out of plant Latin, that is simply oils of: mint, thyme, birch twigs and eucalyptus. (Methyl salicylate, or oil of wintergreen, is now manufactured artificially, but originally, it was made from birch twigs). Listerine was created by Dr. Joseph Lister, a pioneer in the use of antiseptics during surgery. It soon became popular for oral surgeons to use, but only took off as an over the counter product in the 1920s when Warner-Lambert, the manufacturer in St. Louis, created the term, "halitosis" as a medical condition. Promoting their product as a sure cure for bad breath , Listerine became a household name. For many years it was marketed as a preventative for colds, a treatment for gum infections and more. It does all of those things, but the company no longer makes the claims.

While traveling in Bangkok a few years ago, I was hurrying through the night market and stepped into a hole at the edge of the sidewalk. I scraped my leg and and it was late at night (the night market goes from sundown to 2 a.m.; the whole I stepped in, was the drain where all the rotten vegetables and refuse were dumped - not a great place to get a scraped leg). I went back to my hotel room, washed my scraped leg with soap and water and doused it with Listerine. It's a good antiseptic. So is thyme. You can make a strong decoction, or strong tea, of thyme leaves and use it as a mouthwash if you have cuts or sore places in your mouth.

Some of my other thymes are looking pretty good, too. The orange thyme (Thymus fragrantissimus), which is a more upright thyme with a pleasant orange fragrance, looks good any time of year, a bit grayer in winter, greener in summer. And next to it, the upright version of lemon thyme (Thymus citriodorus) shows no signs of damage from the snow, ice and below zero temperatures we've had.

The creeping lemon thyme (Thymus citriodorus 'Creeping Lemon') is nicely robust in winter. Next spring it will green up and start blooming with deep pink flowers. The upright lemon thyme is easier to harvest than the creeper, but the lower growing one has the best lemony flavor, in my opinion.

Try my lemon balm cake, which has lemon thyme as one of the ingredients. The recipe is here, on my Herb of the Year blog. I have another version I used when Nature's Garden featured my garden a couple of years ago and here's that recipe, but without the lemon thyme, from my Recipes blog (you might enjoy browsing that blog, too). I'm not sure why I left the thyme out of that oane, maybe because that time I used a cake mix; usually I just make the cake from scratch. But there are 2 versions of the same cake, just made a bit differently. (And if  you do a search for "Jim Long's lemon balm cake"  you'll find several versions, some going back to 1992 and scattered throughout my Making Bentwood Trellis books. Yes - even when making a bentwood trellis for the garden, you need cake!) Here's an early version of my lemon balm cake recipe, actually pages from my Bentwood Trellis book, that I had no idea was on the web, listed on Google books.

If you don't have thyme in your garden, you need some. Whether creeping thyme for cooking, lemon or orange for preparing seafood or desserts, or just a little bit for a groundcover between stepping stones, this is one hardy plant, year in and year out. Happy gardening!

Lime Balm Peeks Up Through the Leaves

This week I tilled up last year's leek bed to make room for parsnips and noticed the lime balm (Melissa officianalis 'Lime') was peeking up through the leaves. A visitor to the garden, years ago, brought this lime flavored lemon balm. It stays primarily in that same bed, which is 4 ft. x 6 ft. The other end has a clump of Blue Eye Spring mint, which is agreeable to having that small space. Of course every year I have to pull out the mint roots or it would take over the whole bed. The leeks didn't mind, nor the garlic the year before, nor the potatoes before that.

Want to know more about lemon balm? Check this article written by Jeanine Davis, the Extension Hort Specialist at North Carolina Extension Svc. I met Jeanine some years ago when I was a speaker at the NC Herb Assoc, a great organization of herb growers.

So just what's lemon balm, or in this case, lime balm good for? Pie, cake, cookies, tea, just to name a few uses, and it's a very beneficial medicinal plant, too. Owners of orchards, back in previous centuries planted lemon balm between the fruit trees to attract bees, and as you know, bees are required to pollinate the trees. Lemon balm, it seems, is a favorite plant for bees' nectar collection. Of course if you're growing lemon balm for your own use, it's best to keep it pruned instead of letting it bloom and go to seed. Once the plant starts blooming, the flavor of the leaves turn from "Ohhh, that's lemony!" to, "Blescch, that tastes like soap, why would anyone eat that?" Just a few weeks makes a big difference in flavors. Just like basil (or most herbs), if you leave lemon balm, or lime balm alone and don't give it regular pruning and use only the old leaves, you will not like the plant one bit. If you'd like my recipe for Lemon Balm Cake, using either lemon balm or lime balm, here's the link: Jim Long's Recipes: Lemon Balm-Blueberry Cake and if you'd like to find lemon or lime balm to grow, you can find it by going to my website, click on "Looking for Plants?" button and then go to the Richters Herbs link. There are also more links to plant sellers we recommend highly there, as well.

Our long time friend, Nellie Neal, who has a great garden radio talk show, the GardenMama, in Jackson, MS just added Horticultural Projects Manager at Bass Pecan Company to her impressive resume. I have no idea what a Hort. Projects Manager does, but if it has to do with plants, Nellie knows how. At age 7 she planted eggplant seed and when the plants were big enough to transplant, Nellie sold the plants to her neighbors. In college at Louisiana State Univ. while other students were doing wild and crazy things, Nellie was growing 90 tomato plants in her front yard. We were very happy to have her visit us here last summer. And it was fun to be on her radio show. She helps gardeners find answers to their questions about growing organically, in Zones 8, 9 & 10 and is The gardening guru of the South.

One of our customers has a camel dairy business in California and sent a photo of one of their camels, Goldie, and her new baby, Aziz. The Oasis Camel Dairy has 18 camels, which they milk and use to make a very rich, wonderful herbal soap. The husband and wife team of Gil Riegler and Nancy Kobert have been raising camels at the farm for over 20 years and use them in therapeutic therapy programs for the physically challenged. Camels are sensitive, patient and highly intelligent and seem to thrive on their arid California farm. They offer lavender, Rosemary Mint, Gold-Frankincense-and-Myrrh, Orange Blossom and Milk and Honey soaps.

The garden is coming along, beds are being cleaned and every day something new blooms. Yeah spring!

Ravishing Rubies Red Hats

Ravishing Rubies Red Hats

We have several Red Hats groups visit the garden during the summer. Most bring sack lunches and make a morning of it. The Ravishing Rubies (aka Blue Eye Red Hats) came to visit and enjoyed a Dream Pillows workshop in the gazebo. Everyone made a dream pillow to take home and learned about the various herbs that effect dreaming. (All of the recipes for my formulas are in Making Herbal Dream Pillows, Storey Publishing).

They had cold pressed mint tea and Lemon Balm-Blueberry Cake for dessert after lunch. We gave out little envelopes with instructions to place the herbs I handed them (to smell and taste) into the envelope, put it on the dash of the car and they would have a potpourri record of the herbs they'd enjoyed. Alternatively, they could empty the packet into a pot of boiling water in which there was an couple of onion slices, a stalk of celery and a couple of pieces of chicken, and make soup!

Many of my dream pillow formulas are available on our website on the Dream Pillows pages, both as ready made pillows and as bulk blends for those who want to sew their own. We also offer Kits and individual Bulk Herbs for other projects, too.