By now you will have learned that baby carrots are a fiction. Unlike other “true” baby vegetables— baby spinach, for example, baby lima...

Behold the bitter gourd. This is a vegetable I first encountered in India, one of the many that was new and unfamiliar to my...

Is there a more generous, available and yet prickly plant than urtica dioica? Her nature seems to be one of essential paradox. She is a...

Herbal first aid may sound like a contradiction in terms. But herbs are not always slow and gradual-acting, and numerous forms of plant...

If you want to avoid the sniffles this winter or cut short a cold you may already have, look no further than Sambucus nigra, aka elder....

Lemon verbena is uplifting and calming at the same time. My love affair with lemon verbena began quite recently, when I discovered a...

Do you make your own nut milk? This is a great way to use the leftover pulp. Ingredients about 200-250 g of cashew pulp, or soaked and...

Linden blossoms and flowers have a long history in folk medicine around the world. Linden or lime blossom tea is a traditional remedy for...

Fennel belongs to the Umbellifers, also known as the carrot family. It goes well with vegetables that are commonly paired with carrots,...

I am not sure I had heard of neem before I spent time in India, but I certainly heard a lot about it while I was living there. Neem was...

Do you know eleuthero? While its common names include "Siberian ginseng" and "taiga root", eleutherococcus senticosus does not come from...

The community garden at Kotlaska, with member allotments in the foreground. Before I moved to Prague, my work colleagues told me...

Last spring, at a garden where I was helping out, there was such an abundance of red currants that I began to tire of eating them in my...

According to Greek myth, raspberries were once white. Then came the day that Ida, nursemaid to the infant Zeus, pricked her finger on a...

What if the military model of "fighting" disease, "killing germs" and "defending" ourselves against the "bad guys" ramped up our body's...

What makes beet-red different from berry-red? Turns out that beets get their colour from plant nutrients called betalains, pigments that...

Oats are a remarkably versatile food: they are nourishing for children, adults and the elderly, the healthy, the ill and the...

The theory of healing that I gravitate to starts from the idea that the place we long for is the place we start from, in wholeness. This...

The story of the Garden of Eden can be read in two fundamentally different ways. One, the standard version, links agriculture to a...

Known as elecampane in English, and simply called "inula" by herbalists, the root of inula helenium has been used to treat persistent...