Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium)

Feverfew is a tremendously helpful herbal ally with a long history in country and folk medicine.
Most commonly in modern herbal medicine it is considered to be an HEENT herb (Head, Ears, Eyes, Nose, and Throat), with its most notable modern day use as a pain and frequency reducer in migraine headaches. However, due to its bitter properties, it was previously considered a popular herb to be used in issues with digestion, sluggish liver, and constipation. Whether you use it for its modern descriptions, or its traditional applications, this herb has proven to be tried and true over time.

Petra is a faculty member at the Institute of Holistic Nutrition Nutrition, a new member on the HWB Board of Directors,  and has been a member of HWB since 2014. She currently runs the HWB Mahonia Chapter for the greater Vancouver BC area and coordinates the community free clinic. She is also the owner of Healing House Natural Wellness Centre, a multi-modality center located in BC Canada. For more info please visit the site, or follow her on Instagram @healinghouseherbal ​

By Jaycee Clark - Ayurvedic Lymphatic Drainage Practitioner
Healing House Natural Wellness Centre BC Canada

The lymphatic system - made up of lymphatic vessels, lymph nodes, tissues, and organs - is so important, yet often overlooked! These pathways are integral to our immunity - they bathe and cleanse our blood and tissues, as well as produce specialized cells to take on bacterial and viral infections. Lymph must flow - it doesn’t have a heart to pump the fluid around the body and relies solely on the movement of the diaphragm and the physical movement of skeletal muscles to circulate in the body.

Here are some simple wellness tips to nourish your lymph this season.

Welcome to Tip Tuesday!

We hope that this will be one of many to come. Tip Tuesday is designed to give you little tips for health, wellness, herbal medicine, safety practices, gardening, seed saving - you name it!

Since it's the holidays, and this year has been challenging, we felt it would be wise to start with the concept of self care. Self care is so incredibly vital to all individuals when it comes to stress management. Adequate and consistent self care can help reduce feelings of depression and anxiety, insomnia, irritability, issues with concentration, and dietary based deficiencies that often accompanies times of stress and uncertainty.

We hope you enjoy these small tips. 
What else can you do to help yourself?
Feel free to share your self care tips with us in the comments.

~Blog post from HWB Member Contributor Petra Sovcov of HWB Vancouver. 

The Importance of Seed Saving
Despite the various practices of seed saving being a hot topic in social media, seed saving itself is in no way a new practice or idea. Prior to the industrial revolution (1760 to 1840), seed saving was the common practice of all farmers and home gardeners. At this point in global history, seed companies were not the mainstay on the North American and European market, and farmers depended on themselves or others in the community for viable seed for the next years crops. It was not until the 1960's with the introduction of the green revolution (a global movement to end world hunger which instead caused a calamity of loss in developing countries) that corporate farming was born and farmers began to rely on sources of seed from larger entities, thus leading to a devastating loss in native seed varieties around the globe.

Of course the question of "why does this matter?" begs to be asked. After-all, our markets are full of foods, we have access to herbal medicines, things look pretty good for the majority of the world, right? This unfortunately is not the case, but rather the surface image of a problem that is causing genetic devastation to our food supply, and denying many the basic rights to food and medicine.

In the article below we will briefly touch on the importance of seed saving and how it positively impacts our genetic diversity in nutritious food and herbal medicine. We will also share a bit of information on what HWB is doing to help ensure that generational techniques of seed saving, seed access, and threatened/endangered plant varieties are not lost in the shuffle of large scale corporate farming and seed patenting.

Global Loss
There is an exercise that I ask many of my students to do on their second day of class. I think its a great exercise for anyone when we are talking about visualizing the loss of plant diversity.

Step 1: Close your eyes and think of an apple. What color is it? What shape? What does it taste like? What size is it?
Step 2: Gently open your eyes after envisioning your apple. Get a piece of paper and begin to write down as many apple varieties as you can think of. What can you find at the grocery store? What can you find at the farmers market?
Step 3: How many did you write down before you ran out of names, was it 5 types of apples? Was it 10 or 20? How many apples are enough to maintain diversity?

With the incorporation of farming practices at the beginning of the 20th century, farmers started focusing more on growing crops that traveled well and had a high yield. This practice became the agricultural standard, and also introduced the concept of monocropping which is the most common type of corporate farming practice to date. Monocropping is the growth of one type of crop over a vast amount of land. The results of this leads to degradation in the health of the soil web, the need for chemical based inputs, the destruction of ecosystems, and the endangerment of a variety of pollinators ( since the singular crop only blooms once per year which is not enough to feed pollinators) - imagine only getting to eat for a short time each year, you would starve!

With the intense use of monocropping agriculture based on yield and the ability for a crop to transport to other locations, came the mass extinction of heritage varieties. In this case, since we are talking about apples, at the turn of the 20th century (1900) over 7,000 varieties of apples were grown by farmers in North America, now over 90% of these species are extinct.

Unfortunately the practice of corporate farming and monocropping did not simply stick to North America. With the introduction of the green revolution, other countries were impacted as well.

For example,

• In China, nearly 10,000 wheat varieties were cultivated in 1949. By the 1970's only about 1,000 varieties remained.
• In Mexico, only 20% of the traditional corn varieties (maize) which were reported in 1930 are now grown.
• Since 1900, about 75% of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops (food crops) has been lost.

These are only a very small sample of the loss of genetic diversity since the turn of the century. When we lose genetic diversity of food and medicinal plants, we lose sovereignty over our food and medicinal plant safety nets.

In the graphic below you can see further degradation of agricultural seed varieties in North America:

A Seed Saving Crusader!
Who is doing all of the seed saving? Certainly our global chapters and volunteers are greatly contributing, and we could not to the work that we have been doing without our seed donors as well. However, at the heart of it all is a one woman seed coordinating crusader named Denise Cusack. Denise is also the Executive Director of HWB, but beyond that she holds an intense love for plants and plant medicine and is fiercely driven to protect our heirloom and endangered medicinals. I was lucky enough to get a small interview from Denise between meeting schedules, here is what I learned about her efforts:

Tell me about your property:
Lunar Hollow Farm is a 2 acre homestead dedicated to the growing of agricultural and medicinal plants. We are registered as a Botanical Sanctuary with United Plant Savers Network, and grow many threatened and endangered varieties for propagation, conservation, and seed sharing for other communities as well. We of course grow seeds for our HWB garden(s), but also seek to be good stewards for endangered indigenous varieties so we can offer these traditional medicines so indigenous groups and others that may not have access to seeds from their lands and bioregions. 

We are lucky in that our acres have a variety of areas. We have a woodland where we grow such things as uva ursi and ground ivy, we have a prairie where we can grow milkweed, goldenrod, and wild lupine, and we also have a native area where plants native to our bioregion can grow freely such as blue vervain, violets, and cramp bark. In addition to this we have a green house where plants that need multiple years to properly cultivate can be offered the leg up that they need, including herbs like Goldenseal and False Unicorn horn.

What got you interested in seed saving?
After starting the seed saving program with HWB we got a lot of really beautiful heirloom agricultural seeds, but I soon noticed that there were no large scale suppliers of medicinal seeds in North America that were able to donate at the rates we needed to support HWB gardens. I felt it was prudent to instead share resources with other smaller scale growers and work together at creating a much larger supply that could be made available in our seed grants or to communities and chapters who needed the medicinal seeds to get our gardens growing.

What are the top 5 plants your are proud to have grown?

1. Blue Vervain - Which quickly took over parts of the property, I loved growing it but we were not ready to its ability to spread!
2. Boneset - A native, which also was donated to us by Four Elements in Baraboo, WI. 
3. Saint John's Wort - which took two years to fully establish!
4. Sweet Grass and White Sage -  I was really proud of this and our ability to offer it sustainably to indigenous groups that use these plants in ceremony and medicinally. This will be expanded to more groups as the beds grow.
5. False Unicorn horn - it finally established!

What was your proudest moment since starting the HWB Seed Saving project?
Last year I was able to place seeds from Lunar Hollow Farm in seed grants from HWB to various chapters and groups throughout the US.

Our Top Seed Donors:
None of this could be made possible without the help from our main seed donors, and so in offering this Feature Friday, we would like to share who they are. These are seed companies and suppliers that share HWB's vision of health justice and are committed to the good workings of heirloom, non gmo, agricultural, and medicinal seed varieties.

Our Top Seed Donors for 2021 Gardens:
Botanical Interests - https://www.botanicalinterests.com/
Seed Savers Exchange - https://www.seedsavers.org/
Bakers Creek Heirloom Seeds - https://www.rareseeds.com/
Sow True Seeds - https://sowtrueseed.com/
West Coast Seeds (Canada for Canadian Chapters) - https://www.westcoastseeds.com/
To visit who has donated seeds in previous growing seasons, visit www.hwbglobal.org/donors--sponsors.html

Thank you so much for sharing and supporting our vision, we could not do this without you!

Last Words
In closing out our first Feature Friday, none of this could be made possible without our volunteers and those interested in saving the diversity of our agricultural and medicinal seeds. If this article has inspired you to join, donate, or get involved, please don't let the moment pass you by! Reach out to us at www.hwbglobal.org for more information on who we are and what we do!

Want to get involved with seed saving or joining, click here! https://www.hwbglobal.org/become-a-memberjoin-today.html

Want to make a monetary donation to help our efforts, click here! https://www.hwbglobal.org/donate.html

Want to donate seeds to us in the US or Canada, please contact us at officehwb@gmail.com Subject: Seed Saving

We hope you've enjoyed our first feature Friday and look forward to seeing you at our blog again soon!

In Health, Wellness, and Solidarity,
Petra Sovcov - CHT, HWB Chapter Coordinator for Vancouver BC

References:
Center for Food Safety: www.centerforfoodsafety.org
The End of Food - How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply, and What you can do about it: by Thomas Pawlick
Staying Healthy With Nutrition - The Complete Guide to Diet and Nutritional Medicine: by Elson M Haas MD  

At HWB education is a huge part of what we do! We want to be certain that our information about herbs, health, and wellness, are of benefit to the many communities that we seek to serve around the world.

We have such an incredible scope of individuals from various walks of life, but the one thing they all share in common is their love for plants and plant based medicine. Many of our volunteers include practitioners and clinicians such as Naturopathic Doctors, Clinical Herbalists, and many others involved in a variety of modalities.

We want to be able to offer those who follow us a variety of articles, monographs, and videos that can offer clinical, evidence based, traditional, and historical information.

For our first Wellness Wednesday we would like to share a video from Clinical Herbal Therapist, Petra Sovcov. In this video hosted by The Institute of Holistic Nutrition (IHN), Petra explores the microbiome and its potential connections to mental health. 

We hope you enjoy - and thank you, Petra, for sharing this video.

Petra is a faculty member at the Institute of Holistic Nutrition Nutrition, and has been a member of HWB since 2014. She currently runs the HWB Mahonia Chapter for the greater Vancouver BC area and coordinates the community free clinic. She is also the owner of Healing House Natural Wellness Centre, a multi-modality center located in BC Canada. For more info please visit the site, or follow her on Instagram @healinghouseherbal ​

***Disclaimer***
Petra Sovcov is not a Medical Doctor (MD), the information provided by this webinar is not to be considered as a substitute to advice or prescription medications offered by your MD. The following information is provided for the purpose of interest and education.