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Page 1: FULL TRANSCRIPT...Join Kami in the garden for a visual tour of edible flowers that include wild radishes, wild mustard, calendula, nasturtium, chive blossoms, and more. • What edible

“Edible Flower Herb Walk”

Kami McBride

* FULL TRANSCRIPT *

Brought To You By:

Page 2: FULL TRANSCRIPT...Join Kami in the garden for a visual tour of edible flowers that include wild radishes, wild mustard, calendula, nasturtium, chive blossoms, and more. • What edible

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Page 3: FULL TRANSCRIPT...Join Kami in the garden for a visual tour of edible flowers that include wild radishes, wild mustard, calendula, nasturtium, chive blossoms, and more. • What edible

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Kami McBride Edible Flower Herb Walk

Great Big Ideas & Takeaways: Join Kami in the garden for a visual tour of edible flowers that include wild radishes, wild mustard, calendula, nasturtium, chive blossoms, and more.

• What edible flowers are the easiest to grow! • Adding beauty + nutrition to your lunch plate—what edible flowers to start with. • Learn about the spicy edible flowers that can add a little kick to your food. • Medicinal flowers that act as an anti-inflammatory, soothing to the digestive tract. • Lean, yummy ways to use edible flowers in your homegrown food. • Rosemary, thyme, and borage flowers: food for you, and food for the bees. • Get inspired to eat more delicious, nutritious edible flowers! • Even MORE flower-based recipes for flower butter, salad dressings, and more.

About The Speaker: Kami McBride is the creator of Herbal Kitchen Remedy Solutions, an online course that demystifies the world of herbal medicine and empowers people to use their herb garden for herbal self-care in the home to prevent illness and take care of common ailments. Also author of The Herbal Kitchen, Kami has developed and taught herbal curriculum for the Complementary and Alternative Medicine department at the University of California, as well as for the California Institute of Integral Studies. She graduated as a Clinical Herbalist from the Southwest School of Botanical Studies. And over the past 25 years, she has helped thousands of families learn to use herbs and natural remedies so they can be more self-reliant in their health care needs. You’re Invited To Learn More Here: https://www.livingawareness.com

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Marjory Wildcraft: Hello and welcome to the online Mother Earth News Homesteading

Summit. This is Marjory Wildcraft, your host and next up we're going to take actually a wild edible flower walk with Kami McBride. Kami is the author of The Herbal Kitchen and she has developed and taught herbal curriculum for the complementary and alternative medical department at the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing and the integrative health Master’s degree program at the California Institute of integral studies, so she’s definitely got the university degrees going on there.

She’s also a clinical herbalist graduate of the Southwest School of Botanical Studies and for the past 25 years she’s been helping thousands of people to learn to use herbs in the natural remedies. She is also the creator of The Herbal Kitchen remedy solutions which is online course that demystifies the world of herbal medicine and empowers people to use their herb garden for self-care, talk a little bit more about that toward the end of this, but right now let's let you get started. There’s going to be two pieces to this. In the very beginning, for I think the first 12 minutes or so, Kami is actually going to take you for a walk out in the wild and just show you the different flowers.

After that, she’s going to switch to a slide presentation where she goes in depth into each one of those specific flowers, especially with a lot more information. One thing I really liked about this was how she brings in the medical and healing and herbal aspects of this, but wow, it totally inspired me to start adding a little bit more flowers to my meals. Here’s Kami McBride.

Kami McBride: Hey everyone. Kami McBride here and we are in the hills of Northern California. The Pacific Ocean is just right behind me and we’re taking a walk in a friend of mine’s garden and we are going to go on an edible flower walk. We're going to look at all the different flowers that you can eat and put into your food and it's so ... It's not so much a lost art, but it’s like I think we could be doing a lot more of it. Come on with me and let’s take an, let's go on our edible flower walk.

Here we have, this is basically a radish. This is a radish gone wild and these are the radish flowers. These flowers are as spicy as a radish and so you can come and just pick a few of these flowers, put them in your salad, put them on your soup, just garnish your food with them. They’re very, very spicy and the radish flowers come in several different colors. They come in dark purple like this and also sometimes they are a light purple and then sometimes they're even white so they go anywhere from white to light purple to medium purple to the dark purple.

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Yeah, so basically the radish goes to flower and you can pick not only the flower but you can pick all these little flower buds and they're spicy. They are really spicy. You're eating radish flowers, so this is one really amazing, easy to grow edible flower that’s a carminative and it really supports digestion and it’s super spicy and adds a lot of flavor to your food. Also in this little pouch right here, if we just come right over here, we're also, so we see this whole patch is just full of wild radish, but we also have this little yellow flower here. Can you guess what that is? Some really popular condiment that we eat that's yellow. It goes to seed.

This is a mustard flower. This is actually the mustard plant and it's going to seed and it’s the flower and again, these flowers, they are super spicy. They’re really pretty. You can decorate your food with it and they add, you can put it on just about any savory dish. These flowers will add a really good kick to whatever you’re eating. They are as spicy as mustard, so yeah this is a sweet little patch of wild mustard, wild radish and you can see, and even ... Oh, here you go. Here’s even some wild radish that has a little bit of a yellow flower so the one radish comes in a lot of different colors.

Now one of the main things about again, when you’re foraging for wild herbs and plants is you have to have 100% accurate identification. Remember? So there we go. There’s our wild radish flower and let’s come on over here. There's some more edible flowers over here. Okay, here’s another one of my just totally favorite edible flowers. This is calendula, calendula officinalis. Isn't it beautiful? That is such a beautiful color. Yeah, okay, so calendula. What you want to do is you come and you harvest it at the leaf and so that this can continue to grow. Then you come and you get rid of the stem and now you have all these petals and you take these fresh pedals and you sprinkle them on your salad, you put them in your soup, your sandwiches, your tacos.

One of the things you can do is just like when you have a big plate of food like hors d’oeuvres or cheese and crackers, you can just take these flowers and just sprinkle them like confetti all over the place. You can just decorate your plate with these flowers. They're also really good on desserts and yeah, they just add color, an amazing color. They're really also good on potatoes and just about any root vegetable, you can decorate with calendula flowers.

Calendula flowers are an amazing vulnerary, they're vulnerary. Calendula flowers heal the skin, so not just your turn external skins but your internal skin so they’re really good for your digestive track all the way down. They help to soothe and reduce inflammation in the digestive ... Excuse me, in the digestive tract. Look at this one, how beautiful that is, just all the layers of the petals. Calendula also comes in yellow. You’ll find these yellow and dark orange, so it’s in both colors, so calendula officinalis sometimes is

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called marigold but there is another plant that’s called Marigold that’s targets and we don’t, I don’t eat that one.

We eat calendula officinalis and then here, look here’s the seeds and you just take these seeds and just spread them around and they ... It’s a really, really easy plant to grow. Yeah, there’s our amazing. One of the things I love about calendula is that when you do this deadheading process like if you cut it off right where the leaves are, it's like deadheading roses. It actually encourages the growth, so this is one of the flowers that actually the more you harvest it and if you harvest it in the right way, see I'll show you over here too, if you harvest it right above the leaf growth, now the plant can grow again.

If you deadhead it like this, then it actually encourages the growth of the plant and you get, the more you deadhead it and tend to it, the more flowers you get so this is one of the great plants that the more you use it and the more you tend to it, the more you get. We’ll just come right over here. We've got this calendula patch and then also we've got a really nice nasturtium patch right here, so this is another really amazing edible flower. Actually the leaves are edible also, but the flower is just, it’s another one of these super spicy edible flowers.

You can ... Actually, the pods, these are edible. Look, it looks like a goat’s head or something, but these flowers, you can harvest these flowers and we like stuff them with nut salad or chicken salad or tuna salad. We'll just put a little ball of some kind of salad in there or a pate, a nut pate and then you just serve a whole plate of these stuffed flowers or you can just eat them whole or you can just take these petals, the nasturtium petals and just decorate your food. Isn't that beautiful? Look at these colors. It's just so amazing to eat these colors, the orange and magenta. Color is good for you.

You can eat these beautiful flower petals so basically what I do is I just kind of pull all these flower petals off and you can just eat this whole thing here and it’s very, very spicy. You can also eat the leaves of this. You can take the leaf and garnish your salads with it and again, this is a super spicy, spicy herb so you want to chop it up or put it in small amounts. It’s very antibacterial, so it helps with colds. It helps prevent infection and it’s also really supports digestion, so I love this flower. God, I love these two colors. Look at those two colors, just incredible.

This plant, it’s just super easy to grow and oh, I like this one right here. This one, how the plant, you can eat, you can just pick this little pod right here and just pop this in your mouth. Ready? You ready for something spicy? When you bite on this, your nose will start running. It’s up there with like wasabi. This is a great, nasturtium is just so beautiful and it’s a great edible

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plant and yeah, that’s a good one to know about.

Here we have another edible flower that I love and this is borage. Looks like a little star and you know what? The bees love this flower and so you come along and you just pluck this off and you make sure you don’t get this hairy part. Otherwise, nobody’s going to like it, so you just totally just pluck that off and see, here we go. Yum. It has kind of like a cucumber flavor and who wouldn’t want their food decorated with this? It has a slight, it's just got ... Yeah, you can put it on sweet or savory food and you can put it in your water or you can decorate your drinks with it, and blue, the color blue is very, very healing. It has flavonoids. It's anti-inflammatory. It’s very soothing to the digestive tract.

You can see this whole borage plant is going to seed. You can see all these flowers are going to seed, so it’s kind of at the end if you can see all this. You can see this flower is even turning pink but all the flowers on the borage are edible. One plant, if you look at all the flowers on this plant, one plant can give you a lot of flowers and you can just come by and nibble on it or I like to gather up a little basket full of them, and then confetti decorate dessert or salads. The thing is that it’s really fragile, so you wait until the very last minute or even I like to have like a little bowl of these on the table and then at the very last minute, we decorate our food with it.

If you put it onto early, they just kind of turn to mush. This one's really beautiful. See the pink? If you decorate your food at the last minute, I love like just fruit plates or even just your dinner plate. Right before you serve it, you just take these and just put this on your food and it’s so delicious and so beautiful. For me, it’s really fun to, I love decorating my food. I love just adding this extra splash of color and nutrition and beauty. It just adds beauty to your food. Hello, bee. Hello.

The one thing about borage is the bees love it so there you have your borage flowers. Okay, and look at this amazing bed of chives. Oh my goodness, this is good. Oh, I love chives. I love this bed. Look at all this. Oh yes. Of course, the chives, they’re famous. Baked potatoes and chives, but look at this part. Oh yes, talk about getting some color, healing yourself. The plants heal us in many different ways and just having that color. Yeah, so these flowers, they are like the chives. They're spicy, they're piquant, they're hot, they're penetrating and you just really need like a few of them. You just kind of sprinkle this on your food.

This again, it's really delicious on root vegetables, on squash, potatoes, pumpkin, pumpkin soup. Oh my gosh. You get that golden pumpkin and then you sprinkle these purple flowers on orange foods and so you’re getting a great color combination there, so yeah. These are, look at how, they’re just beautiful. They’re so hot and spicy. Again, they help, they're

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antibacterial, they're antimicrobial. They stimulate digestion and they also, I will tell you what, these pretty little flowers will get your sinuses running like no tomorrow. You can also make a tea with them actually but we're talking about edible flowers. You decorate your food with it. It’s, again, it’s like, yeah it’s a great ... These flowers are really awesome decongestant.

You can see how these are kind of waning. These are too old. You don’t want ... Those are already gone. You go for these bright purple, go for the bright purple and yeah, this is a nice patch of chives. Really, the flowers, they can sometimes go for months and months. These are really nice to just pick and just ... I love just sprinkling this on my food. Here we have of course, our beloved rosemary. I can’t be in the garden and not talk about rosemary. Look at it, so beautiful, so so beautiful, so fragrant. Oh, I love that smell. I just love it.

Rosemary we know, a powerful healing medicinal plant, one of our main home remedies in our home wellness toolkit and for our self-care routines, but also rosemary has these really cool flowers. Look at these flowers, oh my God. They're purple. These flowers are totally edible and they taste like rosemary. They're spicy, they're pungent, they're piquant, they're warming, circulatory stimulant and you can just pick these flowers, put them in your water, put them in ... I like rosemary on my salads. It just adds a little bit of a bite.

You just come along, you bring out a bowl and you just pluck these flowers until you get a nice handful of them. You put them in a little bowl on the table and then you just have a little spoon in the bowl and people can just serve up a little teaspoon of rosemary flowers. They can put in your soup, your salad. They’re just, they're really, really good on eggs and egg dishes and quiche and all kinds of egg dishes, you can put your rosemary flowers on. They are really powerful healing herbs just like the rest of the plant, but you just get this beautiful tiny little flower. I just love the shape of this.

Look at like. It's like, oh my God, I love that flower. I love eating that color. I just love having that splash of color on my plate and people enjoy this. When people have their food decorated with flowers, it’s like, "Wow," it’s really, it's special. Here you have beautiful edible rosemary flowers.

Okay. We’re coming up on another really awesome edible flower. It seems to be the day of spicy edible flowers. This right here, these are, this is the leaf and this is garlic chives. We already talked about chives, but these are garlic chives and the amazing thing about garlic chives is they’re drought tolerant. You don’t have to water them and sometimes the leaves is a dark plain green and sometimes it’s this like white and green variegation so yeah, these flowers, these are pretty flowers. You decorate your food with that. This flower looks like it would go with dessert, but it doesn’t. It is

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super spicy. It’s a lot like the chive flower but it’s just, it's bigger and again, you just garnish all your savory dishes with it.

You put it on, or you can just decorate the edge of your plate with it. You can just take this and just put this like on the plate or around the plate or you can just take these one by one and decorate your plate or put them right in the middle of ... Just have fun. This is like food art, so you have ... See, they grow in whole big pieces like this and you can even eat these little small pieces too, the ones that haven’t opened up yet. See these? These are really good. Again, super spicy and really beautiful and it's just so nice to have flowers, to eat flowers. Yeah, I hope you are inspired to get some flowers in your food.

Okay, edible flowers. We are going to go a little deeper into learning about the flowers that we meet on our edible herb flower walk and we're going to talk about a few little simple cultivating tips for each flower and edible tips and just so you know, I'm the author of The Herbal Kitchen and I like recipes. I really do, I enjoy turning our garden into yummy, enticing food and drinks to basically celebrate the harvest so I do. I like good recipes and also, I don't know about you but I'm a busy mom so recipes need to be simple.

I'm going to share some super simple, delicious, easy recipes for each flower and also talk about the medicinal qualities of each flower. Yeah, this is going to be a good talk and I’m so glad you're here, and I’m really happy that you’re interested in the flowers. Sometimes they're overlooked or neglected as far as how to use them in your food and also as medicine. First I just want to talk about a few edible flower basics and that is number one, you want to have 100% accurate identification. This presentation isn't in depth about, it's not about identification. I am going to be talking about useful tips, recipes, edible tips and some yummy ways to get these flowers onto your table and also the medicinal qualities of these flowers.

I just have to say this, you have to have 125% accurate identification and if you aren't totally sure about a flower, don’t say, "I think that's what she said." Wait and find someone that knows the plant that might be a question for you. Also, I just have to say that just because a flower is served with food doesn’t mean it’s edible. Some people decorate their food with non-edible flowers. I don’t do that but just because there’s a flower on a cake, you still have to know if it’s edible or not.

This other one, of course it goes without saying, you want to harvest in the cleanest area possible. Some of the flowers we talk about, they like neglected fields, roadsides, vacant lots, so of course you don't want to harvest next to the road or the golf course or the railroad track or where the dogs and cars hang out. Yeah, you know what I mean. Overall tip when

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you’re eating edible flowers is to first let the bugs escape. Harvest your flowers and then put them on a plate or a basket or colander outside and let the bugs leave. Let them go home. Let them sit outside for an hour and let everybody leave. There's no need to bring the bugs into the house, right?

You can rinse your flowers if you want and the thing is is that many of them will wilt quicker after being washed. I don't wash my flowers. What I do is I pick them from my garden, let them sit outside for a little bit and then I eat them. The other just little consideration about edible flowers is freshness. I know you already know this, the flowers have a short shelf life and some people, what they like to do is they'll harvest the, and keep them in a bowl in the fridge for a day or two, but I usually eat them that very same day.

Okay. Let's talk about our first flower, wild radish, raphanus sativa, raphanus raphanistrum and here’s a quick cultivation tip. Let's see. I've got to get my technology down here. There we go. I’m almost together. I won't be doing that throughout the whole show, believe me. It's a hearty weed. It likes all soil types, wet conditions, cold tolerant. It's a weed and it's not just a weed, it's a serious competitive weed. This weed is, it’s a real weed and so yeah. Here it is. It's beautiful. The bees and butterflies love this plant so it's food for you and it's food for the bees and we like those kinds of plants, don't we?

A simple edible tip is that yeah, there’s lots of good ways to repair but I'm going to give you one. First of all, it's spicy, peppery, sharp, pungent. It goes really well with savory foods. It's not so good on oatmeal. It goes good with root vegetables, potatoes, egg dishes, cream cheese, salads. I like to think of this plant as a snack on the trail or when I’m hiking or whatever sandwich or wrap or food I’ve taken when I’m out for a walk, I like to garnish my food with this. It's also really good in scrambled eggs. You want to think of it like adding a little salsa or hot sauce to your meal or a little pepper bite float on your soup and here’s a crowd-pleaser. I really like adding this to butter.

The thing is, I've been teaching herbal medicine for 25 years and I never get bored. Life is never boring and one reason is all the different ways to use things, especially the edible flowers. The ways to work with them is just, it's endless. Here’s a crowd-pleaser recipe and that is your radish flower butter. What you want to do is just let the amount of butter that you're going to eat for the day soften and then you mix the radish flowers into the butter and you're good. You have a savory flower butter, or you can follow, this is a really good recipe.

You could not just put the flowers, but you can chop up a little bit of onion and rosemary and black pepper and you've got yourself a really yummy

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addition to whatever you're going to eat that day. This plant, this weed that grew up all around where I live and is basically, you can harvest it about 10 months out of the year here. It’s a highly medicinal plant and a couple of the medicinal qualities is that it’s carminative and it's a digestive aid. This is so important, so the carminative action in this beautiful flower, what it does is it increases blood and oxygen to the gastrointestinal tract and helps you digest your lunch. It's a digestive aid and you think it’s kind of a fun, novel thing to add these flowers to your food, but adding this little bit of zesty kick to your food, it helps you to digest and absorb your nutrients and it helps you do the daunting task of turning your garden into you.

One of the gifts of carminative acting herbs and flowers is the gift of energy. They help your body digest your food so that you spend less energy on the digestive process. Basically, they make digesting your lunch a little easier for you. All right? The thing is that we can have the best homegrown food, but we still have to digest it well to get the nutrition that we need from it, and there’s lots of reasons to grow our food. One of them is to be healthier and that goal does not stop with the harvest or preparation.

Adding carminative and digestive aids, they are the bridge to digesting, to turning your garden into you. This flower is a helper flower to help you get the most out of all the hard work you put into growing your food. Is that awesome? It's awesome. Let's talk about mustard, wild mustard, field mustard, sinapis arvensis. I don’t know. I'm not going to even pretend like I know how to grow this plant. I know it loves full sun. It will tolerate a little shade, cold tolerant. It likes pastures, gardens, roadside, disturbed soil, vineyards, orchards and again, this is a wild plant where I grew up in. This is one of my heritage plants and I’ll just show you.

I grew up with mustard flowers, the golden explosion happened every spring, just hills of sunshine. Wading through the mustard fields was an annual ritual that was basically the signature of winter transforming into spring. Every March throughout my life, we would, we had to take a picture. I have so many pictures of me that my mom would take every year in the mustard fields. Our neighboring town had a mustard festival. Spring was here, spring is here when the mustard arrives. As a girl, I remember the old timers, old women walking the fields harvesting the young leaves and blossoms. I have that, I can see that right now.

Yeah, and it’s definitely, it's food for the bees. Bees love this plant and it is spicy. It's spicy, piquant, sharp, zippy. Think of mustard, what do you add mustard to? What do you add mustard to? It goes well with poultry, sandwich, eggs, beans, savory breads, cornbread, green leafy vegetables and these flowers, they do, they have a little bit of bite with them and they go with savory foods. They're really good with like beans like soups and chilies, lentils. They're a great bean topper and I just love decorating with

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these bright yellow sunshine flowers.

I’ll put a whole flower, a whole bunch of flowers with chicken or basically anything meat that you would use mustard on. It's great. This flower is really good on turkey sandwiches. There is ... Let me ask you. Do you ever come up with a dish or a pairing with your flowers or your herbs and your food that you would've never come up with on your own? You just go out and this is what’s happening. You know what I mean? This is what the earth is presenting and even on your best day, you wouldn't have planned that for dinner. This is one of those recipes and this is a traditional food or meal that started happening just because it’s happening.

Mustard flowers are in full spring at the same time as asparagus in my neck of the woods and it's just a natural match created for me and we eat this for about a month straight. Then it's over and then we don't eat it again until next year. It’s really ... Do you have any foods like that or flowers where it’s just a little festival every year when it first comes to life? For the asparagus and mustard flowers, it’s really, it's a signature spring dish. All you do is you cook up a bunch of asparagus and top it with salt, pepper olive oil, and chopped up mustard flowers. Yum, super yum.

Again, I’m a busy mom. I am always looking for, most people I know are busy even if they're not moms, it seems to be the thing that we're dealing with is busyness, so this is an easy spring meal that's super satisfying. Of course, this is a highly medicinal flower. It's carminative. It’s a digestive aid, it’s a decongestant, and like the radish flower, it’s a great digestive aid. Again, these carminative herbs and flowers, they are the bridge to nutrition. I always say that you want a carminative at every meal and it’s a carminative at every meal is a little lifetime habit that adds up. It’s a great way to take care of and support digestion is to get these little flowers into your meals in little bits.

This is really family herbal medicine. It's the little stuff that adds up that even your kids can do. Garnishing your food with carminatives, carminative flowers can become a lifestyle. Again, the beauty of the flowers are healing itself, but garnishing with fresh carminative flowers, that’s powerful medicine and every day at every meal you get a little herbal medicine that's safe. You don't have to worry about the dosage and it's a lifestyle. Those sweet little flowers, well they're not sweet, those spicy flowers offer you more than you think they do. You are what you eat, but you are what you digest and carminative flowers, what they do is they increase the flow of blood, oxygen, and energy to the digestive tract so that you can digest your food.

Now, the other thing about mustard is that it’s decongestant. Mustard flowers help to clear the sinuses and lungs. You've got a stuffy nose, you

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got a head cold? Have you ever taken a bite of something with too much mustard on it? Well, the flowers do the same thing. They clear your head. This is such an amazing flower. I hope that you have the opportunity to get it into your food.

The other flower that I absolutely love, I love them all but calendula, calendula officinalis. Just a simple tip, it’s direct so it’s from seed, full sun. It's easy to grow and it's my kind of plant. You get a little patch going and it just reseeds itself and pretty much full sun, any kind of soil. This plant, it’s amazing. What I like to do with the calendula petals is I like to put all my food out on the table and then just decorate all the dishes with these flower petals. I pull the petals off and for me, it's the confetti flower. I love sprinkling the splash of color all over the plates. It's food art. It makes your food more appealing.

People really, they make a lot of comments and they just enjoy having the flowers on their food. In some cooking schools, they talk about how color and presentation is important as food or as the flavor, it's food feng shui. See if you like to do that confetti where you just decorate the whole table. Edible, you can do a lot with this flower. It's mild, it's slightly bitter, it's slightly tangy. It’s one of the flowers that goes well with sweet and savory foods. It's good with desserts, salad, soup, veggies, smoothies, and the one cool thing about this flower is that many of the edible flowers don’t dry well, but this one does.

What you do is you don’t remove the petals. When I eat it fresh, I just pluck all those petals off but when you're going to dry this flower, you don’t remove the petals. You take the whole blossom, you remove it from the stem and you lay it out on a basket or a screen until it's completely dry, completely dry. Then you store it in a jar and then what you use it with is you add it to soups and broths. These blossoms, they store for a year and you’re just going to add all this nutrition and medicine to your soups with your dried flower blossoms. Cool, right?

All right, so I also like to decorate my drinks. One of the things I do is I make ice cubes. I just have to tell you, the flowers, this may seem, I don’t know what it seems like you, but it’s just a simple thing you can do. When people have flowers in their tea and their drinks, they just love it, so I make ice cubes and blocks of ice and I put them in my water pitchers. This is so easy, you just take, you can make individual ice cubes or you can get like a seven by seven container and put the blossoms and freeze it. Then you just pop it out.

Whenever we have guests at our house, I set up a water station with flowered ice and try it. Tell me what happens. Tell me what people say, okay? All right, the medicinal qualities of calendula. Yes, calendula.

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Calendula is vulnerary and it's anti-inflammatory. It's for the skin and we usually think of vulnerary, anti-inflammatory herbs for the topical skin, for cuts, scrapes, rashes, eczema, things like that but your skin cells are also inside. The skins epithelial cells continue on the inside of the mouth all the way down. Inside, it's our internal skins. Adding flowers to your food is not a take two pills three times a day kind of medicine, but when you add anti-inflammatory flowers to your food, it adds up.

We have lots of problems gut inflammation, so having anti-inflammatory vulnerary herbs is so valuable. You basically can just know that you're taking care of yourself at every meal. I talk a lot about this in my book The Herbal Kitchen. Every meal you have a chance to use the herbs and spices and flowers, the edible flowers, to help you. Besides being enamored with this vibrant color, think of skin healing, tissue regeneration, reduces inflammation and vulnerary. Vulnerary herbs, what they, vulnerary flowers, what they do is they increase the rate at which skin cells regenerate so it enhances skin cell regeneration and renewal.

The thing is, you can't see inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract, but lots of things constant, like stress, pesticides, chlorine in the water, any kind of medication and even stress so vulnerary and anti-inflammatory action in your food is important, okay? All right. I’m sure you probably have this flower growing and there’s so many great ways to get into your food. The next flower is nasturtium, tropaeolum majus, and it likes moist, well-drained soil. It likes partial shade and it likes to be trellised or hanging from baskets and this plant is sharp, hot, nutty, spicy. It's got a hot biting aftertaste and it can be really hot.

What I like to do is I like to stuff the blossoms with cream cheese, egg salad, tuna salad, nut pates, hummus, and it's also just so, it’s a great plant to decorate your salad with, decorate your appetizers and it's a really beautiful ... The brightness of these flowers, it just gives a vibrant flair to your food that people really enjoy. I like to use these flowers again like a shell and I stuff them with things. I use them instead of tomatoes on my sandwich. I also use them instead of pickles. They just add a bite and they're also so beautiful for decorating your salads.

It may sound a little cliche but there is an elevated mood. It kind of when people sit down to a dinner with an edible flower decorated meal and I do, I love serving a dinner bursting with color that just dances on the plate, and one of the best things for me about growing my own food and edible flowers is I really enjoy turning the garden into a delicious meal that’s beautiful and satisfies everyone. I think that might probably be true for you and so this next recipe is a delicious appetizer.

If you take this to a potluck or a gathering, they will be the first thing to go.

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I guarantee it. You can follow this recipe or you can just mix a bunch of chopped veggies with your cream cheese and choose some nuts and roll it into little balls and just stuff each nasturtium flower with each one of these little balls. Make this for the next family gathering or potluck. I have been making this recipe for years and you watch, people will email you for the recipe after the party. I'm serious.

All right, so this flower is an incredible, incredible medicine. It's a decongestant and it's antibacterial and it’s spicy, that spicy, hot moving, aromatic bite. It's like mustard. It’s like horseradish. It opens and drains the sinuses and even if you just eat one flower, it'll just open up your sinuses and things will start to drip. Have you ever had that where you just, you’re eating something, you eat some mustard or some horseradish and things just start to drip? That’s how it is with nasturtium and it’ll just ... It's also antibacterial, so it fights infections and colds. It’s high in vitamin C, so it's amazing. You can prevent a lot of sickness depending on the herbs and spices and flowers that you put in your food.

If you're in prevention mode, get these flowers into your food. It's not hard. They're so so beautiful. I love decorating with nasturtium flowers. Okay, our next beautiful bee-loving flower is borage, borago officinalis. It is a direct so full sun, partial shade, weedy, invasive and you probably already know that. It self-seeds and soon it's everywhere in your garden. You wake up next year and it's chosen 10 new spots. Bees love this plant. It's a high nectar production flower and it’s a good one to have in your garden. It has a cucumber flavor, like a mild, it's mild. It goes well with desserts, cakes, yogurt, fruit, melons, drinks, salads, soups. Again, it's sweet. It's one of those flowers that goes sweet and savory.

I like to do color contrast with my edible flowers and so this one, I have a tomato soup with orange and blue. I like doing that. I like having contrasting flowers with my food and there is something about eating a bright blue food that looks like a star. You can just feel the vitality of this flower when you see it. Now, the thing about borage flowers is they have a cooling effect. It can get really hot here where we live and using borage blossoms is part of my cool down strategy for my family. This salad is just a go-to summer staple. We eat a lot of cucumbers in the summer and you can just thinly slice your cucumbers, throw in a handful of red onions, and then you put your dill or whatever herb you want and you put your borage flowers. I like to top it off with a little rice wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and this is such a yummy, such as satisfying ... You can make it really easily.

Again, the cucumbers and the borage are both cooling. I also, again, remember I like to decorate my drinks. If you start doing this, you watch, after you do it a while and then if you stop, your family will be, they'll be like, "Wait, where's the decorated ... Where's the beautiful stuff?" This is a

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really cooling drink with borage and cucumber water. Now, what I’m going to do, I promise, I promise this is the only time I'll pull the family album on you, my family album out on you, but this is what my life is like. Are you ready?

This is my son, Gabriel, and he is the reason why I need cooling strategies in our household. He never stops. I’m not kidding. I am always trying to cool him down. He’s a gardener. He loves animals. At nine years old, he started volunteering at events that involve pre-tractor farming technology. I mean, the earth and the animals keep him busy, but the soothing, cooling qualities of borage are basically one of the ways that I help to heal him. That cucumber borage drink, we drink that all summer long. Yeah, so borage.

Sorry, go back. All right, the medicinal qualities of borage is that they're cooling and mucilaginous. Mucilaginous, say that three times. Mucilaginous. Mucilaginous is the slang factor. A mucilaginous flower has a little bit of slippery sliminess when you eat it. Think of okra. Okra is highly mucilaginous and we don't have enough mucilaginous foods in our diet. Mucilaginous foods, what they do is they reduce inflammation. They cool, soothe and heal the gastrointestinal tract and borage is, it’s mucilaginous, it's cooling and it cools down the gastrointestinal tract. It's a really refreshing flower for summer’s heat so put it in your water and drink it.

All right. One of the things that I like to do is read old herbals and this is a quote from Pliny. He was a Roman botanist and he died around 79, 80 and his book, Natural History, it talks about hundreds of uses of medicinal plants. This is what he has to say about borage flowers. "Use the flowers in salads to exhilarate and make the mind glad." I love stuff like and I'll tell you the truth. I’ve seen this. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but those blue flowers, when people see them in their food and they realize they can eat them, I see these like fleeting moments of gladness. It’s a little hard to explain but it happens. When I read this, I knew what he was talking about so you can start eating borage flowers and let me know if you see a little bit more gladness, okay?

All right, let’s talk about chives, allium schoenoprasum. They like full sun. They can handle some shade. It tolerates some frosts, it likes well-draining soil. These chives, they're a little bit pickier than some of the other plants we've been talking about that spread easily. With chives, I give them a nice fluffy bed with compost and I keep my chives in the garden beds. A lot of the other flowers, I let them just go wherever they go but I keep my chives, I keep a watch on them. The flavor of these chive flowers are amazing. They’re spicy, piquant, they have mild ... Not mild, they have a mild onion flavor. They're pungent. They go well with grains and savory dishes, soups, potatoes, eggs, dairy.

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You don't want to just bite into one of those globes, the whole flower.

You'll just start sweating. You want to break it up and chives are one of the most prolific herbs in my garden, so I put lots of chive flowers in my foods. They're high in vitamin C and I have a really, really simple recipe that you're going to like. This is a chard soup, chard soup with chive blossoms. It takes hardly any effort. What you do is you just cook up a bunch size of chard and you steam it. Then you throw it in the blender with these few ingredients and voila. You've got a delicious soup.

You can put other things in it, but you just cream everything, you cook the potatoes and chard and then you cream it all. Then you top it off with the chive blossoms and you can feel it. It looks like a celebration. I’m serious, when I say it makes me happy to decorate my food with flowers, when I get ready to prepare a meal and I gather up that little basket of flowers, I do, I feel genuinely happy in that moment. In that moment, I’m not thinking about anything else. It's just me and the flowers and then when it's there on my food, it’s just very, very healing on many, many levels.

These flowers are super, they're super medicine, they're nutritive, they're a digestive aid and they're antibacterial, so nutritive herbs and spices and flowers have lots of vitamins and minerals, and they add a whole other level of nutrition density to your meals. These flowers, these chive flowers, they have calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C. What's so cool is that as a digestive aid, chives, they help you to increase that nutrient density uptake. That’s really good and also chives are highly antibacterial. There are again, I like to read old herbals and there’s a lot of old European herbals that talk about hanging bundles of chives in the home to ward off evil spirits, and chives do. They chase away colds that can feel pretty evil sometimes.

They're like garlic, chive blossoms contain sulfur compounds which basically exterminate bugs and don’t belong in your body. There’s lots of good bacteria in your body but chives know the difference and you, if you've got this plant growing, take advantage of the abundance of antibacterial properties and use plenty of chives, chive flowers, on your salads and in your meals during cold season.

Okay, now our next flower that we meet in the garden is rosemary, rosmarinus officinalis. It likes full sun, good drainage. It handles some frosts, but not sustainable. Where I live, it's a Mediterranean climate. Rosemary loves it here, but I’ll tell you, about once every 10 years, the frost and rain combines at a level where the rosemary bushes die or most of them die. I’ve seen that happen several times in my lifetime and the other thing is is that wherever the rosemary is, the bees will come. I have a hedge of rosemary and it just comes and pulses with the bees.

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Rosemary, it’s got a salty, mildly bitter flavor, mildly spicy kind of piney. It

goes really well with meat, fish, squash, veggies. I like to put fresh flowers on my pizza, salad dressings, soups, drinks, wine, tea, water, and I also like to put it in my sandwiches and I do, I like to decorate my drinks. I'll put a couple rosemary flowers in a glass of white wine. I'll put it in our water. I'll add it to our tea, and you know, it's just a high quality of life. I love rosemary in salads and the salad ... We make all of our own salad dressings and you, you probably do too. You know you can save so much money making your own salad dressings and so many, even natural, salad dressings have borderline ingredients in them.

We use the garden to make a quality of salad dressings that you can never find in the stores. This is a really simple recipe. You just get your 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 2 tablespoons of your vinegar, 2 tablespoons of minced rosemary and a little salt and pepper and you're there. You can make up a batch at the beginning of the week and it just, I don't know, I put it on everything. Rosemary is so medicinal, so many amazing benefits, this flower and it’s a bitter tonic and it’s nutritive and it enhances circulation. It improves circulation which it helps memory, increases blood flow. This improved blood flow, it's therapy for achy joints and muscles and circulatory problems. It helps with headaches and rosemary is known for things like brain fog, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate. Are you dealing with any of that?

Also, rosemary is considered a bitter tonic and bitter foods, like mucilaginous foods, are lacking in many people’s diet. The bitterness, what a bitter food ... We call it a bitter tonic because what it does is it stimulates the flow of digestive enzymes and digestive hormones throughout the digestive tract, so it tonifies the digestive process. It increases the flow of saliva. It stimulates bile from the liver and gallbladder. Again, we’re once again at a flower that helps you to digest your food. Bitter tonics, they do, they support and nourish the overall digestive process. Amazing, right?

Rosemary, it’s also super nutritive. It's got iron, calcium, magnesium, B vitamins, potassium, vitamin C, and the circulation support that rosemary gives helps to deliver that nutrition. It’s such a great flower to have. You just, you can get it in your drinks and oh, I hope you eat this flower. I want to show you one of my very first herb books. When I started studying herbal medicine, almost, I don't know, around 30 years ago, this is Juliette de Baïracli Levy and Common Herbs for Natural Health. My copy is just like, I open it up and all the pages fall out, but what she says, I love this quote, she says, "If my name could be associated with any plant, I would choose rosemary. I use it more than any other plant and I love it most of all. As Johnny Appleseed planted apples, I plant rosemary wherever I travel," so thank you, thank you so much Juliette.

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Okay, let’s talk about another spicy edible flower and that is garlic chives,

allium tuberosum. It likes full sun. It's frost hearty. It can handle a little bit of shade. It’s basically, it’s a sun-loving perennial. It can handle some frost but not prolonged and basically it's drought tolerant so it's used a lot where we live in city and county building landscapes. Actually, it’s amazing pollinator plant. Hudson Valley Seed library calls this one of the top 15 plants to plant for pollinators. It’s a good one, and it’s got an onion flavor. It's got an onion, garlic flavor, pungent, hot, spicy. It’s got a bite. It goes really well with fish, stir fry, sauces, soups, miso soup, beans brassica vegetables, cream sauces. Do you want garlic flavor but not the full experience of garlic?

This is a good flower with that. It pairs well with cabbage, broccoli. I put in my sandwiches. We put it in our kale salad and I have so many chive flowers growing that I like to just snack on them. When I'm working in my garden, so basically any food that you add raw onions to, you can put some garlic chives into the mix. Now, I put these flowers into my pesto and in my book, The Herbal Kitchen, I have over a dozen pesto recipes.

Pesto is an actual food group in our household. It’s a great way to get a serving of greens onto your plate in a concentrated form. You know how your garden can be. When things are ready, they're ready and you can hardly eat it all. You're just giving it away to anyone who will take it. Well, pesto is a great way to use up lots of greens and lots of herbs and get them into a concentrated, amazing, healing food. Chive flowers, they're as good as adding garlic to your pesto and I like these flowers.

This is a really basic pesto recipe and you can use so many different things, but I always, half a cup of olive oil and then you get your cup of basil, half a cup of parsley, half a cup of garlic chives. You can choose whatever nuts you like and then you can use turmeric or salt. Try it, yeah. Pesto is a staple food in our house. This is so easy. I hope that you are going beyond basil in your pesto. There's so many ... Like I said, it's a great way to just get a lot of greens into a small space. Garlic chives, it's nutritive and its antioxidant.

This flower, this sweet, sweet, and it's not sweet but it's sweet-looking. It makes me feel sweet. It's spicy hot biting, but it's full of vitamin C, magnesium, iron, potassium, calcium. What else? B vitamins, it has iron. It actually helps with anemia. The vitamin C and vitamin A content, they're powerful antioxidants, powerful antioxidants that help protect your cells from damage caused by unstable or also known as free radical cells. These free radical cells, along with being a natural byproduct of the body’s metabolic process, the free radical damage increases with exposure to pesticides, environmental toxins, solutions, found in processed food, chlorine and water, and stress. Free radicals, they increase the risk of heart

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disease, cancer, and they make you old so mop up those free radicals and get some chives onto your table, okay?

I have just really thoroughly enjoyed talking about the edible flowers with you and there you have it. Lots of ideas for how to bring the beautiful, beautiful edible flowers onto your table and this amazing edible flower herbal medicine that add in small amounts to every meal and I do, I hope that the flowers come to life for you on your kitchen table.

Marjory Wildcraft: Okay so that was Kami McBride and yes, I just immediately went outside and said, "What can I eat? What’s out there?" If you want to get in touch with Kami, hit that button over there to the right and if you remember, she had some yummy recipes there. She also had that super simple salad dressing, which you can go pick up her website by clicking on the button and of course her book, Herbal Kitchen, which sounds fabulous. I haven’t gotten a copy yet. I'm going to go pick one up myself. This is Marjory Wildcraft and you're at the Mother Earth's News Online Homesteading Summit and we have 34 or 35 other presentations I think you're going to love. We've got a lot of other herbalists lined up. Let’s catch up with each other on the next one, okay?

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Marjory Wildcraft at The Grow Network

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