by Jade Alicandro Mace

This time of year both the gardens and my kitchen start to get a little crazy with the sudden realization that the wheel of the seasons is turning. This is one herbal preparation I can't do without- Winter Immune Honey.  Basically, I stroll through the garden and harvest what's in season and looks good! This season's batch included Echinacea flower, Calendula, Bee Balm, Blue Hyssop, St John’s Wort, and Tulsi. Just thinking about getting to curl-up with a nice spoonful of this in my tea mug makes the on-coming seasonal transition less ominous and- dare I say it?- even a tad-bit exciting....​

Combine any combination of the following herbs, fresh (my preference) or dried.  I’ve included some suggested percentages below (and of course many of these plants could go into both categories!).  The idea here is to pull from the lists and make your own unique honey, based on your favorite herbs, what you have access to, and the specific herbal actions you’d like your honey to have.  Your result will be a honey with a wide range of herbal actions, so you can effectively treat the vast array of winter ailments you might come across in the coming months.  And remember- many of these herbs can be procured at your local grocery store or farmers market (especially the culinary herbs), and can tolerate some frost, often hanging on in the garden well into fall. 

by Jenny Hauf

The older I get the more I find myself at peace with winter. I don’t mean to suggest that I ever disliked winter; being from Wisconsin I am just as comfortable within the graphite atmosphere of February as I am within the leafy arms of July.  

But feeling at home does not contentment make. I’ve always tended toward the melancholy and that, along with the season’s somber palette and farm work’s cyclical nature, which plops me at my desk by the beginning of December and leaves me there until March, can lead to a true dreariness of the soul. In past years I found myself listless, a limp tangle of ennui, desire, and aimless energy. I longed for the kinetic green of April, the rushing thaws of March. All my discontentment bucked against the seamless monotony that my indoor life was steeped in.

I began burying the hatchet with my winter self a few years ago by asking friends to take me outside.  Bundled in wool and down, I trudged to trailheads and embarked into a landscape of brown, white, and green. A birder taught me how to find song sparrows and chickadees in the muted light, listening for them as we traipsed through Fowl Meadow, a tract of land that roams beautifully through marshland just outside of Boston. Measuring my step and cocking my ears, suddenly I found myself engaged in a new sensuality with the white world around me. The tiny wilderness of the place, brightened by the piping calls of winter birds flying through the phragmites, filled my mind with textures of an elegant complexity brave and new to my dulled heart.

Another friend showed me how to learn the names of trees and plants by discovering their buds, the decaying leaves at their feet, and the forked frames of their branches. I began keeping records of the living things around me. Their titles were delicious in my mouth and on the page—hop-hornbeam, Quercus macrocarpa, Pinus strobus, hemlock and hazel—and so were their forms. The luminescence of river birch, shining in the swamps, never failed to make my heart skip a beat, nor did the magically soft, mossy trunks of white Atlantic cedar, the Tree of Life. I introduced myself to sugar maple by finding its decaying leaves with lobes lightly toothed like the new incisors of kittens, and white oak by the gently curved segments of its weather bleached leaves. 

As that winter wore on I urged my sleepy self to rouse to the realities discovered during those rambles. Finally brought out of the static warmth of my house and into the clean white air, I awakened like a frost flower. I remembered the presence of green beneath all of the protective bark that held tightly to the life within and saw that I was walking in a world filled with the slow breaths of hibernation, quiet and wise enough to know that a yearly rest was needed in order to burst forth with flamboyance in the spring, turning the conservative landscape, so cautious with its color, so discreet in its hope, into a cacophonous tapestry of hormones and music and leaves.

My grandfather, an avid gardener who spent the growing season in constant devotion to the voraciously graceful lives within his beds and borders, once told me that he loved trees most in winter. He was enamored of what their nakedness revealed: voluptuous curving limbs sloping toward the sky; the inky tips of branches; deep patterns engraved upon brown bark. My grandfather loved watching these street trees—the statuesque ginkgoes and ash, the cherries and honey locusts raising their thin arms toward the sky—as he drove the old station wagon to church and the hardware store. 
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Whenever I reflect on the winter landscape I return to my grandfather, who smelled of coffee and sawdust and, in winter, like the freshness of snow, and his love of what he found in these months bereft of the lush and light. It has taken me years to find a similar love of the spare streets and woods and to see the February landscape for what it is: a scene of sleep and survival, where the earth has shaken off its old skin like a snake and waits for the time when its soul is so sated that it can begin breaking into a new body. ‎Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s reminder that “what is essential is invisible to the eye” is easiest to understand in these dark months, but when we learn to read what is written in the bark of birch and to hear the songs of chickadees we find that jewels of truth are everywhere once we have learned how to find them.

by Jenny Hauf

I am sitting in my kitchen on a Sunday morning, having luxuriously slept in to the seventh hour. There are herbs neatly (well, relatively neatly) placed on shelves and in the brand new stillroom that we created from the worn out walk-in closet that used to house unused tennis rackets and jumbled canning materials. On the kitchen table are the remnants of wreath-making: sprigs of rosemary and thyme, dried gomphrena, statice, and strawflower stems, bits of wire and pliers. My last market of the year is in a few hours and I won’t be selling anything freshly harvested, only the fat of summer and fall’s harvests. There will be the green salve created with lush comfrey leaves of September mornings and the beautiful calendula of hot afternoons. Spilanthes tincture from when that magic eyeball plant was bounding over the edges of the bed, finding more soil to root in and land to spread eagle in. The wreaths are made of grapevines trimmed during my friend Coco’s prunings of fall, the flowers from her daughter Mal’s dewy harvests at the flower field at First Root Farm. ​

This is the unthinkable: a morning spent at home before leaving at 10:15 to get to Harvard Square. Listening to the radio in my bathrobe. Barely thinking about the field, as the field’s asleep, covered in the comforts of straw and cardboard. The energy is all underground as winter slowly (too slowly) comes in. 

I’m going to a concert tonight, a pleasure rarely afforded during the months of tendriling, weeding, and harvesting. I’ll be seeing Joanna Newsom, who may sing a song of “the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating. Joy of life,” and to which I raise a glass of nettle beer and holler, yes! To life, but also to farming! To all of it trapped in jars and bottles and bags for winter. To the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating JOY of it.

All the pain, all the hours spent doing one movement over and over. All the sun and all the sweat, the rain and the water, the gas station food, the butterflies. To the summer sounds of cars driving by, the leaves everywhere, the trees surrounding me in their shimmers of transition, their eventual undressing, their standing as sentries with such blessed bones and bark. To the moon lighting up a scene that made me guffaw when it was finally too late to work and I realized again that this place, ever so briefly, was mine to harvest and sow. To the crabgrass everywhere and the hands that helped me pull it, to the hands that helped me plant the white cloves of garlic, the huge bulbs of daffodils, the hands that shared picnics and sumac lemonade on long afternoons.

To the stripping of chamomile flowers from stems on CSA mornings, to running around with an apron and a clipboard, to drinking coffee for the first time in months. To Paula Poundstone for making me laugh as I put the bags together, to Car Talk for cracking me up on the drive to Somerville, to Ira Glass for making me misty eyed in Jamaica Plain. To the bees singing around tulsi inflorescences while I weeded and harvested in heaven. To the way that the swamp milkweed burst from its buds and silently waved its beauty of pinks and whites on the 4th of July. 
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To sleeping too little and driving too much. To singing really loud in the car and alone in the field. To never having clean knees and crabgrass seeds getting in my hair. To wrapping California poppies in butcher paper and taking one thousand pictures of honeybees. To podcasts. To wildcrafting plantain and goldenrod, to climbing ladders to get to elderflowers. To wearing big boots and short shorts. To not showering. To dressing up and scrubbing almost all the dirt off. To meeting beautiful people. To slinging fertilizer in a good straw hat. To growing and dying and growing back. To resting all winter. To all of the defeating, the repeating, the outrageous Joy of it.

​To all of it, I give thanks. To all of it, you’re forever in my heart and the dirt of my knees. I’ll drink you in winter; I’ll see you in spring.

by Jenny Hauf of Muddy River Herbals

The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.
—E.E. Cummings

Snow.

If you live anywhere close to Boston it’s everywhere. It surrounds your car, hems you in as you walk the sidewalks, and is piled so high that you need to hurry through the street, dodging drivers and the soupy ridges of slush.