Dear reader,

Greetings to you all,

I'll just manage to send this out in November, before we race into December!  This month has been very busy with getting my garden prepared and planted with food and organising workshops!  I've just come back from Canterbury where I had a very enjoyable working holiday with my friend Vanya of Wyenova Organic Farm.  She is one inspiring woman who grows an enormous variety of food. The elder shrubs were flowering in the hedgerows and we gathered a nice amount to dry.  My latest blog features it: Elder, medicine chest of the people and it truly is a healing plant.  Have a read here.
 I had a trip to Hanmer spings. It is a beautiful spot with amazing natural, hot springs, and a huge forest of trees that began being planted in  1902.  Sunday 19th November I ran a wonderful workshop with 20 enthusiastic people at 'Elemental' a beautiful healing centre run by Kerry and Mike in North Loburn. 

I'll be driving to  Whanganui  to run two workshops on Saturday November 25th 1-4pm and Sunday November 26th 1-4pm. I have had a huge response and the both workshops are full.  

Upper Hutt Sunday 3rd December 10-1pm in conjunction with Natalie Hormann, Sustainable Living Advisor, How deep do you want to go? www.therabbithole.co.nz

The final workshop for 2017
Waikino
(between Paeroa and Waihi) Monday 18th December 10-1pm.

For further information for all the workshops and to book go here.



 

 

 

I was given these beautiful wildflowers for my birthday, aren't they gorgeous.

I'm thrilled to now have bees in my garden. I've wanted them for years.  A dear family friend passed away and I was very fortunate to be gifted his two beehives which I've named Barry's bees. They are strong, but very quiet hives that were both about to swarm. David, who is helping me learn how to care for them, divided both, so that we now have four hives.
I'm so enjoying having the presence of over 60,000 energetic beings in the garden who make me conscious of all the sayings we have in English relating to bees.
'A hive of activity'.
'A working bee'.
'A bee in one's bonnet'
' bee line' towards something
Can you think of others?

 

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Scenes like this greatly distress me. The whole side of a Te Puke road killed off - no insects or life can survive Roundup - it is patented as an antibiotic or killer of life!
Scenes like this fuel my urge to get the word out about the benefits of weeds.

In contrast to this scene on the other side of the same road. Which view is kinder on the eyes and nicer to look at and which scene is pro-life?

The Poor Knights Lily, or Raupo Taranga, Xeronema, is one of our finest flowering plants and ranks as one of our best horticultural subjects.
I saw this beautiful plant at Ohope Beach where my parents and I spent a glorious weekend at the end of October. I have this plant in a pot and love it. They take a very long time - sometimes seven years to flower - well worth the wait.  Xeronema callistemon, in the wild originates from the Poor Knights, but is also found on the Hen Islands off the Whangarei coast.

The Poor Knights have been isolated from mainland New Zealand for longer than any other island group apart from the Three Kings Islands 60 km northwest of Cape Reinga. What remains today of the Poor Knights are the heavily eroded rings of a large volcano that erupted some 10 million years ago. This volcano was possibly 1,000 metres high, measuring 15-25 kilometres in diameter.

On the Poor Knights reptiles play a huge role in the ecology of the forests. There are as many lizards as there are forest birds and at night you can see geckos pollinating Xeronema flowers in the same way birds would do. It seems that in cultivation the plant prefers semi-shade.

Another plant I enjoyed seeing at Ohope beach is the sticky catchfly Selene gallica.  The flowers catch small insects and if you touch the flowers you can feel the slight stickiness.  I don't eat it but enjoy that is is another wild plant providing colour in our landscape.

We have just had the annual calendar event of Halloween meaning 'All hallows eve'.  I don't pay it much attention, but enjoy seeing children creatively dressed walking the streets out trick or treating. The association with witches has a much deeper connection to very old traditions in our cultures that are nature based.  I found this article written by Danielle Prohom Olson, Protectors Of The Earth: Remembering The Radical Legacy Of The Witch absolutely riveting and informative to read, reminding me that I with all my jars of dried plants, potions and seeds and my habit of wandering and spending time in wild places would have labelled me a witch.  This quote from Max Dashu is very powerful:

“In a world in extremity, we are searching for the wellspring, the inexhaustible Source known to all our ancient kindreds. Many of us have been cut off from our deep roots, and especially from the ancient wisdom of women, and female spiritual leadership.”

 

At this time of the year the Miner's lettuce is going to seed and it will come up again in autumn when the weather becomes cooler. It contains a huge amount of vitamin C and omega 3 and is so excellent in salad through the winter.  It is replaced in summer by purslane, hugely high in vitamin C and Omege 3 also.  Purslane loves hot, dry weather.  Also in the photo above are two plants called Wireweed Polygonum aviculare, (in the Knotweed family) which has swellings at the nodes where the leaves come out. That suggests it is good for joints.  The other plant is Allseed, Polycarbon tetraphyllum (on the path) I have been eating and drinking in smoothies both from my new garden. I have not written about either of these before so they will be featuring in the future!

I learn so much from Venya or Wyenova Organic farm. She says she is a caretaker of a much loved and honoured piece of mother earth. She has been there nearly 33 years and during that time has focused on planting food, medicine and survival food for humans and food for bees, birds and insects. One of these survival foods is the prickly pear cactus Opuntia sp.  Vanya showed me how to pick them carefully as they have millions of fine prickles. Vanya cut a small pad off a mother plant and I have planted it under the eaves in a dry place.

To get the prickles off you can firstly rub them on the grass while you have gloves on and are holding them with tongs.  Then remove the rest of the fine prickles by holding them with tongs under a tap, brushing away the from yourself towards the sink hole.

Finally you peel the prickly pear fruit, cut it up and enjoy eating it. It is quite mucilaginous and contains lots of small, hard seeds which we also ate. It is an incredible rich, blood red colour and tastes mildly sweet.  Prickly Pear has a very unique composition of nutrients, including high levels of vitamin C, B-family vitamins, magnesium, potassium, calcium, copper, and dietary fiber.

In the raised garden behind my house there grew a small plant in a rosette that I hadn't met before. I thought I'd let it grow so I could see what it became. It kept growing and growing and then someone came and said it looked like a kind of lettuce.  A light bulbe went off in my mind and sure enough I finally discovered that it is indeed a wild lettuce Lactuca serriola. I am thrilled. Now I have both wild lettuces Lactuca virosa and Lactuca serriola. Virosa is the variety people are using for pain relief. I will be collecting the seeds of it and this one serriola. It may well have the same effect since it has a while milky sap just like virosa. I am enjoying eating my new friend serriola.

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My friends the wild weeds are excellent at nourishing our existing cells, but for deep healing, repair and generating an abundance of new cells from our own bone marrow we can turn to the wild water weed,  blue/green algae.  I'm always looking for natural high quality, sustainable, pure products that work and stem enhance is the best that I have found.  I am astounded at the results people are getting with this magical algae and I'm using it to regrow cartilage (still early days), but it can regenerate any cell in our body that needs it.  Now is the time for this cutting edge technology to flourish says Christian Drapeau, the scientist who has developed this  technology. Listen to the formulator genius himself talk about regenerating lung and pancreas cells.

AUDIO CALL: TOPIC: LUNGS, PANCREAS, RENEWAL

WANT OPTIMAL RENEWAL IN YOUR BODY?

Here is the latest audio recording (call) from Cerule's Christian Drapeau... This call focusses on LUNGS, PANCREAS, RENEWAL and the Synergy of the 3 products together.

https://fccdl.in/KuHty0MmN

If you would like to know more I can invite you to a private Facebook group which is rich in testimonials and information. My website is http://juliasich.cerule.com/home-nz/

This is what my garden looks like today, well almost because I have now planted out the corn seedlings and have two rows of kumara and some potatoes in the two back beds.  I'm so enjoying creating this garden. The wire archway now has beans that will climb all over it.

On this note I'll finish and wish you happy days, filled with joy and health.

Love from Julia

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