Domestication Of The Savages

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Almost in every vegetable garden there is a waste place where uninvited guests of all stripes roam wildly. You can easily organize the life of this corner by placing wild plants there, which can become a delicacy for your animals and bees, a tasty addition to dinner, medicines and cosmetics

Burdock

When you learn about the beneficial properties of home-grown burdock, you are surprised at your carelessness. For so many years you have been trying to free your small spaces from a stately and healing handsome man, who is not too intrusive, but tenaciously reminds of himself, clinging to clothes or hair uncovered with a scarf, instead of using his natural qualities.

Burdock root jam

After all, it grows unpretentious, not requiring attention and care, growing almost flush with cherry bushes, which need to be fertilized regularly, saved from weeds and pests. Of course, cherry jam will redeem all your efforts, but it turns out that you can make an equally tasty and healthy jam from burdock roots.

To prepare the jam, finely chop the peeled and washed burdock roots, and then simmer for two hours with sour milk, vinegar or sorrel. The inulin contained in the roots converts into sugar during the cooking process. The result of cooking is a healthy sweet-sour jam.

Side dish for the second courses

Burdock roots can be stewed, boiled, served as a side dish for main courses. Or use it as a standalone dish, rich in protein and sugar.

Flour additive

Powder is made from the dried roots, which is mixed with rice or wheat flour, baking nutritious cakes or bread from the resulting mixture.

Vitamin C and carotene

Only 20 grams of young green burdock leaves will satisfy the human body's daily need for vitamin C, and 25 grams of dried leaves contain a daily dose of carotene.

The healing properties of burdock

The advantages of burdock are not limited to its taste. It also helps a person to cope with many misfortunes. The wounds were lubricated with burdock juice in collaboration with vegetable oil so that they would heal faster. The juice also cleans the blood well from unnecessary and harmful trash.

A decoction of the roots, an infusion of the roots in almond, olive or sesame oil, called burdock oil, have long been known as hair strengthening agents.

Root cleaning

Having learned about such advantages of burdock, it is difficult to resist not to loosen a waste piece of land in the country, fertilize it a little and sow burdock seeds on it. Then you will always have vitamins at hand, an effective medicine and cosmetic product with the lowest possible cost.

The most delicious and healthy are the roots of the first year of life, dug out in the fall.

Stinging nettle

Stinging nettle or stinging nettle, protecting the garden from the raids of the neighbour's children, is a storehouse of vitamins and useful components, without requiring any labor input from a person.

In terms of the composition and quantitative content of components useful for humans, it surpasses many green and vegetable crops that require considerable trouble. However, a person indifferently passes by the nettle, spending his time on cultivation of cultivated plants.

Lettuce, sorrel, green onions, white cabbage are inferior to nettles in terms of vitamin C content, and highly respected and capricious spinach - in terms of iron content.

When there are still many days before the juicy orange carrot, 30 grams of young fresh nettle leaves will satisfy the human body's daily need for carotene (vitamin A). Next time, passing by the nettle, do not be too lazy to bend down and stock up on a valuable plant, after putting on protective gloves.

Nettle is versatile, and therefore useful for green borscht, cold fish soup, green salads. It can be used to make stuffing for pastries and even nutritious vegetable caviar.