I am so very blessed to have a mind that always wanders and never stops! Over the past two weeks, my mind has been jumping around from making my own granola (thanks to my last epiphany) to canning and jamming harvested foods, and now to harvesting useful herbs that I’ve found in what I  thought was an ungodly overgrowth of weeds. This weekend I was able to purchase the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to Wildflowers (Eastern edition of course) and decided to get right to work identifying what all the flowers were that I was seeing in my jumble of unsightly overgrowth.

View one to the left below my porch that has the most flowers and….

View two to the right which is where I would like to put the garden in next year. A lot of work, I know!

So I knew I had a lot of milkweed (which I knew from last fall, but it was this spring I realized what their flowers looked like), some morning glories, daisies, and of course typical stuff like ragweed, but there were a number of other flowers I didn’t know. My new book helped me out on that.

What a surprise I had last night when I easily identified the yellow flowers to the left in the first photo as common St. John’s Wort! During the winter I take capsules of the stuff which costs me more than $10 a month when the stuff is growing right in my backyard! Needless to say, this got my mind to thinking about harvesting some of it and using that this winter! For those who don’t know much about St. John’s Wort, it’s a wonderful little flower that helps with mild to moderate depression, seasonal and full-time, and anxiety- for me it’s perfect for kicking my mild winter blues. I encourage you to research it a little online if you are interested in learning more about it.

So here begins my next lesson: harvesting medicinal herbs. There will be more to come on this, I’m sure!