Mad About Herbs

Free Seeds

To celebrate their garden at The Chelsea Flower Show, The Children s Society and Royal Horticultural Society are offering families a free pack of flower seeds to brighten up their garden or window box. You can find out more here.

Thanks to Shirl at IndigoShirl, I found a great website that has an opportunity for 7 to 14 year olds to win money for their school in either Amazon or Garden Vouchers.  The idea is to grow your mint from the free seeds that they provide, then add as much value to it as possible, sell it and record the process.   You can see lots of imaginative uses that school children came up with on their website.  To get your free mint seeds, visit Planet Science.

Unfortunately I've only just found this site so it may be a bit late to get your mint plants to a usable size; the deadline for sending in your results is Sunday 6th July and the seeds can take anything between 2 to 6 weeks to germinate.  Mint doesn't actually come true from seed which is why you should take cuttings if you are after a particular variety of mint so I'm not sure what type of mint plant the seeds provided will create!  You could however try doing the challenge for yourself and see what you can create from a mint plant.  Feel free to leave me a comment if you give this a go. 

Aromatherapy Dough

Why didn't I think of that!  Dough with pure essential oils incorporated into it.  My daughter gets travel sick even on short journeys so this might just be worth a try.

Mohdoh have brought out a range of mouldable medicines to combat a variety of childhood ailments through play therapy, colour therapy and aromatherapy.  There are six products each of which tackles different symptoms from travel sickness to anxiety.  As the dough is kneaded, the essential oils are vaporised, inhaled and absorbed through the skin. 

You can choose from No worries, Smart, Are we there yet, Calm, Breathe and 40 winks.

The product is non toxic and contains pure essential oils.  It retails at £6.49 or £30 for all 6 and is available online at www.mohdoh.co.uk

Has anyone tried these?

Easter Fun

Happy Easter!  I hope you are finding time for some fun during the easter break.  As you can see we've been busy decorating twigs (forsythia branches that I pruned a few weeks ago).  We've also been painting and making baskets, and of course having easter egg hunts.

This is the first time that I, oops I mean the Easter bunny has scattered eggs in the snow!  I think the girls found them all, I'll have to check once the snow melts.

I haven't had time to write about using herbs to dye eggs with for Easter but these two websites have:  Herb society's article on dyeing eggs using herbs and Learning Herbs article about colouring eggs with natural dyes  which also has  step by step photos.

Off to check the roast dinner now.  Yum, yum!

How to make a Herbal bath bag

I'm excited to tell you that my third children's activity 'Lavender/Rose petal bath bag'  has been published on the ichild website as a Mother's Day gift idea. My 10 year old daughter made the one shown in the photo.

If you want to take a peek, visit this page and let me know what you think.

(In case you missed them, the other activities were: How to make an orange Pomander and Spiced Biscuits).

Pots of fun

It's half term and we've been having fun painting flower pots.  Well, it started out with me trying to sort out the heaps of pots in the greenhouse, realising we now how far too many but wanting to recycle them somehow.  I guess I could 'freecycle' them. 

I have some paints which are suitable for outside use but are really for painting onto terracotta, metal and stone, so this is a bit of an experiment using them on plastic and yes I know it doesn't look so good but I like my plain terracotta pots and want to keep them that way.

They may not be works of art but the girls had fun painting for a while and they will like using them to start off their sunflower and other seeds over the next couple of months or for putting their own plants in.

Time to clear up the mess now, hey, where did those girls go?!

Does anyone have any other creative uses for surplus plastic pots?

We made our own perfume...

                                ..a nice one I hasten to add.  My daughter wanted to try this set out.  It's a 'Make Your Own Natural Perfume' set from Woodland Herbs in Scotland.  They also sell a lip balm set, bath scrub and herbal tea, insect repellent and herbal infused oil set.  The perfume set arrived very quickly and it was also very quick to make!  All we needed to do was add between 10 and 20 drops of essential oil into the bottle, top up with the grapeseed oil.  Push on the roller ball lid, cap it and shake.  The essential oil included in this set is an organic geranium one which is lovely.

I could have bought the individual bottles, oil etc separately but it would have cost only slightly less than this set.  You could add any single essential oil or experiment with a mixture.

Feel free to let me know if you've come up with any good combinations.

The Original Spice Girl

Do you like our spice girl?

Due to spending so much time making products for craft fairs, I had neglected to use my spices as much as I would have liked so cleared out the old ones. My daughter didn't want to throw them away and wanted something to do, so we put them to use making pictures. It was great fun.