phil: hey guys, it’s is phil from smilinggardener.comand today we have a medicinal plants list that we put together for you, and haley isgoing to tell you why we started thinking about this. haley: well, okay, i started thinking aboutthis yesterday because i went for a walk in the park right beside my house and i sat downon a bench to take a rest and this woman, an older woman, had sat down beside me andshe had a little -- her grandson with her. and this little guy was just covered in sickness,like runny nose and eyes and all this kind of stuff. he looked like he had a cold ora flu and this grandmother, she was so sweet, she was just totally ready to tackle thisand she had like a little bag of candies and
she was kind of sorting through these candies,try to pick the right one and she found one. she says to me "it’s echinacea." so it got me thinking that even across theocean, there are a lot of plants that medicinally offer the same properties. so we thought itwould be worthwhile to discuss some of them. phil: yeah and so we started talking aboutit and what it really reminded me of - and this is kind of the most important part ofthe blog we put together i think -that what got me really excited when i started studyingorganic gardening was the idea of growing really nutrient dense food and growing anykind of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds and mushrooms, whatever you do, if you canlearn to create really good soil and grow
that really nutrient dense food, then youare going to be getting just natural pharmaceuticals really; the same kind of stuff that are usedin things like aspirin, anti-inflammatory things, all kinds of natural drugs reallythat will prevent disease and just help you be overall healthy. so i got really excited about that, but thenwe were talking about today and we were talking about how there are some plants that are especiallymedicinal. so what we did is we put together a list of five, we just picked five reallythat i have in my garden and that i have used in the last week or so. and to keep this video short, we are justgoing to cover one of them in the video and
the other five will be on the blog. so ifyou are watching this on youtube, i’ll put a link below and you can go, check it out.so many other ones are pretty cool; we have like a -- we have a leafy green, we have aflower, we have a bulb, we have a weed. so we have some cool ones. but we are just going to about another onetoday. so haley, you picked one that you really liked, right? haley: yeah, i thought it would be cool tomention fennel because fennel is really awesome for relaxing the tummy. it helps aid in digestion.so if you have fennel tea or phenol seeds, it’s really good to maybe, for example,get a cup of tea, have that before a meal
or after meal, especially if you have somethingheavy, it’s really good to help settle the tummy. so if you’ve ever been to an indian restaurant,you’ve probably seen that they have little dishes of seeds for you after dinner maybecovered in like a sugary coating, something like that. well, those are fennel seeds andit’s a practice in india to eat them after a heavy meal to help aid in digestion. phil: yeah and yet the thing i like aboutfennel too is in the garden, it’s just a great plant for attracting beneficial insects,it may be a perennial where you live so it comes back every year or even if you livein a cold climate, it will self seed quite
readily and same with dill, it’s relatedto dill. so i actually tend to grow more dill becausei like it a little bit better in cooking but more of a medicinal plant is the fennel andyeah, i think that’s the one we wanted to cover. so we had a question we were going to askpeople? haley: yeah, we were going to ask you guys-- why do i always forget these questions? phil: i don’t know why you forget this onebecause all we are asking people is what medicinal plants they like to grow and -- haley: yes, i think i even wrote it down.
phil: you know like what’s medicinal aboutit and just tell us whatever they want about it because obviously there are tens of thousandsof these; we just took five. so we’d like to hear what plants, yeah, people like togrow. haley: yeah. phil: yeah, so if you are not on the blog,check it out because one weed that we wrote about is one that i sometimes use in thisice cream that i make. so i have a little recipe for that on the website too. haley: cool! all right, see you guys.