Sun Mountain Herbal Cookery

HERBAL ODYSSEY OF 30+ YEARS

Recipes from Garden & Wild by 4 Seasons • Food Systems Ancient & Current the Medicinal & Nutritional Properties of Ingredients • Unusual Ingredients & Sources Wild Edibles Nutritional Values • Solar Cooking & Drying • Canning without sugar Cooking Beans & Grains • Harvesting & Processing Foods & Herbs • Really edible flowers • Seasoning Recipes • Natural Dye Colors from Plants • Basic Herbal Preparations • Making Herbal Teas Garden Facials • Aromatherapy • Useful Plants • Dried Flowers

by Maia Ballis
Photography & Graphics by Maia & George Elfie Ballis
© 2004 Maia Ballis / People Food & Land Foundation

• The e-book stores a binder full of recipes and reference material with hot links in the Index pages for easy access to topics.

• Lavishly illustrated with over 375 recipes organized by season.

• PRINT only the recipe pages you use. Store in kitchen safe protector sheets. Print Seasoning Recipes and tape on storage jars for easy refilling.

Roots of SunGardens

Recipes from the SunMt Natural Foods Cookery

Kitchen Herbology

We practice Herbology every time we cook with herbs, so we may as well understand what they are doing for us. The ancient practice of using herbs, spices, and flowers for food, medicine, and aroma is still going through a rebirth – an Herbal Renaissance. New tools for examining the properties of botanicals have given us more understanding of how these complex green allies work, validating most traditional knowledge, adding new benefits, and adding more clearly understood cautions in a few cases.

Global travel and communication have spread knowledge of different, ancient healing systems, and their plant resources. Once on the path of discovery, you will find your worldview expanding in pleasure, benefit, and appreciation. Where I once looked out the car window and saw landscapes, I can now spot many plant friends that I know by name, flavor, and benefit. Shift your perception, change your world. We live in the Chaparral zone of dry hot or cold weather. It seldom rains here between May & November, so our garden and wild area have many tough, beautiful, multi-purpose plants. Perennials are favored in our Permaculture gardens.

I am a utilitarian person. If I have to pay for water and work in the garden, I want beautiful plants that I can use in many ways. We do not have the lush growth of Coastal California, but we do not feel deprived of floral beauty.

Fennel as Teacher

In 1964 I was in Germany sitting on a bench at Frankfurt Airport rocking my feverish baby, calculating how much time I had before my flight home to the U.S. My luck, there was a doctor a few minutes from the airport. Once he learned that she had recently had her immunization shots, he handed me a packet of what looked like garden seeds. He told me to ask the stewardess to make tea for the baby. The package read “Fenchen” and had a pretty plant with seeds that looked like the Fennel Seeds in my mother’s spice cabinet. I did as the doctor directed, and baby Victoria liked the tea. We were in for a 24-hour propeller plane flight from Luxembourg to New York, and it was the hardest trip of my life.

The plane was full of G.I.s returning to the States, but lucky for me again, there was another baby whose mother had some newfangled disposable diapers. Victoria’s fever went down, and she slept, but she began to pee. She peed through all my cloth diapers, peed through all the spare disposable diapers the other mother gave me, and finally, I had to rotate her flannel blankets to sop up the pee. Fortunately, it was so dilute, it had little odor.

Now I know it was the gentle anti-toxin properties of Fennel Seed that were at work purifying my baby’s blood, and gently flushing her system. It was only a little of the whole seed that had this effect. By the time we got to New York, she had saturated her blankets and left little puddles under the baggage cart. But her fever was gone!

Going Back to Eden

I was very impressed by the medicinal action of what I had previously considered a flavoring and began to look for more information. I wanted specific amounts of how much of an herb to use. The recipes that called for “to taste” made me uncertain when I wanted certainty.

Now I know 1 tsp. more or less of a mild herb can be to taste, but I had no experience then. It took me a while to find the herbal reference by Dr. Jethro Kloss, Back to Eden. It was daunting because the herbs were simply listed below a disease, with no clue about preparation or dose. It took me a while to try any of the recipes because we had no illnesses to test them on.

I started with Jeanne Rose’s herbal body care books and experimented with her recipes. Some of the ingredients were hard to find, so I became the herb buyer for our community co-op store to access herbs of all kinds. That was my first connection with Frontier Natural Brands, now a very large business I still rely on for quality herbal products.

Dr. Dick Noble, who worked with Indian Health Centers and the Mexican-American farm worker population recommended a line of American Indian Herbs. These were traditional recipes gathered from many tribes. The herbs came in bulk form in pint-sized bags, from which you had to prepare the tea. The idea of using ancient blood purifiers and tonics had great appeal, though it took me a while to get over the strong medicinal flavors. The tinctures were

just as ‘‘bad” tasting, but they were the best way to preserve the properties and could be used instantly. So I began to use herbal tinctures but had no idea of how they were made until I learned at her school a few years later.

With the exception of bitter Goldenseal, I now consider “bad” tasting herbals as simply medicinal. I even crave the bitter formula of Winter Brew (see Teas) when I have the beginnings of a cold.
We have a preference for sweets in our culture. Without the contrasting flavor of bitter, the sweet has no counterpoint. Have you ever craved a cup of French Roast Coffee after a sweet dessert? It is your body speaking to you. In fact, drinking bitters is a good way to counteract a craving for sweets.

I never had a soft drink with every meal growing up, and the idea seems strange to me today. My family made our own root beer. It was a treat we had once in a while, not daily. It was also the base of a favorite dessert – Root Beer Floats. There were a couple of explosive bottles that made a mess in the basement, but it became a family tradition and our only soft drink.

Later, Rosemary Gladstar Slick introduced me to making traditional Root Beer, the original spring tonic made from blood-purifying, tonic, and stimulating herbs. It was a wonderful refinement of my childhood experience. Because it took a large number of bulky herbs to commercially process, the root beer industry created flavor concentrates that they use today. So just like our commercial licorice candy has lost the medicinal properties of real licorice, commercial root beer is mostly a flavor these days.

Rosemary has a very simple and tasty unfermented recipe (see her book Family Health). I have added Echinacea and Osha root extracts for immune support and a tingly taste.

Beginning to experiment

A visitor who had a bladder infection wanted some herbal relief and asked me to make something. I pulled out Dr. Kloss, gathered several of the ingredients he listed, and made what I thought might be a palatable drink. It worked! I cannot remember what it was, but the symptoms disappeared and did not come back. I wanted to learn more.

Recently my dear friend Marilyn called with an immensely swollen neck. We were considering options for an unusual problem – a calcium deposit had clogged a salivary duct under her tongue. Her doctor had no suggestions and was referring her to a surgeon, and her dentist was expecting that she would have to see an oral surgeon and take drugs.

I suggested Castor Oil Packs externally to draw out the toxins, and Vinegar to melt the calcium deposit. She reported that Castor Oil packs gave her some relief from the swelling, but the hard swelling was still there. The vinegar was too acidic for her to keep under her tongue. As we talked I mentioned Back to Eden as a limited resource compared to all the wonderful books we have now. In desperation, she looked up Glands in Back to Eden and found Slippery Elm bark powder. Because she knew how to use the herb, she was able to make some tea, make a poultice with a little water, and hold a ball of powder under her tongue. She also made a big poultice under her jaw. It was all helpful!

The lump was hardened into a pus-filled lump, which she lanced and drained, but the lump was still there. But within 2 days of therapy, all that remained was a little crater. Cancel surgery!

The beauty of treatment for an oral problem with Slippery Elm is that it makes a superior poultice that is gentle and nutritive, while safe enough for chemo patients and children. So even the simple resources and the very gentle herbs can work wonders if you know the herbs and how to use them.

Not all herbs are gentle and some research is required. Educate yourself before you try to choose herbs by intuition. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, TCM, they classify herbs by whether they are major tonics, minor tonics, food grade, or poisonous. They also grade the quality, so if you pay more for top quality, your plants will probably be more medicinal.

Wild & Organic Roots

In the early ’70s our non-profit organization, People, Food & Land Foundation had a small farm called the Magical Pear Tree, on the Westside of Fresno. We had gardened organically for several years on a city lot using Ruth Stout’s heavy mulching system from How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back. You mulch to reduce water use by up to half, block weeds, and build soil all at the same time. Ruth was in her eighties when she continued to throw a little mulch on her garden problems. We have used the system ever since the late 60’s.

Chemical “clean farming” denudes the topsoil in winter and leaves it vulnerable to runoff and wind. Nature is not a nudist, she wears a mantle of old dry grass in winter, that protects the spring-emerging youth. At the Pear Tree, we expanded the concept for our farm garden. One year we won an award for recycling all the leaves from the City of Fresno. The windrows started out 17 feet high on the front acre, and by spring were down to about a foot deep. The leaf mulch and natural soil amendments helped build rich garden soil rapidly.

The landscape gardeners who brought us grass clippings quickly learned that the grass would become valuable humus. Two of them rented some land and began making their own compost for their own nursery. We considered that a great compliment. You know you’re doing well when they take your idea.

We learned that healthy plants were the best defense against pests,  and relied on Robert Rodale’s Organic Gardening books & magazine as a resource. We worked on building the general health of our soils; and picked tough, pest-resistant plants. We traveled to the Rodale Pennsylvania Experimental Farm to see their work. At the time they were investigating Amaranth and Quinoa as commercial crops In the middle of winter, they were growing greens in cold boxes covered by snow.

Staff also visited the Nebraska Small Farm Energy Project to see what solar applications we could adapt. As a result, we added a solar greenhouse onto the south side of our office.

When Francis Moore Lappé & Joe Collins were working on Food First they came on our agricultural Seminar in Reality tour to learn about the small and large farms in our area. Diet for a Small Planet by Lappé was a seminal influence on our view of the global food system and made us conscious of eating lower on the food chain to conserve resources.

Although not a vegetarian herself, she encouraged many converts with her analysis of the pounds of grain required to produce 1 pound of flesh food: Beef =16 lbs., Pork = 6 lbs., Turkey = 4 Lbs., Chicken & Eggs = 3 lbs. I incorporated a lot of Frankie’s complimentary vegetal protein combining into my cooking. We became strict vegetarians, remaining so for over 20 years. The recipes in this book use fish, poultry, eggs, and some pork, range-fed sheep and buffalo, and many vegetarian options.

We had a larger staff then and worked on Western agricultural water and small family farmer direct marketing issues. We learned that farmers got only 3-4¢ for a can of tomatoes, so clearly needed a larger slice of the profit pie. Small farmers needed to connect directly with consumers.

Marc Lasher & I developed a farm trails map of local producers who sold directly to consumers. Marc also developed a couple of Farmer’s Markets and formed a group called the San Joaquin Valley Farmers Co-op. He attempted to give buyers a lower price in the early season if they would agree to buy from his farmers all season. The buyers agreed, but when the prices went down later in the season not one lived up to the agreement. NLP Staff also worked on building a consumer food co-op, called Our Store, with 400 members. We were a volunteer-run organization, bought whole foods and produce in bulk, and dissolved into buying clubs when our low-rent store space disappeared, and we returned to buying clubs.

The Community Supported Agriculture system, CSA, was developed later. Consumers can now contract directly with the producers for a flat monthly fee. Buyer groups have a personal connection with the growers and get high-quality local produce. The farmer gets a fair, stable price in an assured market; and the resources support the local economy and encourage local food security.

See www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/csa

Products

To help support our research work, we harvested medicinal herbs from forest service land for the extract market, reducing fire hazard while creating a medicinal product. We also made added-value products on the farm to help increase our returns.

Our big ideas were:

1. Herb Teas in bulk. Despite the quality of bulk herbs, we found that people prefer tea bags. My Flower Tea is the only bulk tea we continued to sell over the years.

2. Culinary Herbal wreaths before they became popular.

3. Gourds for Bowls, Covered Containers, Funnels, Dippers, Vases & Hanging Vases, still in use after 25 years.

4. Dried flowers for our gourd vases

5. “Cherry Tom” vine ripe, solar dried, cherry tomatoes.

Among the alternative farmers we met in Washington State was Woody Deryx, a small farm advocate who was looking at how to reduce farm inputs. Woody was experimenting with using hand tools for small-scale harvesting. We visited his farm where he demonstrated his scythe to us. He and his wife Becky had a U-Pick Raspberry Farm and gave us the best cup of Raspberry Tea we had ever had. The secret was in adding a few berries  to the  pot  of  fresh picked leaves – Ahah!

Masanobu Fukuoka. the father of no-till Nature Farming and author of the One Straw Revolution, gave us these important considerations: 1. What can we not do that nature can do for herself?
Our other questions about sustainability are:

1. How do we work in cooperation with natural cycles?

   1. How do we work within closed systems, that is, minimizing outside inputs and using recycled materials where possible.

   2. How do we minimize human labor?

Larry Korn, editor of his book had worked on Fukuoka’s farm and offered a class that included preparing bird-proof seeds by wrapping them in a soil/clay formula, and use of the Kama, or Japanese hand scythe. The Kama has become an essential garden tool for us. Fukuoka impressed us with doing the manageable, using low-tech systems to reduce expensive equipment needs, and gave us some good lessons in looking for ways to cooperate with Nature rather than try to trick or dominate. Getting smart about cooperation and balance rather than getting big.

We acquired our Goumi Tree from Ellie Bluestein when she and her husband Gene, a folk music professor, went to Japan on sabbatical. Ellie also traveled to visit Masanobu Fukuoka and wrote an article on her visit for our newsletter. He mourned the loss of time farmers had since mechanization. He noted that they used to write poetry in the off-season.
Tractors made work easier, but paying for them meant farmers now worked year-round. Ellie, a leader in the Fresno Peace movement shared his concerns about nuclear war. He gave her a drawing that illustrated how we all live in the same global nest, and that a nuclear umbrella protects no one.

We also connected with the West Coast Alternative Food System, and attended conferences of the suppliers and members of co-op food stores all over California. The bulk buying available in larger natural food stores comes from these roots.

We began to integrate Wild Edibles into our gardens and harvesting. One year at the Pear Tree, we fed lunch to about 50 small family farmer participants of a state-wide conference. They were shocked to learn that their weeds list included, some of the tasty, high nutrient, Lambsquarters, Mustard flowers, and Mallow salad ingredients. We also served our own Peppermint Tea on the warm spring day rather than the expected coffee.

How do our Gardens grow?

Robert Kourik author of Edible Landscaping Naturally, came to the Pear Tree to give classes on Instant Gardening and Edible Landscaping. We had taken his class at the Farralones Rural Institute and were impressed by his work. Robert and Rosalind Creasy in her book The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping Design gave an identity to the concept of integrating edible plants into ornamental gardens, and landscaping – something dear to our hearts. We introduced Robert to some green-thumbed friends like Virgil & Lora Byxbee, who gave him Chayote squash.

Gorilla Pruning is what Elfie called the way he pruned to provide natural ladders inside our mature Persimmon and Mulberry trees. This allowed him to climb the tree without a ladder to harvest fruit. Of course, this included quality control munching of “Mooshka,” the very ripe Persimmons. The Permaculture concepts of Bill Mollison were also heady concepts of sustainability. We already leaned towards permanent crops and Mollison reinforced our use of more drought-tolerant crops for our desert climate. We incorporated more Permaculture concepts over time.

We got our Blue Corn seeds from a resident of Taos Pueblo who found a sealed pot of seeds that his grandfather had left. He grew them out and brought ears of corn to a small farm conference to sell. We included heirloom crops from European and Sonoran Desert seed banks. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan of Native Seed /SEARCH introduced us to some wonderful desert crops, like Tepary Beans, Papago White Corn, Mesquite Pods, several varieties of Cactus, Desert Melons and Squash, and Devil’s Claw, mentioned in the Harvest/Process section.

Gary has searched the desert for traditional crops that were falling out of use. Here he is explaining that commercial cotton strains need to have the DNA of wild varieties reintroduced every once in a while to invigorate the plants. See their website to learn about adopting a plant. www.nativeseeds.org

We connected with the California Native Plant Society & the Intermountain Native Plant Nursery for native and naturalized plants. Joining the Rare Fruit Exchange helped us access plants to push the envelope of what we could grow. Wanting to grow Jujubes, we made an 800 mile trip to an abandoned field station, where 17 Jujube trees were surviving with no irrigation. They came in a number of different sizes and forms. It was only then we realized that the mystery tree along the south fence line at our NLPF Pear Tree Farm was a medicinal-sized Jujube! Since then we found a friend who had mature large fruited Jujubes in her yard. After many trials with seeds, we found that propagating by sucker was the best way to go, and now have 3 trees of various forms.

Rosemary’s Garden & Honoring Roots

I had Jeanne Rose’s herbal body care books but had no idea where to look for more medicinal herbal information. Then in the mid 70’s I found the herbal mother lode: when I took classes at The California School of Herbal Studies (CSHS) in Northern California. At that time it was run by Rosemary Gladstar (Slick) who remains one of the most special beings I have known. A nature spirit in human form, she gracefully expresses an immense love and appreciation for plants and all living things. Her joy at bringing green allies into her life was infectious. Rosemary also brought in the best West Coast herbalists and gave us wonderful book lists of other resources that began the web of connections to other teachers who have changed our lives.

As our garden was filling with new plant friends, I began doing food exploring meals with our staff. Soon, my experiments became products and classes on integrating garden herbs, flowers & wild edibles into life. My attraction to herbs remains, and Elfie & I and all those we have touched are very grateful.

Heartfelt thanks to:

Michael Tierra: O.M.D. head of East/West Herb School whose very important Planetary Herbology classifies Western Herbs in relation to the ancient systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine & Ayurveda. It was his diagnostic system and stern lecture that made me start eating the meats that my body needed to function. He has also done a good book on Natural Remedies with John Lust, author of The Herb Book, a small but encyclopedic little reference.

Juliette De Baircli Levy: the unofficial grandmother of the Herbal Renaissance, whose classic books on herbs and natural healing for animals & humans was gathered from practical experience and the wisdom gained among the nomads and gypsies.
Dr. John Christopher: the author of School for Natural Healing, and the most authoritative medical doctor who used Western herbs in the 1940s-70s before the herbal renaissance.
Steven Foster: co-author of Herbal Emissaries and a leader in identifying Eastern medicinal plants with relatives in the U.S.
Christopher Hobbs: the Herbalist who most impressed me with the value of native and naturalized plants. His research on Milk Thistle seed and liver function impacts us still.
David Hoffman: author of Holistic Herbalism, British trained medical herbalist, He had a successful practice in Wales, where medical Herbology is an institution. He taught at CSHS.
Mindy Green: CSHS Aromatherapy teacher.
James Green: Herbs for Males of CSHS.
Jessie Longacre: wild harvesting & use of Sea Vegetables.
Vasant Lad: Ayurvedic Doctor, author of Ayurveda
Michael Moore: author of several valuable medicinal Herbology books on plants of the Western U.S. – he still owes me a correspondence course, so be cautious here.
Louie &Virginia Saso: whose lovely Saratoga herb garden classes exposed me to many plants, and taught me about dried flowers.
Herbal Highways: the KPFA/KFCF Pacifica radio station program, hosts Karen Sanders &Autumn for great public education.
Amanda McWade Crawford: British-trained herbalist of CSHS.
“Herbal Ed” Smith: one of the few medicinal botanists, Ed has searched the world for medicinal plants and is the owner of HerbPharm, one of the pioneering manufacturers of high-quality medicinal herbal extracts.
Susun Weed: author of several excellent books expressing her intimate knowledge of herbs from a feminist perspective.
Kat Anderson: author, of “Tending the Wild” an unparalleled examination of Native American knowledge and uses of California’s natural resources.

Making body care products and cooking consciously with herbs, flowers & wild edibles was the beginning of my herbal practice. Beginning at the Pear Tree, we started having monthly Food Exploring meals, where members and the adventurous public were invited to sample my experiments in cooking. We continued the tradition at SunMt. It was great fun, and I got plenty of feedback. I also made a variety of body care and herbal food products which we have sold over the years. Of all the herb classes I have taught, the Garden Facials and Foot Baths were the most fun. Eventually, many of the leading herbal teachers developed product lines of their own or affiliated with existing companies to make their products commercially available. So now you can buy ready-made, high-quality herbal products of all kinds.

Flowers & Flower Essences: Deep red, ambrosial-scented roses grew in the garden within reach of my childhood playpen. I could not resist eating them. I can remember being surprised that the taste was so tart and different from the smell, but I chomped them anyway. In the early 70’s my sister Aliisa introduced me to using flowers on the vibrational level, the subtle but effective healing system of Dr. Edward Bach. Aliisa gave me the first aid formula, called Rescue Remedy, in a very stressful situation.  It met my threshold of panic, very gently relaxed my stomach and mellowed my mood. The effect was dramatic and immediate. I ordered a set of Flower Essences from England the next week, and have used them ever since. The last time I demonstrated Rescue Remedy was for a young mother. Her son was overactive and bonked his head- a shock – not an injury, that set him to wailing with a wide open mouth. I deftly squeezed off 4 drops of Rescue Remedy into his open mouth, and he stopped crying in an instant, turned and ran off to play again. Mother was impressed and took a bottle with her.

Dr. Edward Bach saw that imbalanced emotional states were the root cause of many illnesses, so he developed a gentle, totally non-toxic system to balance the emotions. Flower Essences are made by mostly using solar energy, or boiling plant parts in some cases, to transfer the energy of the botanicals into the water. It is the vibrational pattern that is active, no physical substance remains. The concentrate is then highly diluted two times and preserved with a little Brandy. Nature Magazine tried to prove the flowers don’t work, only to find that they do work; and that they work better if shaken before use.

The California Flower Essence Society began research into the properties of California native plants, and developed a large number of remedies. In the 80’s I decided to take an Ellon Bach certification course. I did a series of cartoons called the Bach Bears, illustrating the energetics of the original 12 Bach Flowers using a large Bear faced with a lot of problems. It was a giggle to do, and is still being used to educate others today. I have made my own Essences and Elfie has experimented with Tarweed as an antidote to hot summer emotions. We use the Flower Essences only for ourselves these days, but they remain our gentle helpers.

Food Exploration

Here at SunMt, I tried to use the principles of Ayurveda and TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine from Michael Tierra, Vasant Lad & Chris Hobbs) food therapy to feed people the right foods for their constitutions. Then we added meat to our diets and I had to redesign all our meals for Vegans and for Omnivores. My solution was to serve a basic complementary protein combination of grain and beans with side dishes that were, sweet, sour, salty, hot and astringent for people to choose from. Menus were planned so Omnivores could eat everything but Vegans would have a separate main protein dish. Making my recipes Tri-doshic (dishes good for all Ayurvedic constitutions) was overwhelming at first. Fortunately, the Ayurvedic Cookbook, by Amadea Morningstar came out during this transition time and made planning easier.

What do you research?

With the help of staff and occasional interns, we have researched and acquired all the multi-use plant materials we could find that would grow here. We flunked greenhouse Bananas, lost some crops to pests, freezing or drought. We have demonstrated heavy mulching water conservation gardening, Edible Landscaping & Permaculture design, and benefits of hardy, perennial dominant plantings of multiple use plants. We have integrated harvesting consciously from the wild plants that grow here.
Starting as “Certified Organic Famers” we became regenerative “Permaculturists” as we learned from Robert Kourik and Bill Mollison. Permaculture, a contraction of “permanent,” “agriculture,” and “culture”, for sustainable food production. The philosophy of permaculture has expanded over time to encompass economic and social systems – a dynamic movement that is still evolving.

Solar

We started solar cooking and drying at the Pear Tree. Christopher Roth donated the Barbara Kerr- Sherry Cole solar oven we use now at SunMt, and another member, Bill Gettys, made it metal clad for greater durability. We rely on it May-November. I have done most of the experimental kitchen work, using my herbal knowledge to maximize the health benefits of using and combining unusual food and herbs in simply delicious new ways. We have introduced some herbs from the ancient planetary healing traditions of China and India into our diet, and tried to find local relatives to buy or grow. The information here has come from many sources over the years.

Lessons

The things I have discovered came from:

• Trial and error:
  things like Bay Leaf disinfectant & Ceanothus berry soaps came from necessity & conscious exploring,

• Revisiting old concepts:
  Using drying over canning &/or processing with heavy salt use. Drying Fruits, Vegetables & Olives rock hard and rehydrating them for use. Using soaking to reduce cooking time. Our moist, ready-to-eat dried fruit industry is designed for our instant use culture. It requires higher energy for processing, packaging and storage, and costs more

• Applying appropriate technology to ancient practices:
  Our Solar Oven & Solar Dryer are low tech, high value pieces of equipment. The electric blender and grinder are great labor saving devices over grinding stones and mortal/pestal tools. Our grain grinder also comes with a hand grinding option in case of solar-electric power outage.

To all those who love the green world and are drawn to take the herbal pathway – may you find endless delight and be nourished body & soul.

Happy Trails!
Maia Ballis