Medicine Woman

I've become very interested lately in medicinal herbs.  I envision myself one day as a sort of medicine woman for my family and friends, meting out teas and tonics, and cooking up recipes full of tasty herbs to heal the body and keep it healthy.  I've read about them on the internet, and bought a fantastic book called Herbal Recipes  by Rosemary Gladstar.  Then I ordered my seeds from Horizon Herbs.

In the meantime we had also bought 2 rain barrels, which, although great for harvesting rainwater, were really ugly not the most attractive things to put at the edge of our patio.  So we came up with the great idea of building planters up against them to both hide them AND to house my medicinal herbs.  The only problem was, I wanted it done quickly ( I was really not liking those huge, brown plastic barrels) and we didn't want to spend any money.

My amazing, handy, woodworker of a husband came up with the idea of using the pallets, which we had been collecting for some artwork we were making, and using  that wood to make our planters.  Yes, pallets.  We had gone into the trash piles behind many a store and retrieved the wooden delivery pallets.  We searched for the ones that looked as if their wood was untreated.  Then we pulled some of them apart, which was a pretty backbreaking chore but my oldest son Cooper loved it!  There's not many things more fun for a 10 year old boy than whacking things with a hammer.  Some of the pallets we left intact to use as the backing.  Then Steven and Cooper ingeniously made the cutest planters, nailing the boxes onto the intact pallets.  And Viola, a vertical garden!  For free!  And really cool looking!  I've since planted them with all kinds of herbs, such as calendula, sage, lemon balm, valerian, motherwort, flax, nettle, and marshmallow.  Now I just have to figure out what to do with them start using them to make those teas, tonics, and healing recipes!