Spring Greens
The arrival of the first green shoots in Spring is a welcome sight, they are at their most nutritious, mineral and vitamin rich, providing important restoration, cleansing and balancing after winter diets and long nights -
their speciality of alchemising light into a digestible form that brightens the spirit.
When plants grow wild - or as ‘weeds’ - they work symbiotically together and with the land harnessing and rebalancing nutrients and soil condition. When we eat what grows most locally to us we become part of this reciprocal dance of restoring harmony. We not only receive the benefits of their symbiotic nutritional wisdom, we anchor this relationship into our cells - we become more deeply interconnected - the land, the plants and us nourishing each other with our presence.
Eating and drinking what the land offers is more than nurturing our bodies, we develop an intimacy with the Earths body, an innate awareness of seasonal flow, the tender miracle and determination of life, how it is sustained and meets it’s needs within an eternal dance of evolving relationship.
Most mornings I break my fast with an omelette, eggs from my hens filled with foraged goodness - in the autumn it is fungi - and now it is spring there are plenty of green shoots on the Croft. Strictly speaking the Croft isn’t wild, though I’ve let her do her own thing and she invites me bit by bit into deepening our reciprocity.
The land is full of nettles, ground elder, primroses, bittercress, bramble shoots and sorrel. Most dry mornings I harvest nettles and ground elder using some in my omelette, drying some for tea and seasoning later in the year, and fill up the large bags I keep in the freezer. Occasionally I add primrose leaves, using the flowers to sweeten tea and top salads with bittercress.
My time with Nettle here, and as a sentient being, means that I can now pick her without getting stung.
In Nettle Flower Sacred Earth Essence she works with Sycamore bringing warmth to relationships, supporting a stabilising, fluidity of healthy boundaries, returning to presence - fully within the body - and a steadiness and balance enabling communicating from embodied feeling.
Bramble shoots are more hearty. Dried they make a great base for tea, I also like to add them to soups, stews, pasta sauces … as well as freeze them. Having made boundary agreements with them earlier this year for pathways, I use the re-emerging shoots where they grow back. Bramble has shown me their importance of reestablishing land, often working with
Docks who draw nutrients from deeper within the soil. Young dock leaves can also be used in salads and cooked - though I tend to dig up the whole plant to make a nutrient rich ‘tea’ for plants by soaking them in barrels of rainwater. I add the Nettle roots to the barrel too, drying some for a mineral rich medicinal tea, they are tasty, though I find them a bit woody for a vegetable.
The Gorse blooms are as vibrant now as they were over Winter and soon I will be drying them - returning full circle to the lands invitation and unspoken gift of the powerful Purification and Protection Drops.
Staying put means travelling more deeply through the layers of the hidden Earthly realms, staying still enables those layers to expand and rise up to meet me. It is a form of travel I spent nearly 30 years cultivating. But it took broadening my horizons ,and travelling extensively geographically, to return and experience that deep intimacy with the Earth in one place,
to fully understand the delicate detail, sweet exquisiteness, responsive dance and deep traction of belonging.
with much Love,
from my Heart to yours,
Tania Aurora White Crow