Herbalism isn’t just about ingesting plants, it’s about living in a mutually supportive relationship with them. The ‘medicinal’ part that we focus on is really just a bonus. Here’s an example from our garden.
Folks ask sometimes ask is why we have so many Spider Plants (Chlorophytum cosmosum) under our front porch?
One reason is that once you’ve got Spider Plants, you have no choice but to have more
But besides being edible, they are amazing at filtering and cleaning air. The leaf structure on both macro and micro scales effectively filters particles and the plant’s biochemistry breaks down a lot of nasty, airborne chemicals. They’re so good that NASA uses them for this purpose.
We have also found a species (or maybe more) of tiny Orb Weaver Spiders that love to live amongst the leaves, making an effective pest barrier. They must live on gnats and mozzie because the other critter that seasonally makes them their home is the Green Looper Caterpillar, whose size dwarfs that of the tiny spiders.
Their parents lay eggs on the Spider Plants in preference to our Brassicas and they’re easy for me to find as they leave the tale take signatures of lots of little pellets and well chewed leaves. I cam easily pick them off to feed the chooks who. It’s beautifully efficient – leave the front door, pick a few bugs and head down the path to the mailbox, feeding the chooks on the way. It’s minimal effort, just the way I like it.
This way, too, the chemicals from the air are further broken down. First the plants capture them and break them down, then their products are metabolised by the caterpillars, then they are further broken down by the chooks before being sent to the deep litter for microbes and fungi to further decompose them
It’s a very simple and very effective system that leverages our mutually beneficial telationship with the Spider Plants to contribute to our overall health by cleaning the air, feeding the chickens and feeding the soil that feeds us. We don’t even have to eat the Spider Plants to improve the the health of the garden and ourselves.
Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden
We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are –
