Here's a link to the Richter's Herbs website:
richters.com
They have an online catalogue as well as all kinds of neat "stuff"...information, etc.. on there. Of course, it's extra nice to have the print catalogue to be able to read when you kick off your boots and lie back on the sofa at the end of the day.. so you might prefer to go to the site and just get a catalogue for now. (o:
They are a Canadian company, BTW, but I think they can ship a lot of their seeds and other things into the US. Nice thing is that you have the currency exchange on your side... unfortunately not the case for me. I used to buy from Johnny's and some others, but the exchange rate and various extra shipping charges, etc.. are such a killer that I pretty much stick to Canadian sources such as Richters, and Dan Jason's "Salt Spring Seeds" in B.C. as well as a couple of places down in Nova Scotia.
Anyhow, you might really enjoy the Richter's catalogue. The Richter family has been selling herbs since the 1960s and they are very much into the ethnobotany end of things. They sell seeds for plants from all over the world and have a wide range of culinary and medicinal herbs used by cultures everywhere. There is a strong emphasis on traditional medicinal herbs -- particularly Chinese medicinal herbs as well of those used by various Native peoples here in the Americas. Their print catalogue is well-organized and often includes brief notes about where and how a plant has been traditionally used, and they are very much into coding each entry for climate zone, use, etc...
I have been collecting herbs for quite a long time now. I like to grow medicinal herbs...not so much because I would use many of them.. but probably more for their beauty and the traditions which they represent. You may already know this, but many of the more unusual medicinal herbs have interesting physical properties (shapes, textures, odors, roots), and were often thought to have some quality...often a shape...which related to the part of the body that they would heal.. such as kidney-shaped leaves perhaps healing kidney ailments, etc... The biggest challenge up here is to find plants that will survive our winters. I guess I have about 80+ extremely hardy herbs growing in the gardens around here so far, but there may well be more as I've sometimes lost track of plants over the years. Some have become very naturalized over the past 20 years and now grow all over the place, both in the gardens and just around the property now (a few kinds of thymes, a couple of kinds of Tansy, Lady's Mantle, Cicely, Lovage, Echinacea, 3 or 4 kinds of Yarrow, Ajuga, mints, etc..). A lot of the herbs also attract bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, of which there are many around the farm.
BTW, I don't know if I've ever said much about the farm before, but we came here around 20+ years ago. When we bought the land, it was approx. 60 acres of "nothing-ness". It had been part of a potato farm for about 80 years, and it was sandy, nutrient-depleted soil with only 2 large trees on the front part of the property and a small forest at the back. We built our barns, a studio, and a house all in a couple of years, and got a batch of tree seedlings from the Ministry of Natural Resources each spring. I would usually order 1 or 2 thousand and plant them all over the place. We grew oats on about 20 acres of our land for quite a number of years, and pastured goats on another 10 or so acres, but just left the other 30 acres to do it's own thing along with the trees which I kept planting each year (a very mixed selection by the way). Now, since selling off the livestock a few years ago, the whole piece of land is just returning to nature with the exception of a bit of land around our house. Back in the early years, we barely saw a bird or butterfly around here. No mammals at all. It was like a wasteland for the first decade. Then, gradually, the native plants came back along with the new forests which I had been planting. Now, this is a very interesting place. Lots of biodiversity, and an amazing number of native plants and wildflowers.. mostly seed blown in on the wind or transported by birds passing through. The butterflies and birds are very rich in variety now, which is great. And we have fox and brush wolf dens here on the farm... porcupine, raccoons, and a small herd of deer that yard here in the winter. When I think of how much the land has changed in 20 years, it never ceases to amaze me.. how well the process of natural regeneration works when the land is given some freedom to do as it will. Rather a good thing to think about whenever I look around at the countryside and start feeling that things are getting kind of beat-up looking everywhere... (o: |
