Grow your own!

I am on a lifelong quest to be my own doctor. My family relies on me also to teach them and learn with them the essentials in taking care of this temple!  We are all learning to pay attention to the subtleties that our bodies speak in when they are healthy and how loud they can speak when our health has been overlooked!  We have cast aside books on nutrition, seeing that they all say something different and so many contradictory messages! So we have turned to what we have found is a constant theme in our lives. Simplicity. It always works for us.  We figure the good food that is grown on our land, like taro and cassava and the milk from our grass fed cow, the greens that grow abundantly and the fruit from our trees will supply us with all that we will need to keep our bodies healthy.  I am always shocked when I go to the grocery store and see the prices of food and items called "food"!  I should not be so shocked anymore and just realize the reality of it and the emergency of it! My views on the food crisis has not come from news reports or health food extremists, but from my own observations of the quality of food and how I feel after I eat anything that I thought was food but in actuality was not. Slowly but surely I see my family strengthening in their resolve to eat real food!  the more we eat from our land the easier it is!  In our journey of planting food, we also are planting medicinal herbs.( Not marijuana, and i wish Greenharvest would stop flying their 'copters over my land seeing if i am! They are very noisy!) Comfrey circles as many fruit trees as we can plant. Not only is it great medicine but it also keeps the weeds from taking over the trees and the leaves are fantastic mulch and fertilizer for them. When we first moved here, I took a handful of plantain seeds (plantago major) and scattered them. Now it comes up every summer! Chickweed comes wherever i put a garden and she is well welcome!  I hope to learn more of the native herbs to replace the ones that I purchase. I dont like relying on anything I have to ship 3000 miles! Recently I made another batch of salve. Some is left like oil and some i added beeswax. We use this oil for just about everything, from massage to owies, for poultices, hair conditioner, you name it we probably have used it for that!  It is fun to know how to make things like this, now if I can make my own oil! Then I would not need to buy olive oil, although the nutritional benefits from olive oil are unsurpassed! I am not opposed to buying the things we want or need, i just feel the desire to lessen my dependence on those things and to learn how to obtain those things in a more wholistic way.