Spring

Herbs to Help You Stay Healthy This Spring

If you imagine stepping from a freezing December day into a sweltering July day, you can only marvel at the body’s ability to adjust to new seasons. Beneath the surface, your body works hard to transition to new seasonal conditions. More than 5,000 genes change their expression from one season to the next, according to research done at Cambridge University.

The seasonal shift from winter to spring may be especially challenging. You can support your body by gently shifting your diet, rituals, and self-care for the new season. Herbs can also be powerful allies. Keep reading to learn some simple practices to help your body transition to spring and discover four herbs that may help you stay healthy this spring.

The Season of Renewal

During the spring, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners recommend simplifying food preparation. You may not be as hungry as the weather gets warmer. Take heed of nature’s cue and eat less. Steam your vegetables, and move toward eating soups with clearer broths and vegetables.

One season may change to the next in a single day on the calendar, but that’s not how your body experiences the transition. Rise slowly from your winter rest and take measures to stay warm in early spring. Avoid doing extreme spring fasts or cleanses. Instead, replace winter food with spring foods one by one, and gradually increase your physical activity as the days lengthen.

Nature offers an amazing way to know which foods and herbs are helpful when: Eat what’s growing near you when it’s growing near you.

Spring Herbs

Traditional Chinese Medicine emphasizes keeping the liver and gallbladder healthy during the spring months to ward off seasonal allergies and digestive problems. Not coincidentally, these common spring herbs are excellent for the health of your liver and gallbladder.

Two of these herbs are wild and two are domesticated. If you’re not used to eating wild foods, it may feel strange to gather food outside. But people have eaten wild plants for thousands of years, and the human diet was once 100 percent wild. Wild foods are usually far more nutritious than cultivated ones. Just make sure you know how to identify them before picking them yourself. Find out how in this article. You can probably also find these at a health food store, farmers market, or herb supplier.

Stinging Nettle

Nettles grow all over the United States in the springtime next to rivers and streams. They’re high in protein, calcium, iron, and antioxidants. In a double-blind study, freeze-dried nettles were found to relieve seasonal allergy symptoms better than a placebo. I drink a nourishing nettle tonic a few days a week; find out how to make it here.

Dandelion

Don’t poison those sunny, yellow-headed blossoms coming up in your yard! Dandelion greens are some of the most nutritious spring foods you can eat. They’re available in the produce aisle of my local gourmet grocery store for $3.99 for a small bundle. Hopefully that makes you feel better about picking and eating them. For a complete primer on the health benefits of eating dandelion, how to pick them safely, and how to transform them into delicious dishes, check out this article.

Cilantro

You’ve likely eaten this herb in salsa or in Thai food. Some people love it; others hate it. If you love it, spring is a great time to enjoy it. It’s packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, and it helps your body excrete toxins, according to a number of studies.

Parsley

Like cilantro, parsley is high in a number of nutrients, especially vitamins A, C, and K, iron, and antioxidants. It’s a perfect aid for sluggish digestion. Chop it to add flavor and color to dishes or infuse it to make a refreshing spring tea.

Lighten Up

Spring is the time to lighten up your meals and increase activity after a long, slumbering winter. Remember, your body’s working hard to adjust to the new season. You may experience annoying symptoms. Headaches, hay fever symptoms, sinus congestion, red eyes, and other ailments are common as the seasons shift. Instead of cursing your body, support it by stepping up your self-care, getting plenty of rest, and eating with the seasons.

Editor’s note: This is a revamped version of an article originally posted on April 17, 2018.

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Why You Should Sync Your Schedule with the Seasons

By Abby Quillen

“Then there are those rare days … that dawn with a clarity that muscles its way into every home and studio and office . . . There’s a delicious radiance that seems to come from the things themselves . . .” – David Abram

We experienced our first spring-like day this weekend — birds singing, sun shining, daffodils in full bloom, windows open. Ahhh.

All day I was bursting with ideas and creativity. Most of us keep making our to-do lists and checking off items right on through the darkest, coldest months. Summer and winter were interchangeable in my former workplaces. Not once did a manager suggest we adjust our work to be more in sync with our natural seasonal inclinations.

But these first spring days have a way of showing us how stubbornly linked our minds and moods remain with the seasons.

One of my friends manages an organic farm. Not surprisingly, his life is more in sync with nature than most of ours. In the winter, he rests or travels. Then in the early spring, he starts working, gradually increasing his hours with the longer days.

But you don’t have to trade your computer for a hoe to get more in tune with nature. One independent author realized that winter was an excellent time to stay inside writing, whereas spring was the ideal time for book releases, so that’s how he arranges his life now. Some companies have started giving employees extra time off during the summer since that’s when people want to be outside and with family. My dad was a freelance writer, and he took nearly every afternoon off in September for fall hikes.

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I’m fortunate to have some flexibility in my working life, so I try to pay attention to nature’s cycles and adjust my life and work accordingly. But it’s not easy because our modern lifestyle — climate controlled houses and vehicles, cities lit up around the clock, ripe tomatoes available year round — are so adept at inoculating us from nature’s whims. Planting a garden helps since I have to pay attention to and cooperate with nature from spring to early fall.

But every spring I realize how hard I’ve pushed myself to keep exercising, producing, and working at full capacity right through the winter elements. I suspect winter colds and influenza are nature’s way of saying, “Enough. Rest already,” since many of us are bad at heeding the weather’s hints.

It’s noteworthy that until relatively recently, many cultures observed the new year in March. These early spring days, with their “delicious radiance” do seem a perfect time for making resolutions, for birthing books into the world, and perhaps for opening new businesses and starting ventures. What might the rest of our work lives look like if could take our natural seasonal inclinations into account?

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Do you adjust your work with the seasons? Could you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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The Most Powerful Thing in the World

By Abby Quillen

It’s March, and as I write this, it couldn’t be lovelier here. (March does have a way of surprising us, doesn’t it?) In these parts it came in with sunshine, daffodils, and birdsong.

Last week I received my copy of the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine, which includes my review of Janisse Ray’s The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. Ray’s book is about seed saving, and it’s part memoir, part poetic manifesto, and part how-to.

Ray presents a bleak scenario about seeds. Ninety-four percent of vintage, open-pollinated seed varieties have been lost forever since the turn of the 20th Century. “Goodbye, cool seeds,” she writes. “Goodbye, history of civilization. Goodbye, food.”

Nonetheless, The Seed Underground is an upbeat read. Ray calls seeds “the most hopeful thing in the world,” and she profiles a handful of “quiet, under-the-radar revolutionaries” who are collecting and exchanging seeds in a quest to preserve our food heritage against enormous odds.

The Seed Underground inspired me to learn more about seed saving and got me excited about experimenting more in my garden this spring. I hope you’ll check out my review if you see a copy of YES! Magazine. I’ll be sure to post it here once it’s available online.

In other news, we survived our long stretch of sniffly, sneezy, fevered February days inside, helped greatly by … a pack of construction paper. Valentines. Glider planes. Homemade kites. Crowns. Cards. Envelopes. Shapes. Handcrafted books. Oh yes, we are making the most of this $5 pack of colored paper. What a fantastic reminder that kids don’t really need expensive toys to have a great time. And often the most basic supplies inspire the most creativity.

I hope you’re also enjoying some good weather, or some creative afternoons inside, or some combination of those, as we are.

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Sunshine

By Abby Quillen

Last week, I told you the story of our rainy days in the color red. Well, the sun finally came out. It feels only fitting to tell you about it in the color yellow.

I hope the sun’s shining wherever you are too.

March Showers

By Abby Quillen

Remember how last month I was bragging about all of our nice weather and our early spring blossoms. Well, this week we’re getting torrents of rain to make up for it. Our backyard looks like a wading pool.

Honestly, I’m not complaining. I was feeling rather overwhelmed with garden and house projects, so the return of winter, with its slower pace and excuses to bake bread and curl up and read books is just what I needed. Of course, my son has other ideas about how we should spend these rainy days.

Here’s the story of our last few days, told in the color red…