How to Grow Beneficial Plants

Hi, this is Rita Hogan and welcome to the Dogs Are Individuals podcast. I'm a clinical canine herbalist and I've been practicing for over 20 years. This podcast is all about your dog through an herbal lens. So let's get to it and dive right in. Hi everyone. Welcome to the podcast. Today's episode, we are going to talk about gardening. We're going to talk about some plants that you can put in your garden this year to help your pets and get acquainted with these plants. I'm going to give you a little some tips on how to basically grow these plants and some references that you can use to help grow plants. I don't have any books in store for growing plants right now. That's probably a couple years from now. So I'm going to recommend some books that you can use to help grow plants. I had a great question on the podcast email. I usually deal with those questions in our short versions of the podcast, but I did have one question. Someone wrote in. Brenda wrote in and asked about mast cell tumor and what mushrooms I would recommend for mast cell tumor. And basically what is the most important mushroom. I would definitely say for mast cell tumor, one of the most important mushrooms is chaga. And as you know, I'm not a huge fan of chaga unless it's ethically sourced. And both Adored Beast and Real Mushrooms both have ethically sourced chaga. Adored Beast has a mushroom forest which is delightful. I love the work that Julianne Lee and Adored Beast are doing with the mushrooms. Her mushroom forest, it's just phenomenal. And then Real Mushrooms grows their chaga on birch trees. I like to combine both powdered chaga and liquid chaga for my mast cell most of my mast cell clients and what I recommend is that you triple the dose that is recommended on the package. The liquid is pretty tolerable. Just work your way up to dosage on the the dried mushroom and you know, if your dog can't tolerate a triple dose, then just bring it down to where they're tolerating it and then you can try again in like a month or so. I would definitely do a good six months on the triple dose. For mast cell tumor, Chaga's excellent at bringing down histamine. Now another mushroom is reishi mushroom, which you can get at real mushrooms. Reishi is antihistamine and then finally turkey tail mushro. But for me, my number one choice in mushroom for mast cell tumors is chaga. Thank you for joining me again. It's been a really great couple of weeks. Lots of stuff going on, doing lots of formulating, having a good time, getting lots of support for my upcoming book. Super excited about that. And if you haven't signed up to get notifications on when my book is available for presale, go to my website. It'll be in the dropdown list. You'll see where you can sign up for that. It's just to let you know about the book. It's nothing crazy. No marketing. I'm not marketing to you through that email. I don't know when my book is coming out. I'm thinking possibly October. I haven't heard it from my publisher yet, but we are, you know, I'm looking forward to it for sure. Okay, let's talk about plants. My first pick in garden plants for people. One of the easiest plants I know to grow is calendula. It's Calendula officinalis or Calendula officinalis depending on how you pronounce it. I've heard it pronounced both ways. This is just a really great non toxic plant. Really can't get into any trouble with, does a lot of self seeding and it's definitely kind of classified as an annual. But I really call it a perennial because where I live it shows up every year without fail and just kind of is like hi, I'm here. So it depends on where you live. It takes about, I would say, I mean it takes about 40 to 50 days to get to its flowering state. And when those flowers come out, you just pop them off and at the base and they will keep coming. I mean they will keep coming. And you can start drying these flowers and breaking, you know, getting the petals off or you can make tincture with them, you can make oil with them. I just did some oil, calendula oil and like a kind of like a flash sale on my website of my calendula oil. I just love, love, love this plant. You know, it's about 18 inches tall, so it's not very tall. And it likes sun, that's for sure. It definitely loves sun and it loves moisture, but it wants kind of like well drained soil. You know in gardening there's well drained soil. People will describe soil well drained. It doesn't want to sit in water. Okay. You know, I pick calendula as like the first plant to you to get to know because it really is easy to grow. Just this past week I went down to the farmer's market. I have a lot of calendula but I went, I wanted to plant some more and I didn't start it from seed last fall or this spring. So I went and got some plants that have already been grown and they're, I don't know, they're probably about 6 inches tall. And I'm putting them in my garden. I am going to dedicate my calendula to a lovely little dog, well, actually quite big dog named Minnie, who recently passed away. And I loved her, just adored her. I never met her, she was a client. But I'm dedicating my calendula that I'm planting to Minnie and I'm putting them right in the ground. But if you're doing it from seed, you can plant, or as they say in gardening, sow, you can sow your seeds in the fall and then they basically overnight, over winter will germinate and come out in the spring. That is the best way to grow calendula because you're going to get stronger plants. But I've never really had a problem with getting plants from the farmer's market. Organic plants or organically grown plants and planting them have done a lot of seed sowing. But either way, I don't think you should get stuck on that. If you are doing it from seed. I would plant them about 3 inches deep and about good 3ft apart because they can get pretty big. And if you're doing a row, I would say one seed for every two to three inches. And then you just cover the seeds with nice kind of damp soil and this just kind of tamp them down. Okay. And there is a herbalist that I really like. His name is Rico Cech and he has a really great book called Growing Plant Medicine. Yeah, it's called Growing Plant Medicine, Volume one. It's a really great book to have. Rico also has really great seeds that you can purchase and he has a gardening book that you can purchase. He also has a medicine making book that you can purchase. His company is called strictly medicinal seeds.com strictly medicinal seeds.com and he has a book again about making medicine called Making Plant Medicine. And that is, I think, in its fourth edition. I love it. And then he has another book that I love called Growing at Risk Medicinal Plants. And I'm actually trying to grow more at risk medicinal plants in our garden right now and not doing the best job, but I'm getting there. So back to calendula. Rico talks about calendula in his book and he, you know, he goes through like, what it is kind of an overview, how to cultivate it, how to harvest it and prepare it, and some of the traditional uses so it's a good book to have. I love Calendula for dogs because again, it's good for wounds, it's good for internal wounds, leaky gut, antibiotic recovery making, tincture making, tea making. And it makes you happy. You just look at it and you're happy. So I really like that one. And then another one that I like is chamomile. Okay. Matricaria rakuta. Chamomile, I think, you know, we're so used to seeing it. Chamomile tea. Everyone knows about chamomile tea, but the thing is, is that it's a really great plant to have and it is lovely and beautiful and loves the soil. You can grow it in pots, too. And you can grow calendula in pots if you don't have a little garden to dedicate to some herbs. Both calendula and chamomile are really easy. Again, they don't take over. I just love chamomile tea. It's nice and cooling, it's relaxing, it's good for the nervous system. It loves sun. So it is a sunny herb. And it doesn't need a lot of, like, soil reconditioning to make it grow. You can grow it from seed. Unlike calendula. You're going to put the seeds in the ground when it's springtime, okay? You're going to just work the ground a little bit and you're going to put the seed in there. And the seeds, unfortunately, are pretty tiny. So you just kind of. You can mix them with sand, you can mix them with a little soil and you drop the soil in to the spot that you're doing it with. I don't get too crazy. I just add a few seeds into the ground. I've never really had a problem with it. The one thing that you want to remember is you kind of have to put pressure on them when you're planting them. After you put the soil over the top, you want to tamp them down pretty well, you know, kind of hard. I'm not sure why. That's the way that my dad taught me. I know that Rico talks about it in his book, so there must be a thing about it. There definitely must be a thing about it. My dad did a. My dad did quite a bit of tamping, except for, like, carrot seeds. He didn't tamp them very well. But he, you know, he. I was always confused at how the seeds were going to come up with that much soil over the top. He assured me that everything was going to be fine. And so the thing with chamomile is, yes, put some pressure on it. Now, I have bought chamomile plants and planted them in the garden. Once they were grown a bit, you can do that as well. Either way, you want to make sure that you keep the plants moist, okay, until they get very established, and that includes the seeds. You want to keep them moist until they start to sprout up. And if you're doing it with plants, you want to make sure that keeping them moist, one of the things that you can't do with chamomile is you can't grow them from like another plant. It. They only grow from seed. When chamomile comes up, you can harvest the flowers and use the flowers. You can dry them in a dehydrator. You can. You can hang them upside down, the plants upside down. I usually use a dehydrator because I love my dehydrator. But you can definitely, you can use it fresh. I find that fresh chamomile tea is much better and more useful than dried chamomile tea. I also only make fresh tincture versus dried tincture. So, you know, there is that different conversation, but just giving you little hints and tricks of the trade. The next plant, you know, I don't know if you need to plant these. They can grow in a pot, but dandelion is a really good plant to grow. If you don't have clean sources of dandelion and you can grow them in your garden, they will. They are, you know, they will, like, come up where they want to. They have a very long tap root. And the secret to dandelion is that if you leave some of the root, it will keep growing back every year. And it's really hard not to leave some of the root. Dandelion grows in, like, zones 3 to 10. You can check out your zone map online and see what your zone is. Those things are pretty easy. And you can Google, like, chamomile zone, calendula zone, things like that, if you want to. If I'm worried about my zone, I usually grow something in a pot and see how it does, and then I'll bring it in if I need to in the wintertime. So, you know, you can look at that. I'm not really, you know, going to go over too much zone information here on the podcast because I just want to go over what plants you should put in your garden, and dandelion is one of them. They are beautiful. The flowers, the leaves, the root. So get the leaves. In early spring, the Flowers when they're in flower, of course. And the root in the fall, that's, you know, if you, if, if you're getting specific about things for sure then you know that's basically when you harvest. So there's not much to say about dandelion except for the fact that it really great plant to have. And if you don't have clean sources of dandelion, I would grow them. They are a beautiful plant and they're a tonic for the whole body. They really love sun, but they'll also grow in some partial shade. They love nice soil, but as you can see they grow almost anywhere and they like water. So I like to filter my water. I put a filter on my hose. I think that a lot of people think I'm crazy when I suggest growing dandelion. But you should, you should grow dandelion. It is beautiful. So. And they're very well tolerated in most places and God, just a wonderful nutritious cooling plant. Another plant that is a little harder to grow than calendula, chamomile and dandelion is echinacea, Echinacea angustifolia or Echinacea purpeia. Zone like three to nine. I love echinacea. I think it's very beneficial. It's beautiful in the garden. Your dogs can self select it. Your dogs can self select all of these things. So, so if they're munching on them, don't worry about it. Echinacea is about, I would say it's about 20 inches tall, 20, 25 inches, maybe a little less, you know, I mean obviously some plants can be, you know, lower, but that's roughly how tall they are. It's important to know how tall plants are. I recently put some violet, which we'll talk about in a minute, underneath our fir tree and I just totally spiked a dizzy and was like putting them towards the trunk and I'm like, what am I doing? I need to put them in the front so I can put the taller plants in the back. I'm working on some shade plants cause we just put in a sun garden. But I need some shade garden and violets are, violets are pretty good. Not in deep shade, but in partial shade they work really well. Echinacea likes full sun and it, you know, it likes pretty much like not deep rich soil. I don't think it. Well, my echinacea plants don't they like more kind of like low soil, kind of not too crazy, but they just love sun. I wouldn't say that Echinacea is easy to grow. So I would highly recommend getting already started plants of echinacea and then planting them because their seeds are a little persnickety and it probably would be better that way. But I definitely would add some to your garden in the full sun. That's what I'm saying. And there's lots of different species of Echinacea, but I really like for dogs, I like the angustifolia and the Purpeia. They're just wonderful. And you can use them in tinctures, you can use them as teas. You can again let your dog like self select them. So just put a few in your garden if you can. If you can't, that is okay for sure. I did want to talk about violet. So violet is just a wonderful little plant to grow. When I mean they first come out in the spring, they're just like, hey, look at me, I'm here. And they really kind of tell you, you know, things are on their way to getting better outside as far as spring and spring has sprung, right. So violets are easy to grow. We're not talking about African violets with the fuzzy leaves. We're talking about Viola odorada or Viola tricolor. I was just at an arboretum in Tacoma a couple of days ago and they had these great violets, Viola tricolor garden. And there were just clumps of them and they were just gorgeous. I highly recommend planting violet. You can make salve out of it. You can add wild chickweed to it and do a lipoma salve. You can do a tea of violet. You can dry them, you can use them fresh. You can make a tincture. Your dogs might nibble on the leaves or the flowers. They definitely can self select them. They're nice and cooling and moisturizing. Just wonderful for the kidneys, the liver, the lymphatics. So violets definitely get a yes. Another one that I might put in a plant, if you're worried about them growing, you know, kind of being prolific is yarrow, which is Achillea milfolium. White yarrow, milfoil, white yarrow. Achillea milfolium. So white yarrow is easy to grow it. You can grow it in a pot and you use the flowers, I like to use them fresh. And you can make a wonderful infused like olive oil or organic sunflower oil. Yarrow infused oil. That is great as a, like a. Oh God, like a sun protector. Sunscreen is the word I was looking for. I learned that from a, a teacher of mine named Erin. She Taught me about using yarrow as a sunscreen. I never knew that. And once I started, I never went back. And you can mix it with any type of, you know, base oil. I like organic sunflower. And then also I do like olive or sometimes apricot. But you need to add a lot of vitamin E to the apricot. So yarrow is it. It grows about two to two and a half feet, sometimes three feet. Again, it's easy to grow it like sun, and a lot of our plants like sun. But this one will tolerate a little bit of shade. Okay. And it's again, it's like dandelion, where it'll grow pretty much anywhere. Any type of, like, soil. It's okay. And it also can stand some cold. It is definitely a perennial that comes up every year. Your dogs can self select it. Just make sure that you use the white yarrow, the milfolium, achillea milfolium. Always know your Latin names so that you know you're getting the right plant. And it is just a lovely plant. It's a stipic plant. So it stops bleeding. The flower will stop bleeding. You can stick it in a wound. It's just a wonderful plant. It's wonderful to have. I love to see my dog's nipple on it. So you are gonna, you know, you're gonna let it grow until you see the flowers and then you can harvest the flowers. You can again use them fresh or dry them. You can use the leaves as well. The leaves are very pretty. They look like little mini ferns. And so to growing yarrow, you can just sow them right into the ground in the spring and you can do it right into the garden. Or you can get plants that are already grown down at your farmer's market by other herbalists and farmers. But the seeds, they definitely don't need that top layer of soil all that much. Just a thin layer. Lightly spread them and tamp the soil down on them. Or you can put them in a pot, so. And then just keep them a little bit moist. And you're going to have yarrow. And again, lovely for infused oil. Teas, tinctures, you know, whatever you want to use. We'll go over yarrow in one of our episodes so that you'll know how to use it. Otherwise, you can check out my monographs on K9Herbalism.com my monthly monographs where I go over one plant per month in detail. So those are a few plants that you can start out with gardening. We will have more gardening in soon. Maybe I'll just continue on with our gardening episode for our next episode coming up in two weeks. I'm just trying to think. One other plant that I really love for dogs to nibble on is skullcap. Skullcap is a good one. Scolateria latiflora. Skullcap is lovely. It's these little like purpley blue flowers, completely non toxic. And dogs love to nibble on them. They're good for like, I like to use skullcap after the rabies vaccine. Skullcap fresh tincture is wonderful in small dosages for dogs. The one thing you need to know about skullcap when you're using it as a tea is it tends to have more of a hypnotic effect as a tea. So I would, you know, be careful of that. Try it on yourself first. Very small amounts for dogs, you know, very kind of sedating. It sedates the nervous system. As a tincture. You don't really get that effect. A couple other honorable mentions is, you know, parsley. So you know, Petrosalinum crispum I believe is the one that is good. Parsley's good. Celery is good. Cucumbers are great. Watermelon is wonderful. These are all things that can be in the garden and your dogs can definitely just, you know, nibble on them, right? Don't be afraid of your dogs eating things that are non toxic. Just let them do it. Let them do it. I'm just thinking of anything. Eye bright is a good one. Marshmallow is another one that's good for the garden. Mullen is good. That's a biennial. So every other year I have beautiful comfrey plants in my garden. And borage, my dogs do nibble a little on them, but not too much. Don't forget about spinach and kale and different vegetables like that chard. And some of our wild plants like cleavers and chickweed, which in my area is kind of past cleavers is just starting to flower. I would highly recommend growing them in planters because they will take over. I don't mind. And. But some people might really be upset about them taking over certain parts of your property. I harvest them for medicine. So I, again, I don't mind, but those are really nice. And then St. John's Wort is coming out. I mean, I think I could go on for days, but that's a start, right? Just start planting things in your garden and seeing what will grow. Just, you know, even if you do it one at a time and, you know, master that plant and, and then start adding another one. Master that plant. Start adding another one. It's really nothing to stress out about, it's just something to help you enjoy gardening and getting out there with your hands in the soil and having your dogs be involved as well. So these are all plants that your dogs can nibble on freely and not have any problems. Again, thanks to my sponsors Adored Beast and and Real Mushrooms mentioned Chaga for Mast Cell Tumor and we will definitely do an episode on mast cell tumor which is a very common tumor in dogs and we'll get to it as the weeks go by. Thanks for listening to this episode of Dogs Are Individuals. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review in your podcast app. And don't forget, sharing is caring. So if you love Dogs Are Individuals podcast, share it with your friends and family who love dogs. This will help me so much. And remember, as a listener, I appreciate you much. Thanks to Resonant Media, my podcast production team. This podcast is produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. Any questions, email the show, go to k9herbalist.com click podcast contact in the menu and then fill out that form and I'll answer any questions here online. Okay, so thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dogs Are Individuals Podcast and I'm going to talk to you in our next episode. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for veterinary care. This podcast doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor, veterinarian or healthcare provider first before starting anything new and that includes herbs. I'm not a doctor and I don't treat disease or prescribe anything. I'm a traditional herbalist providing herbal support education only. Regarding any products I may suggest the statements made regarding these products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The efficacy of these products has not been confirmed by FDA approved research. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. All information presented here on the podcast is not meant as a substitute or alternative to information from your vet. Please consult your veterinary professional about potential interactions or other possible complications before using any product.