Immune-Boosting Plants
OSGF
This blogpost discusses the historic and current medicinal uses of various plants. While some of these plants may help boost your immune system, they should never be substituted for medicine or treatments prescribed by your healthcare provider. OSGF recommends consulting with a medical professional before adding anything new to your diet or medicine cabinet, particularly if you are pregnant, nursing, or are taking any medications.
As COVID-19 cases continue to rise around the country, we also find ourselves sunk into the depths of cold and flu season. It’s a daunting triple onslaught, and ensuring that we are keeping our immune systems in tip-top shape is one way to fend off illness (along with mask-wearing, hand-washing, and other WHO recommendations!)
While the immune system is complex and many factors can influence its effectiveness, a balanced balanced diet consisting of a range of vitamins and minerals can help prime the body to fight off infection. Perhaps the best place to turn for such support is your garden (or farmer’s market) - a source of herbs and plants that, throughout history, have given a boost to winter dishes and helped to see people through countless cold and flu seasons.
At the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, our Biocultural Conservation Farm is full to bursting with incredible edible plants that have been used throughout history to keep humans healthy. Even humble pantry staples such as garlic and onions have powerful antibacterial and immune-boosting properties, and when combined with other plants in tonics like elderberry syrup and fire cider, they can help keep your body ready for a tough winter.
Scroll down to read about a few of the immune system-supporting plants grown at the BCCF, and watch the video below to learn how to make elderberry syrup and fire cider!
Elderberry
Sambucus canadensis from “The Family Flora and Materia Medica”(1789-1876).
You’ve likely seen purple-hued products touting the benefits of elderberry lining the shelves of your local pharmacy. Thousands of years before the plant started going viral on social media, people throughout the world were well aware of the flowering tree’s useful medicinal properties. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates referred to it as “the medicine chest,” and throughout what is now the United States, Native American healers used all parts of the plant to treat everything from rheumatism to headaches. Modern research has since proven what our ancestors were well aware of: laboratory studies have show that elderberry can alter the activities of cytokines, which signals molecules for the immune system to ramp up and down - a possible explanation for why the plant is such a good cold and flu-buster.
Elderberry growing at Oak Spring. Photo by Christine Harris.
The two types of elderberry you’re likely to find in syrups and other products are Sambucus canadensis (native to the Americas) and Sambucus nigra (native to Europe). The BCCF doesn’t cultivate elderberry, but there are plenty of American Black Elderberry shrubs to be found growing wild on the Oak Spring and Rokeby properties (it puts out beautiful flowers in the summer). While it’s not a good idea to eat elderberries fresh - like several other edible plants, they contain chemicals that can metabolize into cyanide - boiling them into a syrup results in a tasty, immune-boosting tonic. BCCF manager Christine Harris, who has years of experience making elderberry syrup, shares her recipe and tips in the document below:
Ginger
Ginger is another well-known immune-booster, and for good reason: aside from being a diaphoretic (meaning that it increases sweating and warms you up), the root of ginger, a long-stemmed yellow perennial flower, contains many anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, helping to keep your body’s defenses in tip-top shape.
Baby ginger grown at the BCCF. Photo by Christine Harris.
Native to Central Asia, ginger root has been used as a spice and tonic for well over 5,000 years in India and China, and its unique flavor and medicinal usefulness have since given it a place in home remedies all over the world. While scientists have only recently begun researching the compounds of this humble brown root, some studies have shown that it may have cancer fighting-properties - pretty impressive for a plant that goes for about $3 a pound at Walmart.
The BCCF grew its own baby ginger over the summer, which is milder than the mature root and comes without the tough brown skin, saving cooks valuable peeling time. It freezes well, in case you’d like to stock up on this immune-booster the next time your local farmers have a ginger harvest!
Horseradish
Freshly-washed horseradish from the BCCF.
A star ingredient in fire cider - the clean-out-your-pantry tonic invented by herbalist Rosemary Gladstar - horseradish is high in antioxidants and has strong inflammatory properties. A member of the Brassicaceae family native to Southeastern Europe and Western Asia, horseradish has been used medicinally at least since 1500 B.C. in Egypt, where it was primarily applied topically to ease bodily aches and pains. It has remained a popular condiment and home remedy around the world, particularly for those suffering from stuffy noses: its high sulphur levels can help to clear the heck out of your sinuses.
Grated horseradish is a star ingredient in fire cider.
It’s best to harvest horseradish when the ground is cold, so it’s a great spicy immune-booster to have available in your garden throughout the chilly fall and winter months. Oak Spring’s chef and organic farm assistant Saskia Poulos recently used some horseradish from the BCCF in a punch-packing fire cider. See her recipe below:
Turmeric
Some of the BCCF’s turmeric crop from last summer. Photo by Caitlin Etherton.
An excellent pain reliever, inflammation reducer, and digestive, turmeric has been staining counters and brightening dinners for over 4,500 years. It’s native to South Asia and has deep roots in Ayurvedic medicine, but it’s not so new to Virginia. In Mary Randolph’s 1830 cookbook “The Virginia Housewife,” turmeric is a sunny star ingredient in at least a dozen recipes from pickled radish pods to stuffed melons to curry powder.
You’ve likely heard of turmeric being used in golden milk - a traditional Ayurvedic drink that has made the rounds of social media and food blogs in recent years - but it also adds great color and immune-boosting properties to tonics like fire cider. The BCCF grew several varieties of the colorful root this year and froze them for winter use, but if you can’t get a hold of fresh turmeric for your recipes, the dried root works great as well.
Fish Peppers
Photo by Nick Sette
Hot peppers contain capsaicin, a compound that studies have shown could have anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. Hillary Clinton munched down on a fresh jalapeño a day while on the 2016 campaign trail as a way to stay healthy and energetic, and adding spicy dried peppers to immune-boosting recipes such as fire cider can both up the concoction’s Vitamin C content as well as helping to build up your body’s defenses. If you want to infuse some local history into your Fire Cider or other immune-boosting tonic, try using using fish peppers - one of the many heirloom crops grown at the BCCF.
Dried fish peppers waiting to go into Chef Saskia’s fire cider.
This beautiful heritage pepper has a special significance to Virginia and Maryland. According to culinary historian Michael Twitty, fish peppers likely arrived in the United States from Haiti around the time of the island’s revolution, and from there made its way into produce markets. By the late 1800s, it was well established in home gardens in Baltimore’s Black community
Like many heirloom crops, fish peppers faded into obscurity in the 20th century. They were brought back from the brink by celebrated Black Philadelphia painter Horace Pippin and culinary historian William Woys Weaver; Pippin had traded fish pepper seeds with Weaver’s grandfather, a beekeeper, for homeopathic honey bee stings in the 1940s, and when Weaver came across the saved seeds decades later, he shared them with the non-profit Seed Savers Exchange. Today, many chefs, farmers, and organizations in the mid-Atlantic are working to revitalize the historic pepper. If fire cider isn’t your thing, try the tasty fish pepper hot sauces from Soilful City and Woodberry Kitchen!
Want to learn more about the BCCF and the fascinating heirloom crops they grow? Visit www.osgf.org/bccf.