Plant Walk at Meeting House Farm - June, 2024

Take a walk with Emily Springer through the medicinal herb gardens at Meeting House Farm in Scarborough, Maine! 🌿

0:00
Welcome to the farm! I'm so excited to show you around today. We're going to take a little plant walk and see what's in bloom. This is Meeting House Farm and my name is Emily.

0:18
Our first stop is here in one of our shaded beds. This is Black Cohosh and Black Cohosh is just about ready to bloom not quite and growing really well with Black Cohosh is Solomon’s Seal and you can see underneath here that the bloom has passed and the berry is forming. These berries will be purple on our next plant walk. Let's keep going.

0:44
As we move into the sunny beds, you'll notice that we have rows of Lavender. This is a Czech Lavender that does really well here in Maine with our cold winters that recently have not had much snow. So this variety really thrives here. We also have beautiful Feverfew blooming right now.

1:39
This is an amazing Mullein. She's such a gorgeous lady. These plants originally came to me as a gift from Deb Soule of Avena Botanicals.

2:45
So this is another just a closer look at the Absinthe also known as Wormwood. It has a beautiful silvery foliage. And right behind it is our beautiful Yarrow fully in bloom right now in late June. This is white Yarrow, which is the medicinal variety and it's just stunning. You do sometimes get a little bit of color variation. You can see there's a pink one back in there. That's also medicinal - it’s a natural color variation.

3:44
Here we have our Nettle bed which was just harvested cut back we used what was cut to be made into a Nettle ferment for the plants and we will get a second and third flush in August September timeframe. Behind the Nettle we'll see our Mint patch and this is close to blooming and also will be harvested in the next few weeks.

4:27
You have your Eleuthero here. It’s a Siberian Ginseng. And we do harvest from the bark. We have four of those plants in here. This is a wild lettuce, which just sprang up but it is interesting and beautiful so we've left it. We have golden seal here and we are slowly nurturing goldenseal hoping it will continue to spread throughout the bed. And we also have bluebells in this bed in the spring.

5:26
This is St. John's Wort, which is in bloom. You will find it growing wild and we also propagate it here. And this is Elecampane and Elecampane will be blooming in time for our next plant walk.

6:02
In here we have a row of Astragalus. It will bloom and seed as we get closer to fall. And we have Chamomile. We're using Codonopsis which is grown for its root as a ground cover.

6:36
And this is Wood Betony.

6:45
This is Angelica and right next door is Valerian. The plant standing next to me is Catnip and the blooms are a purplish white and this is almost almost blooming. Below it is Catmint. They're often confused.

7:35
This is Lemon Balm. And it is just luxurious this year.

8:08
Coming along here we have two kinds of Echinacea. This is Echinacea purpurea, which may be growing in your garden. It's not blooming quite yet but it will be there soon. Then we also have Echinacea angustifolia which is much more rare.

8:47
This is Marshmallow. Yes, Marshmallow is the reason for the name of the gooey treat. The root of this plant used to be used to make marshmallows but this is also just a beautiful plant to grow. It's a member of the Hollyhock family.

9:24
We have another Black Cohosh here and this is kind of an anomaly so I'll point it out. This Black Cohosh, they usually really prefer more dappled shade, but this Black Cohosh has been here for seven years and she loves it here.

10:09
Here we have our Calendula row this year.

10:24
Here we have Blue Vervain. You can see Blue Vervain is almost ready to bloom.

11:17
So our last bed on this tour and this section is our Arnica bed. This has been harvested for the past two and a half weeks and it’s closing down. And you’ll also notice that we have this Teasel in here.

12:22
So we are here with the roses. It is the end of June and these are just in full glory right now. These are all Rosa Gallica which is a really old variety of Rose. It's not hybridized and they kind of grow all over the place which is charming. Behind the roses we also I’ll just point out that the Elderflower is in bloom. And those are beautiful, statuesque plants back there.

13:14
I hope you enjoyed this plant walk and I hope you'll join us in July for another!