Hi folks.

We had a nasty hack infecting the server this blog lives on.

I’m partway through cleanup — this blog is online again (let me know if parts are broken), but the herbwifery forum is proving harder to fix. I am working on it, when the toddler allows!

Thanks for your patience.

(Maybe this will get me blogging again, for real!)

Miss Jean Louise, our June baby. Keeping me busy and happy.

So I’ve been busy lately.

Not a lot of energy for blogging (building a human is a bit tiring, apparently).

But I was inspired to go to a meeting of local folks interested in food and farming today. It was lovely to see so many different people ready to start new local food projects!

Maybe I will be motivated to blog, now that I’m about to have an infant to take care of. (I never claimed to make sense.)

Whenever I hear about new medical research, I always ask one question first: who funded it?

Too often, reporters — even reporters for respected news sources like Reuters — don’t give us this essential information when they cover new studies.

Take, for example, the flurry of recent news items with titles like “Morning sickness linked to smarter babies” and “Study links morning sickness to higher IQ.” I found this kind of an intriguing idea, so I read the Reuters article. The article didn’t mention the study’s funder, but the very small size of the group they studied, and the fact that they also studied the safety of a drug for morning sickness, made me suspicious.

A quick visit to the website of the Journal of Pediatrics, the study’s publisher, showed me I was right: the fine print on the abstract indicated that the study was funded by the maker of the anti-nausea drug, and one of the study’s authors is a paid consultant for the company. Why, exactly, didn’t Reuters think this was worth mentioning?

The only article I found (on an admittedly cursory search) that brought up the obvious problems with the study was this one on the website doublex.com.

The Herbwife’s Fiancé has his own blog now.

(Yes, that’s the Herbwife’s Fiancé, recently upgraded from the Herbwife’s Boyfriend.)

• You know it’s been raining a long time when you can pull a yellow dock root straight out of the ground without any effort. #

• Stepped on a wasp. Thank goodness for plantain spit poultices! #
• Rest peacefully Juliette de Baïracli Levy. http://bit.ly/JAdJY #

• Late frost. #
• Off to cover the frost-tender plants! #
• Our neighbor’s eggs with seven herbs from the garden. (Savory, parsley, marjoram, thyme, oregano, tarragon, sage.) Good morning! #
• Surprised at the extent of the frost damage on my spearmint. #

• Frustrated that the USDA plants site is down. #
• At an herbal consult last week… Client: Can I make my tinctures with moonshine? Me: Why not? (I love being an herbalist in West Virginia.) #
• So glad Matt Wood included tuliptree in the New World volume of the Earthwise Herbal! #
• Wondering where the hops will climb, now that they’ve reached the porch roof… #
• Trying to fix my poor hacked blog. (Thanks, Ellen, for letting me know!) #
• On my way up the mountain with plant-geeky friends! #
• So excited about the lovely calamus patch I found on the mountain today! #
• Our neighbor’s eggs with our other neighbor’s scallions and a morel from yesterday’s walk on the mountain. #
• The boy is an ice-cream-making fiend. This time: rose petal. #