Violets are one of my favorite spring flowers! They are so bright and beautiful in the bright green spring grass, and I love picking them to add some color to our spring salads. We happen to have many of them growing on our property, so it's easy to collect a handful or two in just a few minutes.

While I've enjoyed eating violets my whole life, I didn't know until recently that they actually have some interesting healing properties.

For example, both their leaves and flowers have mucilaginous properties, helping to moisten and soothe inflamed and irritated tissues. This makes violets a great natural remedy for illnesses that involve cough or sore throat.

In fact, as Rosalee de la Forêt at LearningHerbs.com explains, violets have actually been used to soothe coughs throughout history in Native American, European, and Chinese medicine. One double-blind randomized clinical study of children with intermittent asthma found that violet syrup helped ease and significantly shorten the duration of coughs.

Violet-infused tea, syrup, or honey is also great for soothing dry and irritated sore throats, and may also help to move congestion and stagnant lymph related to upper respiratory infections.

Since it's violet season, I thought I would share this awesome recipe for quick and easy violet syrup. It may be a good remedy to have on hand right now - and you can also freeze it for later use during cold and flu season.

Most of us don't think much about the food we eat beyond what's for dinner. In fact, until recently, many people probably didn't even think about that. We live in a fast food nation, and millions of Americans eat out more often than they eat at home - at least, up until the recent pandemic hit and forced everyone to stay home and start cooking for themselves... 

Growing up on a farm, we thought about food a LOT. Since we grew and raised most of what we ate, thinking about food was a long-term proposition. In the summer and fall, we thought about how much of our garden produce we needed to can and preserve for the winter. When chicks hatched or baby goats were born in the spring, we thought about when and how to butcher and store the meat, and how long it would last our family of 5. Most of the foods we bought at the store were purchased in bulk (whole wheat, beans, dried fruit, oil, and animal feed), so we thought about how much to buy at a time to save the most money possible and make every purchase stretch as far as we could. In the spring, we tapped maples and boiled and bottled maple syrup. In the fall, we harvested honey from our bee hives and poured the thick golden sweetness into jars to last throughout the year.

When you raise your own food, your life becomes about food in many ways. This is a far cry from how most people in modern society approach food, and as we have shifted to a mindset of convenience over substance, speed over source, this has been considered "progress." But in a very real sense, distancing ourselves from our food has caused more problems than it has solved.

The truth is, no matter how much we deny or ignore it, how and what we eat impacts our entire world in many important ways.

By making conscious food choices and choosing to learn and care about where our food comes from, we can not only improve our own health, but the health of the entire world - from the farmers who grow our food, to the animals, plants, and soil that support and/or comprise our food, to the environment at large - including water, air, and wildlife.

As the video below explores, food impacts everything, which is why changing the way we eat and working towards a new food system can be so powerful and far-reaching.

The guest on this episode, Mark Bittman, is the author of more than 20 books on cooking and food, including the acclaimed How to Cook Everything series. His new cookbook, Dinner for Everyone, shares how simple and delicious it can be to cook at home, no matter what your dietary preferences are. It's the perfect cookbook to add some easy and tasty variety to your home cooking - which many of us could use right about now!

Watch the interview below to learn why the food we eat can be a solution to many of the issues facing our world today...

As we move forward into what will likely be a long and slow recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, most of us are striving to find a new sense of normalcy in an uncertain and ever-changing situation. While the effects of the pandemic will likely be felt for years to come - both in our economy and our emotional state - there are some potentially positive effects that we can try to focus on.

One of these is the tendency of our human, caring side to come through in times of danger. Many communities are now banding together to care for the less-fortunate among them.

Another positive aspect is our ability to appreciate the "little things" in life, and find joy in small moments that we may otherwise overlook.

Still another positive is the fact that many of us are seeking ways to become more healthy and self-sufficient - whether it be growing some of our own food, learning to cook for ourselves for the first time in years, or taking charge of our own health, cutting out unhealthy habits, and learning natural ways to strengthen our immunity.

This summer's Immune Defense Summit online event comes at a time when this topic is top-of-mind for many of us. In preparation for this event, there are a number of helpful resources that you can access right now to help build up your immune system and increase your odds of staying healthy.

I will be sharing these free resources with you via email and social media over the next few weeks, but first of all, I wanted to share a very interesting eBook that I think you will find quite eye-opening. Inside, you will learn what the media hasn't been telling you about the coronavirus, particularly when it comes to how to actually protect yourself from viral infections like this one.

You can grab your copy here now, or read more below...