Beat Cold Season With the Help of Your Crisper Drawer

Posted in Adult Education on October 23 2013, by Ann Rafalko

Cold season: It’s as inevitable a piece of the New York City calendar as the Marathon, the Thanksgiving Day parade, and New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Colds are miserable and difficult to get over, but that doesn’t mean you have no recourse. In fact your local greenmarket, grocery store, garden, or crisper bin might just hold a few plants that can help you get through the winter with a slightly cheerier demeanor. No, seriously.

Next Tuesday at our Midtown Adult Education Center in Manhattan, Andrea Karo will be teaching you how to make your own herbal medicine kit. Learn how medicinal herbs and lifestyle approaches can help prevent and treat common winter woes including coughs, earaches, fevers, sore throats, and stuffy noses. After seeing easy-to-follow demonstrations for making syrups, soothing oils, natural decongestants, and healthy teas, you’ll go home ready to stock your own herbal medicine kit.

You’ll never look at your refrigerator in the same way after learning how it can help you weather a cold more successfully. For that matter, you’ll never walk through the woods in the same way after taking Leda Meredith’s fascinating new class, Botany of The Hunger Games, where she’ll use her expert foraging skills to separate the plant science from the science fiction in this entertaining and informative course.

Did you know that the heroine in Suzanne Collins’ wildly successful YA series, Katniss, is named after a plant? And it’s not just Katniss. Rue and Primrose are also named for commonly found plants, and the books are full of other fascinating, botanically-derived references. Take a walk through the woods in this class, and you’ll come out with some great trivia and a few woodland survival tips, too.

The NYBG’s Adult Ed courses span the spectrum from homebrewing, to herbal medicine, mushroom foraging, and cultural influences, along with classes for professional horticulturists, aspiring landscape designers, and blooming entrepreneurs. Just have a look at our regularly updated Adult Ed course catalog. We’ll have more for you in the coming weeks, too, as we dig into hands-on horticulture, nature writing and photography, floral design, and all sorts of new fall and winter programs. If you’ve forgotten how easy learning can be when you’re in love with the subject matter, now’s the time to reacquaint yourself.