Grating Black Turmeric from our neighbors at Earthaven Ecovillage

Written by Courtney Brooke on April 27, 2021. Posted in Uncategorized.

Transcript from Video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning, Zev.

Zev: Good morning.

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing?

Zev: I am grating this incredible black turmeric grown by Leon with his mad, passionate devotion to beautiful food and medicine plants at Full Circle Far next to Earthaven Ecovillage.

Courtney Brooke: Look at that color of the grated root.

Zev: This is after Courtney Brooke dug it up with Leon, harvested it. Then I had this vision that doing a steam inhalation with it would heal my nasal passages. So I’m working on that and I’m gonna tincture some and make an elixir with some, like Rachel taught us to do. Really excited about this plant.

Courtney Brooke: This plant was dug maybe like a few days ago. On Thursday? Like last week. Just from our neighbor.
I have a motto that I live by that I eat purple things every chance I get because you are what you eat.

Zev: And she wants to be purple.

Courtney Brooke: Yeah.

Zev: Wow.

Courtney Brooke: The smell is intoxicating. It’s not like regular Turmeric, is it?

Zev: No!

Courtney Brooke: The smell is like, what is that? Some people say it’s kind of like….cardamon?

Zev: Camphor? But I don’t know. What do you think, Mom?

Courtney Brooke: What’s Camphor?

Jodi: Hmmm. Camphor usually drives me crazy when people have it in their cedar closets. I would like, oh my gosh. I just accidentally broke open this little Orange one.

Courtney Brooke: Let’s see it.

Jodi: Or maybe this is called yellow.

Courtney Brooke: Wow!!

Zev: Yeah, that’s the one that we call carrot turmeric…

Courtney Brooke: Because we just eat it. It’s so crunchy and sweet and mild. That’s also from just next door at Full Circle Farm. They’ve got that turmeric, the normal turmeric. They’ve also got what they call a red turmeric. And then they grow this also black turmeric.

Zev: Which is actually purple

Courtney Brooke: Which is actually purple. Blessed are we. There’s a saying,….all these, come from the place we call India….And there’s a saying there that says, if you have the black turmeric in your home, you’ll have good fortune and abundance of finances.

Zev: Finances.

Courtney Brooke: So maybe…

Wealthy are we.

Courtney Brooke, Full Circle Farm, tumeric, zev friedman

Courtney Brooke

Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live. Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing. Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between. Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.