Not So Common Thyme

I was harvesting thyme for the market today. It inspired me to blog. The entire bed is covered with beautiful edible thyme flowers and bees, bees, bees. When I water, the bees don't even bother to leave for the duration; they just dance in the rain and carry on.

Thyme is very high in a much-overlooked vitamin, Vitamin K. This vitamin is necessary for bone formation and blood clotting and helping the body assimilate calcium, a mineral along with manganese that is also found in abundance in thyme. Thyme is most known for containing the volatile oil, thymol, which makes it's antibacterial activity strong enough that it actually preserves food (and a few Egyptian mummies) and is known to be a great antioxidant. It has other valuable constituents as well, including terpenoids that are known to have anti-cancer properties. Cook with thyme to help make the food you eat safer from microbial beasties. Put it in salad dressings for taste and health benefits.

As an herbal remedy, it has historically been used as a remedy for a wide variety of ills ranging from coughs and colds to infections to hangovers. It makes a powerful tea so I like to have it on hand all the time.

This is only a single small blog entry and cannot begin to say all there is to say about thyme. So suffice it to say that while thyme is called "common thyme", I find nothing common about it at all.

We have plenty of both common thyme and lemon thyme for the market. Let us know if you want to dry your own and we'll bring extra for you.