Welcome to 1782Farm.com!

The Home of the Simples & Worts Herbal Apothecary and Wellness brands.

Welcome Farm Guests and Herbal Sherpas!

Our Simples & Worts Herbal Apothecary newsletter pays homage to all of you who share our interests in exploring the many diverse herbal lifestyle possibilities which exist for all of us. We’ve been lucky to uncover many of these market gardening traditions, hobbies and pursuits over the past 17 years. During this period we’ve been running our historic site and herb farm, Captain Pollard's Flintlock Farm in mid-central Massachusetts. Our Herbal Apothecary and Wellness Gift Shop can be found at 1782Farm.com.

Herbal Lore

As we're based in Massachusetts, our herbal focus is steeped in the rich history of Colonial New England. The year, 1620, marks the start of North America’s Simples & Worts herbal journey and written history. The English “Pilgrims” arrived at this juncture. But their long herbal history was brought with them from Europe. This legacy is an important aspect as it represents a millennium of herbal lore brought to North America. An herbal Body of Knowledge (BoK), as we currently call them, is the proof of the treatments and concoctions which were prevalent at the time.

Later, this herbal wellness legacy was blended with those practices and traditions of the indigenous North American tribes. Many of these tribes were desecrated by the viruses and plagues carried by the colonizers. Those few tribes which had not succumbed to these pestilences, were few and far between.

Colonial surgeons leveraged herbal lore, and actual experimentation, to help ward off the “bad humors” which afflicted their patients. More on this health balancing concept, later.

In essence, it’s the notion of a documented herbal lore which is the connotation behind our 1782Farm.com and Simples & Worts brand names.

Market Gardening

We’re highly focused on “market gardening” as that’s where the best returns are to be found for the small grower. Market Gardening is the lost art which combines the agricultural production of fresh gourmet vegetables along with herbal plants and flowers in the colonial kitchen garden, or potager. The secret sauce, then and now, is the know-how of building robust soil health, organically… and sustaining it.

Market gardening was developed in France during the late 1600's at Versailles. It was further developed, later, in the 1880’s in and around Paris. We’ll be telling you about the top production “packaged system solutions” or platforms, which mesh Methods, Tools and Training (MTTs) into a set of concise requirements for getting your market gardening / farming operation off the ground, and moving forward. The packaged MTTs which have made a huge difference in our abilities to get ourselves educated, resourced and confident are as follows:

1. Square Foot Gardening (Mel Bartholomew)

2. Holistic Resource Management (Holistic Management Inc.)

3. SPIN Farming (Wally Satzewich, Gail Vandersteen and Roxanne Christensen)

Each of these will be covered in our Pro Market Gardening Track. We'll share our thoughts and many other resources which we've been using for well over 25 years.

Herbal Dimensions

We will focus our free-bee newsletter on the wide diversity of herbal topics and lifecycle categories. These “herbal dimensions” offer our global community a wonderful opportunity to collaborate and share. We will post on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well on other days, based on our farm and life schedules. Our posting lengths will range from short snippets to longer treatises.

You'll learn about our Herbal Sherpas who are those community member who step up to research specific herbal dimensions and who help us to blaze a trail for others to follow, or benefit by. Herbal Sherpas understand that we, as herbal community members, need to leverage the 4 C's to build know-how:

• Communicate

• Coordinate

• Controls

• Collaborate

We would like to offer fee-based educational and consulting guidance, in the future, as “Professional Tracks” for those of you who want to move beyond the hobbyist level in regard to herbal plant growing, nursery operations, plant liner operations and market gardeners.

We’re also planning to provide a fee-based Herbal Collector Series for those of you who are into historic herbal woodblock artwork, like we are.

Culinary Track, and Herbal Art Track,

We'd also like to offer recipe-based content for herbal culinary aficionados. We look forward to diving into more detailed, requirements-based content, for market gardening professionals. Our business objectives are to run a number of unique mini courses , or “Tracks”, which you can be subscribe to, for a very low cost. Each track will consist of a set number of weekly, or monthly, content which is sent to you by our Substack account, or by our website, which can be found at https://1782farm.com.

For instance, our Herbal Professional Track will span topics of interest to prospective herbal plant nursery managers and / or herbal liner business owners. This Pro Track will include herbal content relating to the lost arts of Market Gardening, Pasture-raised Livestock, Whole Farm Planning, Holistic Resource Management (Regenerative Agriculture), Square Foot Gardening and SPIN Farming. SPIN is an acronym for Small Plot INtensive.

Other Tracks

Other more unique, and arcane, Tracks will be covering our other passions of homesteading, green energy management, lost arts and our unique large-scale farm party-giving and entertainment content; Outrageous Outdoor Eating Events (O.O.E.E.).

Our list of herbal apothecary and wellness topics are many. So, too, are our herbal lifestyle dimensions which we have aggregated, as categories, over many years. We will list these topical areas over the next several newsletter issues, so that you can identify, understand, and determine, if our information is right for what you're interested in, and need, for the short and longer, timeframes.

We also want to make it easy for you to judge whether our herbal discussion threads, podcasts and educational courses are not only interesting, but highly inspirational, as well. We also want to cultivate herbal Sherpas's who feel inspired to participate and collaborate with us, going forward. We look to herbal Sherpas to take a leadership role with Simples & Worts community-building, no matter where you may reside around the globe.

Our intention is to provide a free community resource which is devoted to those individuals who are not only interested in herbal endeavors, such as the use of herbs in cooking, but who may have stronger sentiments, such as developing an herbal hobby, or career direction, based on on the herbal educational topics which we want to write about and share with our global community. Some of our ideas may rub off on you.

In essence, we love to share our herbal findings and we take pure pleasure in hearing from our community members who, like us, may be smitten by such topics as the history of herbal apothecaries, herbal lore and the founding of North America's herbal wellness movement and associated Body of Knowledge.

Until we talk with you next… we send you our very best…

Best Regards,

Phil and Beth Wilson