5 Natural remedies for winter wellness

Look in your garden before heading to the pharmacy if you want to ease seasonal sniffles and sore throats.

Making your own cough-and-cold remedies is highly satisfying – not to mention cheap and convenient, especially when someone invariably gets sick when the pharmacy’s closed! Even the most staunch defender of pharmaceuticals is happy to nip out to the lemon tree for the comfort of a hot lemon and honey drink, but a number of common cold remedies have good scientific backing – depending of course on exactly what symptom you want to treat. Coughing at night interrupting your sleep? A 2007 study found two teaspoons of honey at bedtime helped soothe coughs in children better than commercial cough syrup Robitussin.

If it’s the nausea from ’flu that is getting you down, on the other hand, you might want to try ginger, proven to reduce nausea caused by everything from surgery to chemotherapy to pregnancy.

These remedies combine a number of well-attested homegrown ingredients, ranging from delicious to… well, my husband admitted that the onion syrup helped his cough, but very grumpily!

ONION COUGH SYRUP

Onions are the focus of many folk remedies, including wearing a slice in your sock or simply keeping an unpeeled bulb by your bed. The most dubious claim is that the onion will ‘suck up’ infections, viruses and bacteria. It won’t, but the characteristic eye-watering sulphuric compounds in an onion are an effective decongestant. Onion also has what might be called natural anti-infective properties – in that nobody will want to be in the same room with you with this on your breath!

To make the syrup, dice 2 onions and layer them with ½ cup sugar into a clean jar. Shake a little to ensure the onion pieces are evenly coated, put the lid on and leave the jar to sit at room temperature. The sugar will pull the juices of the onion out within an hour or two – feel free to start using the syrup then – but will take a day to fully extract the juice. Once the syrup has finished collecting (about 2/ cup), strain out the solids 3 and store the jar in the fridge. Take one teaspoon every hour as required.

Onion has natural anti-infective properties as nobody will come near with this on your breath!

As anyone who’s eaten a too-hot curry can attest, cayenne pepper thins and liquefies nasal mucus as well as activating sweat glands, which can help reduce a fever.

ROSEHIP SYRUP

If you didn’t get around to deadheading your roses this year, well done! You now have a lovely crop of bright-red, vitamin C-laden rosehips ready for harvest.

Any kind can be used, though the larger hips ( Rosa rugosa and Rosa moyesii are particularly good) are less fiddly.

The highest vitamin C levels are found in species that originated in cold climates; however, on average rosehips contain 20 times as much vitamin C as oranges, complete with bioflavonoids that enhance vitamin C’s absorption.

This syrup can be ‘dosed’ directly off a spoon; mixed into hot water and drunk like a tea; or swirled into porridge or yoghurt.

If you find yourself a fan of the fruity, tropical flavour, rosehips also make lovely jelly.

To make the syrup, boil a full kettle. While it boils, use a blender or food processor to finely chop 500g of washed, topped and tailed rosehips.

Scrape into a medium-sized pot and pour 2 cups boiling water over. Bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes.

Pour the liquid off into a large bowl. Reboil the kettle and pour another 2 cups of boiling water over the rosehips. Bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes as before.

Tip the contents of the pot into the bowl with the rest of the liquid.

Rinse the pot to get rid of any lingering rosehip hairs, then strain the mixture back into the pot through a sieve lined with a clean tea towel.

Press as much liquid out as possible with the back of a spoon.

Bring the liquid to the boil once more, add the sugar and stir until thoroughly dissolved.

Bottle in sterilised jars.

LEMON-HONEY-THYME COUGH SYRUP

Not every cold remedy can do double duty as a glaze for roast chicken, but this one can! The classic lemon-and-honey remedy tastes lovely made into a hot drink flavoured with thyme. It’s perhaps less appealing with garlic, but before you leave it out, remember garlic does help clear out a stuffy nose – and until it does that, you can’t taste it much anyway!

Squeeze the juice of 2 lemons into a saucepan and add ¼ cup honey, a handful of fresh thyme and 2 crushed cloves of garlic. Heat the mixture gently until it nearly simmers, then steep covered for one hour before draining out the solids and bottling. Store in the fridge for up to a week.

FIRE SYRUP

As anyone who’s eaten a too-hot curry can attest, cayenne pepper thins and liquefies nasal mucus as well as activating sweat glands, which can help reduce a fever. Whiskey’s main contribution to this adults-only remedy is in helping you drift off to sleep afterwards, though an oft-quoted Dr Willaim Schaffner claims it also helps calm inflamed mucus membranes by dilating the blood vessels.

Combine ¼ cup honey, 1 tablespoon each of whiskey and lemon juice, 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper and a 3cm chunk of sliced fresh ginger in a small saucepan. Heat until just simmering, turn off heat and leave with the lid on to steep for an hour. Strain into a bottle and store in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. Add a few tablespoons of this syrup to hot water for a toddy, or drink straight off the spoon.

ESSENTIAL OIL SHOWER MELTS

Essential oils are a minefield of hype and misinformation, but it’s fairly safe to say that essential oils with a camphor component are effective decongestants – eucalyptus and tea tree oil being two examples which are fortunately cheap as essential oils go! The basic mixture of these bath bombs is plain, so you can add essential oils ‘to taste’ – adding a little lavender oil to relieve stress, perhaps, or peppermint oil to relieve the achy muscles and nausea of ’flu.

As well as tossing a few bath bombs in the bath, they can be used for steam inhalation. Drop one in a basin of boiling water, sit over the basin with a large towel over your head and the basin, and breathe deeply for a few minutes. Or use as a shower melt – place a few bombs on a shelf in the shower where they’ll be hit by steam but not water, and enjoy inhaling the oils as the bombs slowly dissolve. Combine 1 cup of baking soda, ½ cup Epsom salts and 1 tablespoon citric acid in a small non-metalic bowl. Slowly sprinkle up to 2 teaspoons cold water over the mixture, drop by drop, and stir gently until the mixture reaches a wet-sand consistency. (Adding the water too fast or stirring too vigorously encourages fizzing, which you want to save for later!) Pack mixture firmly into silicone moulds – mini-muffin tins or ice-cube trays work well. Leave in a dry place for 12-24 hours until set firm. Sprinkle 4 drops of essential oil onto each bath bomb – a good basic mix for a cold is two drops each of eucalyptus and tea tree oil. Store in an airtight container for up to a month.