Lemon Balm-Melissa officinalis for sale

Buy Lemon Balm

Lemon Balm
Bot. name: Melissa officinalis
Family: Labiatae or  Mint Family
Parts used : Whole plant/Leaves
Chemical composition : The main chemical components are trans-ocimene, cis-ocimene, 3-octanone, methyl hepenone, cis-3-hexenol, 3-octanol, 1-octen-3-ol, copaene, citronellal, linalool, b-bourbonene, caryophyllene, a-humulene, neral, germacrene-D, geranial, geranyl acetate, d-cadinene, y-cadinene, nerol and geraniol.

Common Uses : Beauty , Cardiovascular, Colds, Depression, Herpes, Hypertension, Insect Bites, Nausea, Pregnancy,Sore Throat, Sunburns

Properties : Anodyne, Antispasmodic, AntiViral, Aromatic, Cardic tonic Cordial, Carminative, Diaphoretic/sudorific, Digestive, Emmenagogue, Febrifuge, Hypotensive, Nervine, Sedative, Stomachic, Uterine Tonic,Vermifuge.

Medicinal use of Lemon Balm : Lemon balm is a commonly grown household remedy with a long tradition as a tonic remedy that raises the spirits and lifts the heart. Modern research has shown that it can help significantly in the treatment of cold sores. The leaves and young flowering shoots are antibacterial, antispasmodic, antiviral, carminative, diaphoretic, digestive, emmenagogue, febrifuge, sedative, and tonic. It also acts to inhibit thyroid activity. An infusion of the leaves is used in the treatment of fevers and colds, indigestion associated with nervous tension, excitability and digestive upsets in children, hyperthyroidism, depression, mild insomnia, headaches etc. Externally, it is used to treat herpes, sores, gout, insect bites and as an insect repellent. The plant can be used fresh or dried, for drying it is harvested just before or just after flowering. The essential oil contains citral and citronella, which act to calm the central nervous system and are strongly antispasmodic. The plant also contains polyphenols, in particular these combat the herpes simplex virus which produces cold sores. The essential oil is used in aromatherapy. Its keyword is "Female aspects". It is used to relax and rejuvenate, especially in cases of depression and nervous tension.

Description of the plant
Plant : Perennial
Height : 70 cm (2 feet)
Flovering : June to October
Scent : Scented
Edible parts of Lemon Balm : Leaves - raw or cooked. A pleasant lemon-like aroma and flavour, they are used mainly as a flavouring in salads and cooked foods. A lemon-flavoured tea can be made from the fresh or dried leaves. A bunch of the leaves can be added to china tea, much improving the flavour, the leaves are also added to fruit cups etc. They are used as a flavouring in various alcoholic beverages including Chartreuse and Benedictine.

Other uses of the herb : The growing plant is said to repel flies and ants. It is also rubbed on the skin as a repellent, though the essential oil would be more effective here. An essential oil is obtained from the plant (the exact part is not specified, it is probably the entire plant and especially the flowering stems). It is used medicinally. The whole plant is very pleasantly aromatic, the aroma lasting for a long time after the plant has been harvested. It is therefore a very useful ingredient in pot-pourri.

Propagation of Lemon Balm : Seed - sow spring or autumn in a cold frame. Germination can be slow. Prick out the seedlings into individual pots as soon as they are large enough to handle and plant out into their permanent positions when the plants are at least 15cm tall. If there is plenty of seed it can be sown in an outdoor seed bed in April. Plant out into their permanent positions the following spring. Division in spring or autumn. Very easy, larger clumps can be replanted direct into their permanent positions, though it is best to pot up smaller clumps and grow them on in a cold frame until they are rooting well. Plant them out in the spring. Cuttings in July/August.

Cultivation : Planting is usually 40,000 plants/Ha. with propagation from seed or cuttings. The plants have a life of 10 years but are usually replaced every five years with crop rotation to rejuvenate the soil. Propagation in the northern hemisphere is from April to July.

Harvesting period : In the first year the crop is in August, thereafter two crops are experienced. The first in June and the second in August.

Harvesting methods : Usually by hand on a clear warm day as the leaves will turn black if harvested wet. For good appearance leaves should not be left in the sun.

Pre-Treatment : Weed control is recommended (Pank). It has been reported that, in Egypt, irradiating seeds has an effect on growth, essential oil content and composition. The quantity of herb was reduced but the oil content was increased, with the irradiation dosage varying the proportion of the constituents.

Preservation and Storage : The oil should be stored in filled sealed containers, out of light and kept cool. The oil is subject to oxidation.

Lemon Balm -Melissa Officinalis seeds/leaves are available at :
The Jammu and Kashmir Medicinal Plants Introduction Centre
Meet to us at :"Ginkgo House", Azizabad, Nambalbal, (Via Wuyan-Meej Road), Pampore PPR JK 192121
Or
Jammu and Kashmir Medicinal Plants Introduction Centre
POB: 667 GPO Srinagar SGR JK 190001
Mob: 09858986794
Ph: 01933-223705
e-mail: jkmpic@gmail.com
home: http://jkmpic.blogspot.com

Anti-Cancer and Medicinal Plants

Taxus baccata Linn

Plants (Rare from Kashmir Himalaya)
Available : Size of plant : 10-15 inch
Min. order : 50 plants
Taxus  leaves
Available  : 500/1000/5000 grams
Podophyllum hexandrum
Available :Plants/Roots/Seeds

For more details : http://jkmpic.blogspot.com
The Jammu and Kashmir Medicinal Plants Introduction Centre
"Ginkgo House" Azizabad, Via Wuyan-Meej Road, Nambalbal, Pampore PPR JK 192121
Or
POB: 667 GPO Srinagar SGR JK 190001
Ph: 0193--223705
e-mail: jkmpic@gmail.com

Kashmir Is Killing India’s Military and Democracy

Buy Howthorn seeds

By Pankaj Mishra
More details: http://www.bloomberg.com
In July 1995, an Islamic fundamentalist group called Al Faran kidnapped six foreign tourists, including two Americans, in Kashmir. For a few weeks, the world’s attention was fixed on the Himalayan valley as the allegedly Pakistan-backed militants negotiated with Indian security officials and foreign diplomats.

Eventually, one of the Americans escaped. Another hostage, a Norwegian, was beheaded. The other four were never found.

“The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 -- Where the Terror Began,” a staggeringly well-researched new book by two respected journalists, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, concludes that the hostages were killed by local mercenaries funded and controlled by Indian army and intelligence.

The authors argue that the drawn-out negotiation, during which Indian intelligence allegedly knew the hostages’ whereabouts, was a charade, part of India’s larger effort to portray Pakistan as a sponsor of Islamist terror, thereby delegitimizing the Kashmiri struggle for freedom.

Certainly, India today no longer needs to highlight the role of the Pakistani army and intelligence in sponsoring extremist groups. It has also succeeded in shifting international attention away from the appalling facts of its counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir -- tens of thousands killed, and innumerable many tortured, mutilated and orphaned. The tallying in 2009 of 2,700 unmarked graves containing the remains of people (often buried in groups) killed by security forces barely provoked any comment in the international media, let alone expressions of concern by Western leaders.

Killers in Khaki
But India’s diplomatic and public relations success has been achieved at considerable costs: the rise of militaristic nationalism, the assault on civil liberties, and a dangerously enhanced role in politics for men in uniform.

Most of the million-plus men and women in the Indian military still manifest what Shashi Tharoor once described as “increasingly rare” qualities in India: “high standards of performance, honesty, hard work, self-sacrifice, incorruptibility, respect for tradition, discipline, team spirit.” As a child, I had myself wanted, like many Indians of my generation and class, to acquire the virtuous glow of an army officer’s uniform, and even attended a military school.

It was therefore shocking and demoralizing to encounter, during a visit to Kashmir in 2000, accounts of extrajudicial killings and torture and rape by Indian soldiers -- stories that, though commonplace in Kashmir, were largely kept hidden from the Indian public by a patriotic media.

But to those who reported from Kashmir in the past decade and a half -- as opposed to the many more who were content to disseminate briefings from Indian army and intelligence officials -- “The Meadow” presents a disturbingly familiar picture.

I was there when, during Bill Clinton’s visit to South Asia in March 2000, Indian army officers allegedly kidnapped and killed five Kashmiri villagers and presented their mutilated corpses to the international news media as the Pakistani killers of the 35 Sikhs who had been murdered by unidentified gunmen just hours before Clinton’s scheduled arrival in India. It has taken 12 years for India’s legal system even to acknowledge this well-documented atrocity: Last week, the Supreme Court gingerly asked the army how it wishes to prosecute the officers suspected of the coldblooded murder.

Since 2000, the number of armed militants has steadily decreased in Kashmir. But the human rights situation has not improved. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in effect in Kashmir and the northeastern states (where the Indian army was first deployed in counter-insurgency), soldiers can kill on the basis of mere suspicion while continuing to enjoy near-total legal immunity.

Regime of ImpunityThe result is a regime of impunity. A coalition of Indian human rights groups in a report to the United Nations this year documented 789 extrajudicial killings in the northeastern state of Manipur alone between 2007 and 2010.

In recent years, the army has also been dragged into Operation Green Hunt, the Indian state’s extraordinarily big, armed offensive against Maoist insurgents in central India. Predictably, the use of scorched-earth tactics once deployed in border areas has undermined the general rule of law in the states of Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and West Bengal.

The widened powers of the military against the new electronic media’s background chorus of hypernationalism have given army officers a public role they never had. Breaking with old protocols, the previous army chief openly speculated about a “limited” war under a “nuclear overhang” with Pakistan.

It is also not at all clear if there is any proper governmental oversight of the Indian intelligence agencies, which, mimicking the doomed Pakistani quest for “strategic depth,” have been trying out potentially useful proxies in Pakistan’s Balochistan province as well as Afghanistan. These adventurist spies and the perennially belligerent men in uniform now seem to constitute as formidable a lobby against peace between India and Pakistan as the Islamic zealots on the other side of the border.

Backed by Hindu nationalist leaders, they even dare to overrule elected politicians such as Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s chief minister, who has been pleading in vain for a withdrawal of the much-despised special powers act.

Their jingoism, echoed by hawkish think tanks and websites (India’s own military-intellectual complex), goes necessarily together with dubious arms purchases. India is now the world’s biggest arms market; a series of scandals have not stopped spending sprees that, as the recent outbursts of the outgoing army chief reveal, do little to prepare India for any conceivable war.

No Banana Republic
Things are about to get worse. The next Indian army chief comes into office later this month, trailed by allegations of his involvement in an extrajudicial killing in Kashmir. He was also in charge of Indian peacekeeping soldiers accused in 2008 of sexual misconduct in the Congo.

Unlike its Pakistani rival, the Indian army remains firmly under civilian control. A sensationalist recent story in a major Indian newspaper claimed that unauthorized movements of soldiers near New Delhi earlier this year had “spooked” the government. But it is hard to imagine the foolhardy army officers who would attempt a coup in India. Although beset by internal wars and draconian laws and chaotic governance, India is very far from degenerating into, as an exasperated Ratan Tata feared last year, a “banana republic.”

Yet there are plenty of reasons for alarm and dismay over a process that, starting in obscure battles in the northeastern states in the 1960s, was accelerated during the two previous decades in the valley of Kashmir. Levy and Scott-Clark’s book mainly excavates one of the many murky incidents of the 1990s. But its revised draft of history also sheds light on the present -- how a democratic state’s addiction to colonial-style dirty wars has damaged not so much the Kashmiri cause of freedom as India’s frail democracy and one of its last uncompromised institutions.

(Pankaj Mishra, whose new book, “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia,” will be published in August, is a Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Today’s highlights: the View editors on bank-capital rules and force-placed insurance; William D. Cohan on e-mails from the fall of Lehman; Albert R. Hunt on congressional elections; Michael Ross on Vladimir Putin’s oil-money machinations.

About Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond," "The Romantics: A Novel" and "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World."
To contact the writer of this article: Pankaj Mishra at pmashobra@gmail.com.

Crocus bulbs for sale

World's most expensive Saffron bulbs are vailable for trail purpose.
Beset quality.Open-pollinated.Untreated.No GMO's @ 55/per bulb.
Interested buyers can contact us at

Sheikh GULZAAR 
Head
The Jammu and Kashmir Medicinal Plants Introduction Centre
"Ginkgo House". Azizabad, Via Wuyan-Meej Road, Nambalbal, Pampore PPR JK 192121
Ph: 9858986794
e-mail: jkmpic@gmail.com
home: http://jkmpic.blogspot.com