Herbs

The Best Online Classes for Learning Traditional Skills – Bread Making, Fresh-Milled Flour, Homemade Cheese, Herbal Medicine, Canning, Preserving, Gardening, and More…

Traditional Skills That Are Making a Comeback

If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you know that I love the classes at Homesteading Family. I’ve learned so much from them – bread making, sourdough, homemade cheese, canning. Their classes on herbal medicine, preserving, and permaculture are a great starting point if you are wanting to learn more about traditional homemade skills. The skills that our grandparents knew are becoming less commonly known, if not forgotten altogether, but they are so much more important to our daily lives as grocery prices soar and uncertainty looms around the corner. Consider these Homesteading Family Classes as a way to take back some of your independence and the skills we have lost.

Read to the end for a special coupon code! Take advantage of this discount code just for Maggie Lane subscribers!

Traditional Food Preparation Skills

1. The Art of Homemade Bread

This course covers yeast and sourdough. It is broken down step-by-step so that anyone can do it. If you’ve tried to make bread before and failed, this course is for you. By the end you’ll know just what to do to achieve the perfect loaf every time. What’s the secret? Knowing how to read the dough. The course gives you benchmarks at each step to know when your dough is ready for the next step.

2. Homemade Dairy Masterclass

Think you can’t make use of this class because you don’t have a cow? Think again. You can make all the recipes in this course using store-bought milk. Every recipe I’ve made have been made with milk from the store. The course starts out simple and builds your skills so that you can make the simplest fresh cheese all the way up to mozzarella or hard cheeses like cheddar and parmesan. No special equipment needed. You can use the things you already have in your own kitchen.

3. Baking with Home-Milled Flour

Want to learn the ins-and-outs of milling your own flour at home. This mini-course is a great companion to the Art of Homemade Bread class and gives you even more tips on using fresh-milled flour at home.

Food Preservation Techniques

4. The Abundant Pantry Canning Masterclass

Learn how to safely water bath and pressure can in this masterclass. This comprehensive course gives you step by step instructions in over 70 lessons. You’ll get all your questions answered and learn to can with confidence. This class will remove all the doubt in eating your home-canned food.

5. Preserving Eggs & Wild Milk!

If you have your own animals, these two classes will help you know what to do with all those eggs from your chickens and milk from your cow rather than give them to the neighbors. Learn to preserve your eggs like they are fresh for over a year, and find out how to use the good bacteria naturally present in your raw milk to your advantage.

Medicinal Herb & Garden Skills

6. The Herbal Medicine Cabinet

Discover how to grow, harvest, and prepare your own herbal remedies. This beginner course is just what you need if you’ve been wanting to learn how to make your own teas, tinctures, gylcerites, syrups, herbal vinegars, oxymels, and steams, but don’t know where to start.

7. Permaculture

Learn how to work with nature in this introductory course to growing a productive and sustainable garden. Gain the basic skills you need to maximize your food production and provide your family with good home-grown food.

Household & Kitchen Resources

8. Handmade Home

This course is part of Homesteading Family’s Homestead Kitchen Membership. It covers soap making and making your own herbal oil and salves.

9. Home Management

Gain tips on managing a busy home, homeschool, and homestead. From tips to streamline breakfast to managing your time and finding joy in your day, let this course guide you to peaceful productivity.

10. In the Homestead Kitchen Magazine

This digital and print magazine is a beautiful addition to your coffee table and a valuable resource to your kitchen. The kitchen is truly the hub of the home. Whether your homestead is acres of land or a tiny balcony garden, you can make use of these tips and recipes in any kitchen. Take your cooking from scratch skills up a notch. This will soon become your favorite cookbook!

Want access to all these classes and more?

Homesteading Family offers a monthly or annual membership to their Homestead Kitchen Community. Membership offers you all these classes plus access to members-only content and challenges.

Whether you’re seeking greater self-sufficiency, trying to balance the budget, or simply wanting to experience the joy of making things at home, these online courses offer guidance and experience that makes traditional skills accessible to anyone.

Special BONUS for Maggie Lane readers!

Enter your email below to get the Homesteading Family coupon code.

Click here for your FREE Coupon Code for Homesteading Family!

View Homesteading Family classes here.

Not ready to sign up for full class? These FREE trainings might be just what you need.

FREE Dairy Training – click the link to sign up.

FREE Canning Training – click the link to sign up.

FREE Bread Making Class – click the link to sign up.

FREE Herbal Medicine Training – click the link to sign up.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

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Herbal Portrait: Orange Peel

Do you throw these in the garbage? Most people do. You might want to reconsider especially if you buy organic oranges.

Why should you save your orange peel?

Because they are the best herbal remedy for heavy, wet congestion. Need to dry up that drippy nose, drainage, wet sinuses, croupy cough? Try a tea or infused oil add with orange peel.

How do I preserve and store my orange peel?

I must lay mine out on plate covered with a paper towel to keep the dust off. Mix around once a day to prevent mold. Throw out any moldy pieces. In a week or so they should be dry and you can store them in a baggie or glass jar. Just keep them in a dry place with low humidity.

Best tea for seasonal allergy attacks:

Here’s my recipe for making a tea to combat seasonal allergies and allergic reactions.

In a quart size jar combine the following:

3 tsp black tea

4 tsp nettle leaf

2-3 large pieces of organic orange peel

Cover with just boiled water. Put the lid on the jar and let it sit until cold. Strain out the herbs into a clean jar and store in the fridge. Drink as needed.

Just after adding the hot water.
See how dark the tea is once it has steeped and cooled.

Another good companion to this remedy is tea or an infused oil made with Wild Cherry Bark which is a histamine regulator (Matthew Wood) and can help calm down allergic reactions. Follow my steps for making your own infused oil here.

100 Herb Monographs:

Expand your herbal research with Farmhouse Teas Herbal Monographs. Their set of nearly 100 monographs is just excellent! You get free access to them in their Herbal Studio. They are beautiful and very thorough.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

Air Drying Calendula Blossoms
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Air Drying Calendula Blossoms

Calendula is one of the few plants in the Aster family that we use as my son has a allergy to ragweed which makes him sensitive to many of the plants in that same plant family.

I’ve grown Calendula for years and thought I’d share how I air dry them without a dehydrator. It is often recommended that you dry calendula with a dehydrator since the centers are so thick and resinous that they can be hard to air dry, and if not completely dry, they can mold in storage.

Why this method of air drying Calendula works. Two reasons:

  1. Good air flow.
  2. Long drying time.

Because my calendula is grown in containers, I usually have small harvests, meaning I’m not harvesting basketfuls at a time. I might harvest 2-3 flower heads per day. This is certainly not enough to warrant pulling out the dehydrator in order to dry them.

So mine sit and wait for me, and as they wait, they dry.

Here’s what I do…

Each flower that I pick goes into a little linen bag. This is in fact a little bag for sprouting micro greens, but since I use a different method for that, I’ve never used that bag for sprouting so I turned it into my calendula drying bag. Now, let’s stop here. You don’t need a bag for this. Any airy, piece of fabric, linen, muslin, flannel, burlap, or scrap of cheesecloth that is large enough to lay the flowers on and fold over on top of them will do. The purpose of the fabric is to keep your flowers clean and free of dust while drying.

Tiny harvest. These Calendula blossoms have been drying for a few weeks.

Next I lay this little bag on top of my hutch where the air is warm. I usually lay it in the bowl of my old fashioned kitchen scale which lives up here, but anywhere high and warm that is open to the air will do. On top of the fridge would work quite nicely. (Do not place anything inside an upper cupboard though. There would not be enough air flow in there.)

As I pick new flowers, I add them to the bag. Each time I take it down to add more I shuffle them around to ensure they are all getting moved around so that all the parts dry well.

New flowers added to the bag.

When I have new blooms to pick, I add the new flowers to the bag and it goes back up on the hutch. Sometime in the fall when they are all good and dry, I’ll take them down, ensure that they are all dry and can be crushed, and I’ll store them in a glass jar until I need them to make more infused oil or Calendula salve. They wait quite happily for me, and by the time I’m ready to use them in winter, they are dry and ready to use. In fact, most years, they just sit there until I remember to take them down sometime in December.

Growing, harvesting, and drying herbs doesn’t have to be a fussy process. Find a method that works and feels easy to you and go with it. What’s stopping you?

Want to turn your Calendula flowers into an infused oil. Check out my step by step process for making a home as herbal infused oil. These steps are written to make Plantain oil, but the process is the same for making an infused oil with any plant.

And once you have a homemade infused oil, you’re only one step away from making your own salve. You might want to check out my Healing Salve which is made with Calendula. (See the little dried up Calendula flowers laying there?) 😊

And if you really want to wrap your head around making all your own infused oils and slaves, let Carolyn with Homesteading Family hold your hand through the process. She recently came out with a Herbal Oils class that is quite nice which covers the basics of making culinary oils, infused medicinal oils, and using essential oils for your own handmade salves, balms, lip balms, and more. You can get access to it as part of their Homestead Kitchen Membership.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

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DIY Herbal Infused Plantain Oil

Look at that color!!! Have you ever seen a prettier dark green. Did you know that the deepness of color, indicates the potency of the oil. The deeper the color, the more potent the oil.

Note: This recipe is written for plantain but this method can be used with any plant. You could make rose, mullein, borage, Hawthorne, calendula…. The sky is the limit.

Anyone have this little plant in their back yard?

Plantain (Plantago major) is one of the most common “weeds” found in lawns. Many homeowners spend thousands of dollars every year trying to get rid of this little weed. It is a tough one to eradicate since it forms in low-growing rosettes. The fact that it hugs the ground means lawn mowers often pass right over it without doing any damage.

The other trait of plantain that makes it difficult to get rid of are all these little seed stalks that it sends up in the late summer to early fall. The seeds spread easily which means new little clusters will always pop up.

The fact that this little plant is so common and determined to survive means that it has a whole host of medicinal properties. So go find a lawn that you know is not sprayed with any weed killers, pick some leaves, and let’s make a batch of plantain oil.

Plantain leaves can be gathered any time of year when the plant is growing. The leaves will be most potent when gathered before the plant goes to seed. (Note: Do not harvest the seeds. They contain contraindications for some health conditions.)

Let’s make some oil!

Infused Plantain Oil Recipe:

  1. Gather your leaves. Choose whole, unblemished leaves if possible. Do not pull up the whole plant. Pinch from the bottom of the leaf stalk to pick each leaf individually. This will ensure more harvests later in the season.
  2. Fill a bowl with cool water to rinse the leaves of any dirt or bugs. I actually like to use my salad spinner for this step. The mesh basket makes it easy to wash, drain, and dry. See step #3 below.
  3. The next step is to let the leaves dry and wilt. They don’t have to dry completely, but the drier they are, the longer the shelf life of your oil will be. Using the mesh liner from your salad spinner by removing the strainer from the outer bowl so that the leaves can get good air flow works well for me. I like to fluff them up occasionally as I walk past them on the kitchen counter to keep them moving to ensure they dry evenly. Or if you don’t have a salad spinner, a pasta colander with larger holes will work as well. You can also lay the leaves out on a tea towel on top of a cookie cooling rack to air dry and wilt. Now, here, you could choose to let them air dry completely for winter storage in a glass jar, or you can wilt for 2-3 days or until dry before moving on to making your infused oil. A dehydrator could also be used in low heat if you don’t want to wait for them to air dry.
  4. When sufficiently wilted or dried, take your leaves and roughly tear or crush them into a glass jar. Fill the jar half full with plant material.
  5. Cover the plant material with olive oil or any oil of your choice that you have in your kitchen.
  6. Put a lid on your jar and loosely tighten.
  7. Set a clean dish rag or cloth in the bottom of a sauce pan that is half full of water. (Note: the dish rag prevents the glass from being too close to the heating element which could cause it to break.)
  8. Set the jar in the sauce pan on top of the dish cloth.
  9. Turn on the heat to medium high. (Set a timer for 10-15 minutes so you don’t forget your oil.)
  10. Watch the oil, as soon as the water starts simmering, turn the heat off. We don’t want to cook the plant material. Just infuse it with a little warmth.
  11. Let the jar sit until it is cold.
  12. Strain your oil using a handheld mesh strainer (often the dollar store or grocery store will have these) into a clean, completely dry, glass jar.
  13. Label your jar with the name of the oil and date. Masking tape and a sharpie works well for this. I keep a masking tape dispenser like this on my kitchen counter specifically for labeling things.

And you did it! You made your own Plantain oil! Well done!

And now that you have the skill of making an infused oil under your belt, you can do it with any medicinal herb. Be creative. Some of my favorite plants to make oil with are mullein, rose, calendula, Pansy, violet, echinacea, pine, wild cherry, and yarrow. I use my infused oils every day.

Want to see a photo log of these steps? Scroll to the bottom of the page.

Infused Oil FAQ Section:

What is infused plantain oil good for?

Plantain is an excellent remedy for any type of bite, sting, or skin irritation. It is especially useful for anything that needs pulling or drawing out. It is a mild astringent and good for any skin or issue with any angry or inflamed membranes.

How long will my infused oil last?

Homemade infused oils are good indefinitely if made with dry plant material, and if stored in a cool, dry location. If fresh or wilted plant material is used, extra steps will need to be taken to ensure that your oil doesn’t mold.

What are the signs of moisture in my oil?

Condensation or cloudiness on the inside of the jar after straining is an indication of moisture. This is easy to remedy. Simply take the lid off of your jar and cover with a paper towel or coffee filter and secure with a rubber band. Let the jar sit until the oil is clear and all the moisture has evaporated. Then you can replace the lid and store in a cool, dry place.

Do you see the cloudiness in this jar of oil?
Same jar of oil as above after 2-3 days sitting with a paper towel cover to allow the oil to evaporate. Can you see how much more clear the oil has become?

How do I know if my oil is moldy?

When an infused oil grows mold, it often does not grow on the surface like what we are used to seeing on food in our fridge. It grows down inside the oil and looks like dark fuzzy spots floating in the bottom of your jar. For this reason, I like to store my oils in clear, glass jars so that I can easily see if anything begins to grow or look amiss. An off smelling oil would be another indicator. However, be sure that you smell your oils right after making them to be sure that you know the scent of that plant. Not every plant has a pleasant smell, and you don’t want to throw out a perfectly good batch of oil simply because you aren’t familiar with the scent of that particular plant. So train your nose to know what your oil smells like right after you make it.

How to know if my oil has gone bad?

Visible mold on the surface, dark spots growing in the bottom of the jar, or rancid or putrid smells are signs that your oil has spoiled and should be discarded.

Can I use this same method to make an infused oil with a different plant?

Yes! This method can be used to make an infused oil with any medicinal plant. Keep in mind that infused oils dried plant material will have the longest shelf life.

Do you feel confident to make your own infused oil now? I hope so. Enjoy your creations. Using my oils through the year and especially during the winter is one of my favorite things.

Want to make your infused plantain oil into a salve?

Make this Healing Salve using your infused plantain oil. If you don’t have infused Calendula oil, just replace it with an extra part of plantain oil and you’ll be all set.

Healing Salve

Want to take a deeper dive into the world or herbal oils?

Consider the new Herbal Oils class by Homesteading Family. It covers making your own culinary oils, medicinal infused oils, as well as your own salves and body products using essential oils. It’s a great all-in-one course for beginners. You can get access through Homesteading Family’s Homestead Kitchen Membership.

Photo Log Step-by-Step of Making an Infused Plantain Oil:

Plantain (Plantago major) – freshly picked.
Washed in my salad spinner.
Air dried and wilted.
Completely dry and crispy. These can be stored for use later in a sealed glass jar, or you can move straight into making your infused oil.
Though not plantain here (this is torn violet leaf), the next step is to roughly tear your plant and place in your jar.
Cover the plant material with the oil of your choice.
Place the jar on a cloth in a sauce pan half full of water. Turn on the heat.
When the water starts to simmer, turn off the heat and let it sit until completely cool. Then you’re ready to strain and store.

Note: Some links on this page are affiliate links.

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Herb Journal – How to keep track of all your Herbal Learning

Studying herbs. It’s a rabbit hole. You read, you reference, you study. Soon it all gets jumbled up in your head. How do keep it all straight.

My inexpensive, DIY solution was to use an old address book. It’s about 5×9” inches and perfect for this use, as who uses an address book for addresses anymore.

I used the alphabetized sections to record each herb and ailment in the lines where you would usually record peoples names and addresses. I take the herbs and ailments that I study, write them down in the section of the book with the letter associated when their name, and make notes about what I learn about them as I go. I don’t worry about alphabetizing my entries within each letter section. I just make sure that all the “A” herbs or health conditions are written on one of the pages of the “A” tab. I just looked and you can even still buy some old style address books. There are several spiral bound, pretty ones available on Amazon.

Another strategy that I use is that I highlight any family allergies to a particular herb in orange as a warning. I’ve told my husband, if I die, look in here to see what the kids are allergic to. We have some unusual plant allergies – yarrow, chamomile, chicory, clover, licorice.

I’ve found that it really helps to understand plants by their plant families in my studies of herbs due to all our allergies. That way if there is one herb that I know we respond to negatively, I can easily know what others I need to be careful of using medicinally because I know what plants are related to it.

Botany in a Day

Botany in a Day by Thomas J. Elpel is the best book out there for learning plants by plant family. It teaches you to recognize plants by their family characteristics which helps you not only in learning to identify the plants but also in knowing their medicinal characteristics which is often consistent across plant families. Both can be extremely useful if you are learning to forage for your own plant material. For more info on identifying your local plants, check out my favorite regional medicinal plant books. And if you live in an urban area like we did when we lived in NYC, read my review on my favorite book on urban foraging here.

If you REALLY want to get a jumpstart on your herbal research though, look into the Herbal Monographs offered by Farmhouse Teas in their Herbal Studio. It is such a great herbal resource. They have compiled a set of nearly 100 monographs on different herbs that are just excellent! You get free access to them in their Herbal Studio. In my opinion, these monographs are unparalleled and I wish I could buy them as a book! Check them out. They are beautiful and totally worth having as a resource.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

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Herbal Portrait: Mullein

As you get to know your herbs, you may find some surprising uses that are not written up in the herb books and materia medicas.

If you have used mullein, you probably know that it is know for loosening things especially in the respiratory tract which is why it is often included in remedies for colds and coughs.

It is also a mild nervine which means that it acts and calms the nervous system.

Well, I’ve had a super busy stretch. Stress and not sleeping well has resulted in a tense muscle in my shoulder/neck that is causing me jaw pain.

Mullein is not your go to herb for muscle tension or pain. But as I have used and gotten to know this herb, I know that it loosens and speaks to my nervous system. So I know from past experimentation that if I apply it to my shoulder, neck, and jaw that it will help the tension and pain.

I have been applying it several times a day this last week, and the muscle generally stays much looser and doesn’t hurt any more. It still feels tight in some places but I’ll keep working on it.

For now though, I’m glad to have a remedy that I can rely on that helps me keep going, even if I am using it “outside the box.”

Pine, which is good for respiratory issues, also addresses pain, and frankincense which is resinous like pine is excellent at keeping muscles loose. Do you see a pattern there? Two of those herbs – pine resin and frankincense, are hard as rocks in their natural state, but they help loosen things.

Sometimes herbs reflect and look like the conditions God made them to heal. Isn’t it nice of Him to give us little clues like that?

And don’t forget to apply your herbs topically – even tinctures. I think our pill popping culture gives us the mistaken idea that medicine (whether herbal or conventional) has to be taken internally to be effective. They don’t. Rub them on. They will soak in and do their job just as well.

What herb would you like to know more about? Let me know in the comments.

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FREE Live Herbal Medicine Webinar tomorrow!

Want to learn to use the herbs that are growing outside your kitchen door more effectively? Carolyn Thomas with Homesteading Family is hosting a live Herbal Medicine webinar tomorrow 4PM ET. But don’t worry if you can’t make it live. Sign up for the webinar and you can view the replay after.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

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3 Ingredient, Dairy-free, Nut-Free Pesto!

Sometimes when you have food restrictions you automatically write foods off when you can’t make them using their traditional recipes thinking that they won’t be as good. Well, pesto should not be one of those recipes. Make it without the cheese and bits and I think it tastes just as good.

Dairy-Free, Nut-Free Pesto Recipe:

Food processor stuffed with fresh basil leaves

1-2 heads of garlic (2 heads for an 8 cup food processor, 1 head for a 4 cup or smaller)

1/4-1/2 tsp salt (Go by taste here, use the lesser amount for the smaller food processor. I actually prefer to add 1/8 tsp at a time and then taste in between to be sure I don’t get too much.)

Pulse until all the ingredients are finely chopped.

Slowly begin to drizzle in olive oil until your mixture is creamy. Taste it. Tweak the seasonings if needed. A little more salt maybe. A little more basil. Maybe it needs some more olive oil to make it creamier. Work with it until you like the flavor.

Store in freezer bags or small air tight containers. It’s best to store in single serving sizes so that you can just thaw out what you need for a batch of pasta or pizza. Refrigerate for 1-2 weeks or freeze for a up to a year (if it lasts that long).

It’s that easy and it tastes great! You’ll never miss the cheese or nuts. In fact, I prefer it without it.

We turned these nice homemade French bread loaves into French bread pizzas with fresh mozzarella and they are delish! They pesto is hiding in there under the meat and cheese. 😊 We took some of these to a church event, and I can’t tell you how many people were thankful for the dairy-free and nut-free pesto. It is nice when people get to enjoy a food that they normally can eat at a group event because someone was considerate of their allergies. I know I appreciate that. 😊

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Orange Raspberry Infused Water

This blog post on Basil Infused Water by Farmhouse Teas inspired me to try making my own herbal infused water. My body is very sensitive to herbs. Even a small amounts of herbs made into a hot tea can be too strong for me sometimes. So, I decided to try an herbal infused water hoping it would be milder than a hot infusion. I’m also on a very restricted, low-histamine diet right now, so except for a tiny bit of coffee occasionally, the only thing I can drink right now is water. That gets boring, so this also gives me something with a little bit of flavor to drink occasionally.

This is my favorite flavor so far. It’s mild, tasty, and easy to make. All you need is a tea infuser and a glass jar. Or if you want something you can take on the go, you might like this fancy glass water bottle with its own infuser.

Orange Raspberry Infused Water Recipe:

Red Raspberry Leaf loose leaf herb

Fresh or frozen raspberries

Dried orange peel or fresh orange zest (substitute: dried lemon peel or lemon zest)

Glass Jar

3-4 cups of Water

Pinch of salt

This recipe couldn’t be easier. Simply combine 1/2 teaspoon of red raspberry leaf herb, 1-2 crushed raspberries, a small piece of dried orange peel or zest, and pinch of salt in your infuser. Place the infuser in your jar (or water bottle), fill with fresh water and place the jar in the fridge for 12-24 hours. The longer the infusion time, the stronger the infusion.

This jar infused overnight. It’s slightly sweet from the raspberries and just a bit of citrus flavor from the orange peel. The minerals from the herbs plus the pinch of salt makes this a pleasant electrolyte drink.

You can tailor this to your taste and change up the fruit or citrus flavors easily.

Try these other flavor combinations:

Lemon Raspberry

Blackberry Lime

Blueberry Lemon

Strawberry Lemon

Other Herbs that make mineral rich and tasty infusions:

Nettle Leaf

Chamomile

Plantain

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Making the Most of your Herbal Home Remedies

My herb shelf

There’s something satisfying about having all you brews, infusions, and concoctions ready and within arms reach when you need them.

We moved to a new house this summer. I finally got around to opening up my box of herbal remedies this week. I hope to unpack it soon and get it all nicely arranged on the shelves with my other herbs.

I haven’t made anything new this year except a new batch of mullein oil from last year’s leaves. I need to re-establish all my medicinal plants here at the new house so I don’t have much to harvest yet. And there is no mullein growing here if you can believe that. I was so jealous on the way to PA this summer as it was growing all over the roadsides. It was all I could do to keep from asking my husband to pull over so I could jump out of the car to grab some. I’m going to have to plant some I guess.

I also need to pull out my favorite local medical plant ID book and investigate what is actually growing here at the new place. There’s got to be some good stuff in the woods behind our house. So far I’ve found some plantain and yarrow in the front yard, but I haven’t investigated the woods yet. One thing at a time. Trying to get the inside of the house live-able and settled. The outside will have to wait for now.

Do plants have personalities?

Making your own remedies either from herbs you grow and harvest yourself or from dried herbs that you buy requires you to get to know the herbs. I like to think of them as friends who can help me when I’m in a time of need, but first I have to get to know their personality so that I know what they have to offer. Reading and studying about them is helpful, but rather than solely focusing on the medical conditions that an herb may help, I file my herbal friends away in my address book describing their characteristics. This way I get to know the “personality” of the herb.

This is a little address book that I’ve had for years. I use it to make notes on herbs or conditions that I’m reading and researching. Since the address book is organized alphabetically, I use the lines where you would typically write a person’s name and contact information instead to write the name of the herb or condition that I’m researching and then I use the extra lines to make notes of what I’m learning. That way I can always come back and remind myself of information that I may have forgotten when the need arises. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve referred to my little book over the years.

How to Further Your Herbal Studies:

If you’re interested in taking your herbal studies up a notch, consider Homesteading Family’s free herbal trainings. Join in and maybe I’ll see you in class. I’m one of the online moderators for that course and it would be fun to see you over there. 😊

And if you really want to dive deep into herbs I highly recommend the Homegrown School of Herbal Medicine. I’m a student, though albeit progressing slowly, but the school really gives you an excellent foundation into anatomy and physiology of the human body so that you can properly understand how different herbs are going to work on the different systems of the body. And Doc Jones is a funny teacher to boot! 😊

However you choose to study herbs, keep good notes, enjoy what you are learning, get to know herbs as friends, and most importantly use the things you make.

From L to R: Rose Petal Sugar Scrub, Dried Rose Petals, and dried Forsythia blossoms.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

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Healing Salve

I taught a group of 1st-3rd graders how to make this salve yesterday. If they can do it, you can too.

This takes an otherwise silky, moisturizing salve and bumps it up a notch with the healing powers of calendula and plantain. Both are excellent for your healing everyday cuts, scratches, and scrapes, but I have found calendula to be excellent at healing infected or hard to heal wounds, and plantain to be excellent for eczema that is easily irritated by other oils and lotions.

Healing Salve Recipe:

1 part infused plantain oil

1 part infused calendula oil

2 parts beeswax

1 part cocoa or Shea butter

1/2 part lanolin

5-10 drops of essential oil for scent (optional)

Melt all the ingredients in a double boiler. Pour into a heat proof container. It’s that simple.

When I made it with my group of girls, we did some as chapsticks too, because what little girl doesn’t like her own chapstick. We also poured some in a jar to use as salve.

If you don’t know how to make an infused oil, refer to my post on making your own garlic oil, and simply sub calendula flowers and plantain for the garlic in the instructions.

You can also skip the infused oil and use plain olive or almond oil if you prefer to have the moisturizing properties for everyday use without the healing powers of calendula and plantain.

Want to take your knowledge of herbs and home remedies up a notch?

Check out Homesteading Family’s Free herbal trainings.

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Bookshelf: Urban Foraging

One of the authors of my favorite regional herbal medicine books (see blog post here) just put out a new book. Look up Urban Foraging by Lisa Rose. It’s in my shopping cart.

I like that the book covers plants that are common to many regions and that it explains basic botany terms, as well as how to identify the plant, the parts used, what it’s culinary uses are as well as medicinal ones, and suggested recipes.

It covers 50 plants including,

apple, artemisia, aspen, autumn olive

blackberry, burdock

catnip, chickweed, chicory, crabapple, currants

dandelion, daylily, dock

elder, field garlic

garlic mustard, ginko, goldenrod, ground ivy

honeysuckle, hyssop

Japanese knotweed

lamb’s quarters, lilac

monarda, mulberry

nettle, oak

pennycress, peppermint, persimmon, pine, plantain, prickly pear, purslane

raspberry, red clover, rose, Russian sage, spearmint, spruce, St. John’s wort, sunchoke, sweet clover

violet, wild carrot, wild grape, wood sorrel, yarrow

The nicest thing about this book, is that you don’t have to live in the wilderness to find these plants; you can find many of them even if you live in the city.

If you want to get your feet wet on making your own medicinal remedies, check out Homesteading Family’s free Herbal Medicine Webinar. Carolyn always gives great information and answers your questions live.

Happy foraging and medicine making. 🌱

Note: This post includes affiliate links.