Herbal tincture recipes allow you to take charge of your own herbal health at home. Make your own potent, shelf-stable herbal tinctures with fresh or dried plant material and high-proof alcohol using the recipes in

The fresh needles and buds of Pine, picked in the springtime, are called “pine tops.” These are boiled in water, and the tea is consumed for fevers, coughs, and colds. The needles are also diuretic, helping to increase urination. This recipe combines pine tops with dried peppermint and catnip for relief from sinus and lung congestion.

Herbal antibiotics help fight infections, such as UTIs, and speed wound healing. Many also fight viruses, like colds and flu. They are gaining interest as treatments for antibiotic resistant bacteria.

In this post, you'll learn when to harvest roots, how to prepare them for use, and you'll even find several recipes to try. Use herbal roots for wellness!

Dandelions are medicinal, who knew!?! Every part of the dandelion plant from the flower to the leaves and even the root are both edible and medicinal. Dandelions are one of my favorite medicinal flowers that

This pine needle cough syrup is beneficial for soothing for a dry and scratchy throat and helping to tame coughs.

Herbal cigarettes were a common way to take your medicine, long before cigarettes became associated with tobacco (and addiction). Learn how to choose herbs for herbal cigarettes, and enjoy this time-honored way to take your

Looking for some herbal support for your mind? If so, here are eight herbs you need to know about that help to calm the anxious mind.

NOTE: I wrote this article to help you learn about herbal actions. Herbs aren’t drugs, but they can and do have medicinal actions. These are necessary to know and understand as you journey into learning herbalism. I have a printable glossary available for you too that contains the word and definitio

Herbal cigarettes were a common way to take your medicine, long before cigarettes became associated with tobacco (and addiction). Learn how to choose herbs for herbal cigarettes, and enjoy this time-honored way to take your

Comfrey salve is easy to make at home, using homegrown herbs or by purchasing dried comfrey. Studies show that comfrey is an effective herbal pain reliever when applied topically.

Check out this recipe to start creating your own unique and non-addictive herbal smoke blends with blue lotus.

Learn how to make your own herbal smoking blend at home.

The aromatic nature of the mint family (Lamiaceae) come from their high levels of volatile oils, which also account for many of their medicinal properties.

Natural antibiotics have a very important role to play healing all sorts of minor infections. Which is NOT to say we never need the power of prescribed antibiotics. Of course we do. But using natural

how to make herbal tinctures for effective medicine

Willow bark has been used for centuries as a natural pain reliever. It contains salicin, which was later synthesized and is the active ingredient in aspirin. It's reputed to relieve pain without the stomach upset

Homemade herbal remedies are easier than you think, and most only require a few minutes of hands-on time before you've crafted powerful herbal medicine for your families' medicine chest. Diving into making herbal remedies might

Dandelions seem to take over every spring. Since we can't beat them, we might as well eat them...and drink them and wear them, too.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a condition which is characterized by recurrent abdominal pain, diarrhea or constipation, gas, bloating, abdominal distention and fullness, loss of appetite and nausea and vomiting. While there are conventional medications available that treat the symptoms of IBS, there is no cure. There are many medicinal herbs that can be used as herbal remedies for chronic conditions like IBS and they have been gaining popularity in recent years because they tend to be milder than conventional medications and with a fewer side effect. They can be easily customized for specific needs. But like with any pharmaceutical

There are so many wonderful dye plants to forage in fall. Check out this list to keep your dye pot supplied well after the end of summer.

A comprehensive list of Herbal Medicine Making Resources from Living Awareness Institute. From containers to herb suppliers and so much more!

"I can't remember a year when the blackberries ripened so early. And there are still plenty more to come. Lovely ones, too." My companion barely spared them a glance, having other fruit in mind. I watched her pick her way up a branch of blackthorn, sheer madness, but you have to admire that kind of commitment to sloe gin. "Mind your fleece on those thorns, Elinor." She waved a hoof and chucked a ripe sloe into the basket. "Who dares, wins, Beaut." I suppose I'm just as fanatical about plant dyeing, though I decided long ago that the only purpose for picking fruit should be with a view to eating it. Early experience of berry dyes left me soured with the bitterness of pretty pink knitting gone beige by Christmas. At this time of year, Pinterest is simply laden down with fabulous pictures of berry dyed yarn. Planning to make some berry robb, I went back to check the recipe on a blog I wrote five years ago, when the disappointment was still fresh. My companion joined me and we were soon scanning the latest berry dye images to arrive on the computer. "It's such a shame. Those colours are going to fade, no matter what they say online." Elinor looked at my purple stained fingers. "To be fair, Beaut, most of your dyework was pretty crap, back in the day. Go on, have another go, I'll even give you some sloes, there's plenty left over." I had to wonder, was I wrong to condemn berry dyes out of hand? Could all these people really be wasting their time? This year of all years, it wouldn't be such a big deal to do a proper trial, trying to avoid beginner's mistakes. One thing I've learned is the most effective way to mordant fibres is by heating them for an hour in a 10% alum solution. Dyers have been using alum for several thousand years. Another way to improve colour depth and fastness is to use lots of plant material to weight of fibre. With this in mind, I simmered 200g fruit for each 10g sample, a ratio of 20:1. I decided to dye wool and silk blend fibre tops and my test subjects were blackberries, elderberries and sloes, (since Elinor was offering, though of course, sloes are stone fruit, rather than berries.) The simmer to extract the dye was kept well below the boil, as I have found high temperatures can destroy some natural blues. Purple might be the result of a mixture of red and blue dye molecules, so a cooler dye bath ought to give berries the best chance. After mashing the stewed fruit in my three pots, leaving it to cool and sieving out the juice, I gently heated the samples for an hour and left them to cool in their pots for 24 hours. Another major error I used to make was whipping wool out of the pot pronto, just to see what colour it had gone. I now realise that during a long soak, fibres are able take up considerably more colour than they absorb during the initial simmering phase. To avoid bleaching out fresh dye, my samples were dried out of direct sunlight and to avoid washing out any as yet unfixed colour, they were left without being rinsed. I did tease out a portion of the fibres from each sample to spin a little skein of yarn. These are my glamour shots of the results, purple from blackberries, pink from sloes, with the elderberries giving a colour somewhere in between. All the pictures were taken a couple of days after dyeing. To test lightfastness, I wrapped a few turns of each dyed yarn around some white card, slid half of the card inside a fold of black card to exclude light and taped it against the skylight for a week. It was a wet, grey week, with no sunny days at all. In the meantime, I tested wash fastness by wetfelting some of the dyed fibres around a soap. Here's a link to the method, it involved about fifteen minutes of rubbing the wetted fibres against a bar of Dove soap with half a dozen plunges from hot to cold water. To my surprise, I didn't see any colour wash out of the fibre, there was no pink discoloration of the lather or rinse water. Sadly, this is how my felted soap turned out. Sloe pink had turned beige, elderberry went brownish, only blackberry held much purple. "There you go, see, the blackberry dye is alright." My companion has become relentlessly cheerful. Suspecting the sloe gin might already be going into her tea, I sighed, smiled and added an extra stripe of blackberry round my felted soap. Given the lousy weather we have been having, lightfastness was not by any means an extreme test. After a week, this is how the card looked, shown together with the little skeins of yarn, which had been kept in a drawer. The effect of light exposure was similar to washing. "I'll have to use that soap up quickly, Elinor. Now the sun is shining through the bathroom window, it will soon go completely beige." "Oh, don't be so negative, just bathe by candlelight. Anyway, it's all your own fault for not adding any vinegar to the dye bath. Everybody says that fixes berry dyes." "Now I know you've been on the gin. VINEGAR IS NOT A MORDANT!!!!!" "Chill out, Beaut, my body is a temple. While I'm waiting for those sloes to ferment, I've taken up yoga again. Don't stress over lightfastness, rejoice in nature, join me in a sun salutation. Ooo, you've gone all red in the face." I took the dog for a walk and had a think about things. Acidity does change some plant dye colours, quite a few of them are sensitive to pH. I do know vinegar isn't going to fix natural dyes onto fibres, but it might affect how they look. I put vinegar and water into one jam jar and dissolved a little soda ash in another, to make an alkaline modifier. Small samples of the dyed fibres were left to soak for twenty minutes in each jar. Once they had dried, I laid them out, vinegar acidic soak on the left, unmodified fibres in the middle and soda ash alkaline soak on the right. I don't think the vinegar deepened the colour perceptibly. Berries are naturally acidic, it gives them flavour. On a guess, the berry dye bath was already acidic. Washing the fibres with soap while wet felting probably reduced the pH toward neutral and that was why the colours dimmed so quickly, even though no dye appeared to rinse out. Alkali did indeed shift the colour, look at that green, much the same modification as with pink hollyhock dye. "See, Elinor. More acidity didn't even alter the berry dye colours. All those people putting instructions online about adding vinegar really are sending each other on a hiding to nowhere." I got out my camera and showed her a couple of photos. "It's all a matter of what you choose to share, a well staged first impression or an evaluation under test conditions." "Life's an illusion, Beaut. Live the dream. By the way, did you remember to add salt to the dye bath?"

Comfrey known as one of the herbs to heal broken bones. This comfrey salve is a must have for your home herbal apothecary.

Reap the benefits of ashwagandha -- an amazing adaptogenic herb that can improve mental health, hormone balance, adrenal fatigue, and more -- by learning how to make an ashwagandha tincture! This easy herbal how-to saves money, too!

This caffeine-free wild foraged dandelion coffee is tasty on its own, or with a bit of milk or sugar added.

Use the kitchen spices that have amazing properties to enhance our overall immune system, boost weight loss, improve skin health, improves digestion, and is also rich in anti-oxidants. Here are amazing ways to use different spices to heal your body. Cold & Cough = Pepper Make pepper tea that provides a number of other health …

Chamomile is one of the most popular herbs known and used around the world. Here are 23 ways to use chamomile in many different applications – not just tea!

Nervine is an herbal action term used to describe plants that support the nervous system. Nervines can be relaxing or stimulating.

Learn 12 practical ways that you can use dandelion flowers to make things that are good and useful for you and your family. (1) Dandelion Oil (2) Dandelion Salve (3) Dandelion Vinegar (4) Traditional Dandelion Syrup (5) Dandelion Soaps (6) Dandelion Lotion Bars (7) Dandelion Tea (8) Dandelion Magnesium Lotion (9) Dandelion Tincture (10) Dandelion Infused Honey (11) Dandelion Cupcakes (12) Dandelion Bath Bombs

Medicinal herbs for diabetes have been a part of traditional medicine for thousands of years. Any herb intended as a treatment should focus on lowering blood sugar levels and reducing some of the damaging effects of the disease. The use of medicinal herbs for diabetes treatment can be an essential addition to the overall management of the disease and should be regarded as a part of a holistic approach that addresses proper nutrition and a good exercise program. It is important to visit a medical professional for proper diagnosis and the available treatment for the disease. After a diagnosis of

How to make natural dyes from food. Turn your food scraps into all natural dye to color Fabrics, Paper, Frosting. Easy natural dye recipe

In its intelligence and compassion, the earth provides a multitude of solutions to the pain and suffering that are part of life. The aromatic herb Helichrysum is so unobtrusive and humble that it could easily be overlooked, yet it contains remarkable healing powers that make it superior among the vast selection of natu

In unserer schnelllebigen Zeit fällt es uns immer schwerer genügend Schlaf zu finden! Eine Schlaftinktur mit ausgewählten Kräutern hilft uns wieder zur Ruhe zu kommen.

The combination of dandelion root and high quality butter offers many potential benefits for the liver and heart.

I began using herbal powders early on in my practice as an easy and alcohol-free alternative to tinctures. Herbal powders can be added to juices, smoothies, honey or your milk of choice for internal use or quickly mixed with oil, water or honey for external application. My two favorite ways to use

Self heal is an herb who's many wellness-supporting virtues have been forgotten. Here are 3 ways to add this traditional herb back into your materia medica.

Learn all about herbal poultices, powders, and electuaries — what they are, how to use them, and how to make them yourself at home.

No one is immune to depression, but that fact doesn't help if you don't know how to deal with it or move forward. Because depression (and anxiety) is like playing the freeze game, except in