It’s the end of summer and time for me to make my big batch of herbal ointment. Now, since I’m the kind who loves to throw in every ingredient I think will help, my stuff is a bit more complicated that it has to be.

I thought you might enjoy a simple description on how to make your own herbal ointments. Homemade offers the following advantages:

• You know exactly what’s in it.
• You can pick potent and fresh herbs to use.
• MUCH cheaper!!
• Can easily make a bunch to share with friends.

The basic idea is simple (I’ll include a few pictures from my current batch):

• Pick a dried herb (or a few) with the properties you want to apply to your skin. (Example: lemon balm for cold sores, comfrey for healing, plantain for bites/stings/infections, etc.) These are all easy to grow yourself or wild harvest (the plantain is a yard weed). You can also buy them locally or online.

• Put the herbs in a container and cover them with an oil: olive oil, sunflower oil, etc.
• Place somewhere warm for up to two weeks, stirring every day or so (I use my Excalibur dehyrator)

• Strain off the oil.
• Add beeswax and warm gently on the stove.
• Pour into containers and let it solidify.
• Keep cool or in fridge and it will last a year or more.

A few tips I’ve picked up over the years:

1. Powder the dry herbs in a coffee grinder or blender before steeping and the results will be more potent . . . but you’ll get less oil when you strain.
2. Take a bit of ointment on one hand and some water on the other hand – rub them together to get a makeshift “lotion” for a less greasy application – to moisturize/treat the face, for example.
3. Add a bit more beeswax to the recipe to make lip balm.

Just before pouring your ointment, you can add any non-water ingredients to enhance your final product. Have fun experimenting! Here are some of my additions:

• Butters: Cocoa butter and shea butter
• Essential Oils: Tea tree, lavender, peppermint
• Anti-oxidants to make it last longer: Vitamin E and Benzoin Tincture

My oil is still straining, so I’ll be doing the final steps this week. I’ll make sure to include som pics of the final product in next week’s newsletter.

How about you?

Do you use herbs in your day-to-day life? Maybe as tea, tinctures, capsules or ointments? I’d love to hear about your favorites.

Misty’s Writing Update:

Steph and I are closing in on the final battle scenes in our first book in the storm apocalypse series we’re writing together. We’re already past an 80K word count, so hopefully we don’t go too much past 100K by the time we finish.

We’re working to include herbs that could come in handy in a survival setting. One of my favorites is plantain – not the banana-type – but the simple yard weed that grows commonly in many places in the world.

Steph’s character has an infected gator bite and is combining both modern and herbal medicine by taking some of her precious antibiotics while an older lady applies a fresh plantain poultice to the wound.

Around here, our family uses it regularly for bug bites and even once for an infected gum. Recently we got a bunch of chigger bites – like mosquito bites, but they hang around and itch horribly for weeks!

I took the time to put plantain on one of my bites and it healed in days while the others, I was too busy to treat, itched off and on during our entire two week vacation. Note to self – chew up a wad of plantain and put it on the bite as soon as I can see it start to swell. 🙂

Such fun stuff! I really enjoy tidbits of knowledge that are simple and useful at the same time.

Feel free to send any other survival medicine and herbal tips my way that would come in handy in a post-storm and flooded environment. I love hearing from you!

Happy reading this week,

— Misty 🙂