Foraged Skin Care Remedies
Early spring is a wonderful time for foraging. After winter, it is refreshing to finally get outside and gather some healing herbs. Foraging for plants is an easy way to enjoy the benefits of herbs, and to learn more about the gifts that nature offers us. Gathering free wild plants to add to our creations…
How to Choose High Quality Essential Oils
This post is the second in a weekly, multi-part series on Using Essential Oils. Last week we discussed Basic Essential Oils for Daily Living – how to get started using essential oils in your daily life. Here we will explore considerations to help you choose high quality essential oils. What should you look for? How can you…
Skin Care Tips and Simple Recipes for Spring
Although you might feel energized by the warmer weather when spring comes around, your skin could be suffering. Here are some springtime skin care tips to help you prettify your skin. Get Rid of Winter in Your Spring Beauty Regimen Before you can focus on gorgeous spring beauty, you first need to get rid…
Basic Essential Oils for Daily Living
This post is the first in a weekly, multi-part series on using essential oils. Here we will start with some basic essential oils. What are essential oils? How can you use essential oils? Which essential oils could you start with? We invite you to learn some basics here and then join us weekly for additional articles on…
Herbal Remedies for Dry Skin: 3 Simple Recipes
Most of us have dealt with dry skin at some point in our lives, and for many of us, this concern intensifies during winter. Even though spring is just around the corner, if you are still dealing with the drying effects of cold air and indoor heat on your skin, here are some natural options…
10 Reasons Why Witch Hazel Rocks!
I have been known to buy witch hazel extract by the gallon. I always keep it on hand and substitute it for water in almost all of my homemade beauty products. I got to thinking the other day about the many ways that it can be used, and as my list grew longer, I realized…
Soothing Oatmeal Bath Recipe
My son and I suffer from eczema, and during the coldest parts of winter our eczema tends to flare up more often than usual. It can get pretty itchy and all I want is some relief! During these times, I love to make us a soothing oatmeal bath. It’s super simple to make, and you’re…
Looking for Natural Flu Remedies? Woad Works!
Worries about influenza, Ebola, and measles are making headlines. As herbalists, we have many natural flu remedies in our toolkits, including a repertoire of immune boosters, cold remedies, and digestive aids to help with viral symptoms. Wouldn’t it be helpful if there were other plants, like elderberry, that work at the cellular level to prevent…
9 Herbal Remedies for a Toothache
If you’ve been plagued with a sore tooth or swollen gums, you know that the pain it can cause is often completely unbearable. Toothache or not, life goes on, making pain relief a necessity. While over-the-counter painkillers are the most popular form of pain relief for many, there are a variety of herbal remedies for…
Natural Homemade Lip Balm for Kids
Do you remember Lip Smackers? I can remember a time in my life as a kid that I had a necklace full of lip balms of every different flavor and color of the rainbow. It was the cool thing to have all your favorites on hand and my mom, always wanting to substitute real gifts…
Comfrey Uses + Soothing Comfrey Cream Recipe
I started growing comfrey a couple of years ago, but my reasons were NOT strictly altruistic. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my herbs, but I particularly love perennial herbs like comfrey that are well suited to a pot and can be brought indoors during our cold Kansas winter. There is Comfort in…
Love It Up With Herbal Aphrodisiacs
In herbalism, aphrodisiac herbs aren’t just a means to an end! Aphrodisiac herbs nourish the nervous, heart, and reproductive systems on both physical and energetic levels. Physically, they tonify the body and support balanced function, enhance physical desire (libido), and improve performance. Energetically, they balance and love up the heart and sacral chakras and increase…
A Simple Cold and Flu Recipe with Ginger, Lemon, and Garlic
Like many families, each winter we struggle through cold and flu season; fortunately, it’s usually just a cold. I have a pretty basic natural protocol I follow at the first sign of illness. Therapies like elderberry tincture or syrup, salt baths, lots of warm soothing liquids, and rest can really help support your body to…
Wintertime Herbal Infused Whipped Body Butter Recipe
‘Tis the season for cold and dry winter weather, which also is synonymous, in our world, with dry cracked hands and feet. My husband has worked for a prominent coffee company for as long as we have been married, and every winter his hands take a huge beating because of all of the numerous hand-washings…
Vanilla Recipes: Three Ways To Bliss
Mmm…vanilla. Its sweet, perfumed aroma and flavor are known and loved around the world. The rich but subtle complexity of vanilla’s flavor is exotic and luxurious, yet at the same time comforting and gentle. No wonder it has been celebrated and used for hundreds of years, first cultivated by the Totonac Indians in eastern Mexico,…
Making Sage Honey
Sage. One of my favorite culinary herbs and one of the herbs people have easy access to no matter where they are. Salvia officinalis – even the Latin name gives us an idea of the respect this Mediterranean beauty has earned. Salvia in Latin derives from the word salvere which means, “to save.” Historically, it…
Warming Ginger Cayenne Salve For Natural Pain Relief
I have been going through surgeries on my spine since my first one, at 8 years old. It all started with scoliosis, and from there things got worse. It seemed that with every surgery, new symptoms and pain were added. Over the last 20 years I have had 7 surgeries on my spine, causing paralysis…
Bitter Integrations! Part 2: Making Bitters
In my previous article, Bitter Integrations! we saw how humans adapted to some bitter plants to not only attain precious plant vitamins and minerals, but also improve our digestion and lower organ performance of processing, elimination, and detoxification. Part 2 will discuss making bitters, the health benefits of bitters, and specifically how bitter herbs assist…
