Learn how to grow, harvest, and dry bee balm (wild bergamot), plus 8 creative ways to use it, including recipes for bee balm salve, tea, infused honey, and more! Bee Balm (Monarda fistulosa, M. spp.) also called wild bergamot, is an excellent plant to put in a pollinator garden! Beloved by bumblebees, butterflies, and hummingbirds,…
Use some foraged early spring greens to make a lovely little lip balm! Violet leaves, purple deadnettle, and chickweed combine with sweet almond, tamanu, and castor oil to create a soothing balm for chapped lips. Infused Oil First, you’ll want to make an infused oil to use in the lip balm. You will need: 1…
These two plants have the same common name, but are very different! One plantain (Plantago spp.) is a leafy weed used to make things like a lovely first aid salve, while the other (Musa × paradisiaca) is a starchy fruit that looks like a banana. At a Glance Don’t want to read through the whole…
Rosewater’s an easy enough project if you have a bunch of roses to spare and just a little patience. And since the method to make it’s the same for any number of fragrant plants, why not indulge in a little experimentation? Rosewater Rosewater (or the closest one can get without having specialized equipment) is pretty…
Hear me, ye who be blighted by the heavy gloom of winter’s passing; there be four things you must find to lift your curse most foul- Just kidding. No curses being cleaned here, just faces. You will need: Violets Thyme A few sprigs of sage Forsythia flowers (if you don’t have access to forsythia, dandelion…
I love my cats dearly, but the last thing I need is for them to be trying to eat my tomato seedlings as I’m trying to transplant them. Since I generally don’t feel like constantly removing cat faces from my planting trays, out the catnip comes! My greedy little gremlins can and will eat every…
The Hypnos bedtime balm was born from the overwhelming desire to find something heavy and whack my insomnia over the head with it. That’s about it, really. Will this balm physically fist-fight your insomnia? Sadly, no. It makes for a pretty relaxing (and very fragrant) pre-bedtime massage balm, though! Some links on this site are…
This yarrow salve was designed for calloused and dry feet, but it works just as well for hands, too! I created it after reading a folklore book one day, which had a tidbit saying that yarrow (Achillea millefolium) has ties to Achilles’ spear, and promptly ran with the idea. In traditional herbalism, yarrow is used…