Sunday 29 April 2018

Tinctures


I've long been a lover of herbal medicine and have incorporated herbs into my health and healing protocol for longer than I can remember. In recent years I've become more interested in concocting my own medicines and herbal products and have been learning about both cultivated and wild grown plants. I've experimented with tisanes, decoctions, salves, syrups, herbal vinegar extractions and encapsulation as a way to extract and take herbs for a variety of acute and chronic ailments. Tinctures have been on my mind for some time and I have only once made a tincture before now when in my pregnancy/ breastfeeding days of no drinking I decided to throw some elderberries into a lonely looking bottle of gin. For the most part I've tended to prefer other extraction methods but I'm keen to experiment and find out if there are some tinctures that will be invaluable to my personal apothecary.



With the cooler weather setting in, the wild chickweed has started to run rampant in my pot plants and garden beds and as this little gem of a plant only grows in the cooler months I've been keen to capture and store the healing benefits for use in the months when it lies dormant. Chickweed is rich in a variety of minerals and is soothing and healing for skin conditions like eczema. I stuffed a jar about 2/3 full with freshly picked chickweed then filled the jar with organic vodka. I needed to weigh the chickweed down to keep it under the liquid so I used the first thing I could think of- a couple of chunks of amethyst.



I've been working through the ups and downs of having hypochlorhydria (low stomach acid) for a few years and I'm prone to developing protein deficiency due to the my body struggling to digest it, my acquired aversion to high protein meals, and the number of food allergies I have as a result of vaccine injury. Hypochlorhydria has been a hard one to kick due to the self perpetuating nature of it.  Although I have come a long way in my healing and for the most part I can function normally these days in regards to feeling like a normal human, I'm not there yet and I'm always searching for remedies that will heal my allergies and fix my digestive issues. So this is where this tincture comes in. I rarely get around to making decoctions at the moment so I was thinking a digestive bitters tincture might be the way to go.  I half filled the jar with burdock root, dandelion root, ginger and fennel seeds and then filled to the top with organic vodka. I just used what I had on hand in the cupboards so I'm looking forward to trying this one in a few weeks time.

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