Foraging in February

It’s cold. But needs must. If you want to get fresh cleaver juice, you have to get the cleavers.

This month in Pharmacy part of our work was making herb juice. We decided on nettles and cleavers because, basically, that’s all we could find. My special spot of chickweed which is usually out early had disappeared, so we substituted nettle. Cleavers are reliable in my locality. They spring up early, year in, year out.

So we went back to base with bags of nettle and cleavers and started to juice. The nettles were poor and straggly and didn’t yield much juice at all. For an awful lot of hard work we got about an inch of juice. The dry waste was just like green sausages. Even so we could not bear to throw it all away so it found it’s final home as compost…

The cleavers however, were a different story. Oozing with succulent moisture, the jug soon filled with plenty of bright green fluid.

We then went on to discuss the properties of both plants and what they could contribute to a patient’s health, marvelling at the abundance of vitamins and minerals contained in these two abundant weeds. These beneficial  nutrients are much better absorbed by the body than synthetic supplements because they are organic.

Our afternoon was spent making creams from scratch. We discussed beeswax, borax, Vit E, essential oils, emulsifiers, water in oil, and oil in water creams, and so much more…

In fact, we have done a little experiment. We made one cream with just bees wax/oil/herb juice, one with bees wax/oil/herb infusion/borax, and one with bees wax/oil/herb infusion/emulsifier/preservative. We noticed something straight away which was interesting. However much water part you added to the cream with emulsifier – it emulsified and looked and felt perfect. [This was not done on purpose – just a slip of attention when we halved the recipe, but forgot to halve the water.] We are observing how all three creams survive. But just a heads up. The cream with no borax or preservative or emulsifier began to go mouldy after one week. We decided not to keep them in the fridge to replicate the behaviour of most of the patients we know.

The successful emulsified creams made with our very own organic calendula, grown in our very own school’s herb garden, made into an infused oil and an infusion. It’s lovely.