It’s Back to Work!

It’s back to work after the Christmas break, and we love it. We have just completed our first Materia Medica and Pharmacy seminars of the new year, and it’s going well.

We take pride in each of our original herb monographs because they are researched extensively and painstakingly by Dr Susan Vassar, producing the high standard you would expect from an ex-Oxford scholar. During the seminars the complete herb is studied, examined and tasted, and it’s complex phytochemistry and action are explained and documented.

In Pharmacy we discussed the therapeutic differences between hot infusions with a short steep time [10 mins], cold nourishing infusions with very long steep time [4 hours or overnight] and decoctions [simmer 10 mins], and what herbs and parts of herbs we would use in each instance. Then we got to work trying them all out and making notes along the way as to taste and texture and feel and properties etc etc.

                                                                  Our nourishing infusion.

In this cold water are dried nettle leaf, red clover and cleavers. These can be left overnight but we just left them for four hours. It may look gross but packs a mighty punch of vitamins and minerals.

Our decoctions

On the left fresh ginger root decocted for 10 minutes which gave a much better potency than merely infused in hot water for 10 minutes. On the right, decocted shatavari root which plumped up nice and soft from almost a rock hard root. The taste of the shatavari was slightly sweet and nourishing.

We also made an infused Plantain oil using Plantago lanceolata in olive oil, so we can make some healing ointments at the next seminar.

After all that we also planned the next year’s planting in the School’s Herb Garden.

Busy day…