hey guys it's me i'm so glad that you're joining
me i'm going to talk to you about my favorite flower calendula one of the most rewarding flowers
to grow the more you pick them the more they grow calendula is a herbal medicine and today i'm going
to show you three ways that you can incorporate it there is some controversy about making calendula
oil i was first introduced to calendula as a medicinal plant by rosemary gladstar one of her
books that i read now following rosemary gladstar and i am taking a course a herbalism course
by her i learned from her that the best time to pick the flower is when it is very warm and
sticky there's a lot of resin on the plants and that actually has a lot of medicinal
purposes when it has that resin on it now following her method you take the fresh flour
put it in the oil and have the oil cover it the controversy is is that there's a lot of others out
there that say that you do run the risk of getting fungus on it doing it that way and a lot of people
prefer to dry the flower and do it that method i've been doing it rosemary gladstar's way and
i don't have any fungal issues on the ones that i have done there's no fungus no problems with
it but because of the controversy i have been toying with the idea of an experiment
and that's why i have saved some flowers and i have them dried to do a comparison so that's
what i'm going to show you guys with this with my calendula oil making calendula oil is a lot easier
than most people think it would be it's just a matter of filling up a jar three-fourths full of
calendula flowers whether it be the fresh method of rosemary gladstar or of the dry flower method
when you fill that up three-fourths of the way you want to top it off with oil and have that
oil an inch from the top now if it's a medicinal purpose you're going to want to use olive oil if
you're not using olive oil and you're just wanting to do it for a cosmetic type of recipe you can use
grape seed oil almond oil or apricot kernel oil now that you have your oil covering the flowers
you want to take and put these in a sunny location a sunny window in your house that gets a lot of
sun and you're going to have it there for three to four weeks after the three to four weeks you need
to put this in a cool dark spot and it's good for a year the oil itself can go ahead and be used
for any rashes anything that's going on in your skin that's irritating a lot of people prefer to
use it in a salve and i'm going to show you guys how to make that before i show you how to make the
salve i want to point out to you how differently the rosemary gladstar method calendula oil looks
compared to the dried flowers these flowers as i said were something that i picked fresh and
put in here per her method you'll notice that it doesn't look as full in the jar these were very
large sticky flower blooms when i put them in here so as they become more saturated with the oil and
putting the resin into the oil and shrinking down it doesn't look as full as these do for the
calendula salve you're going to need one cup of calendula oil as you see i have two jars here
i'm going to go ahead and strain that and get that oil ready you also need to have some beeswax we're
going to be using 1 4 cup of some grated beeswax and you want to reserve about a
tablespoon and put it aside you also want to have some lavender essential oil you
also want to use a pinch of turmeric root fortunately for us we grew some turmeric and
i'm going to put a card above for that video we're going to be using the double boiler
method and for this method once it gets nice and warm you're going to go ahead and add your
calendula oil and your beeswax once it is melted all together you're going to take a spoonful
and put it in the freezer for two minutes the reason that you want to do this is
so that you can check the consistency this is why we held a tablespoon of the beeswax to
the side this is only two minutes and it's still soft so i'm going to add the rest of that
if you want it to be firmer you're going to add that tablespoon in if you want it to be a
little softer you're going to add a little bit more calendula oil so we've made the calendula
oil the calendula salve now i'm going to show you how to make calendula cream for the calendula
cream you're going to need 1 cup of calendula oil 1 ounce of beeswax you're also going to
need 4 to 6 drops of essential oil for this i'm using lavender and orange oil you're
also going to need one cup of tepid water and just to explain that's about 60 to 100
degrees temperature of water so for this next step i'm going to get two cups of the boiling water
and put it into the blender and i'm going to blend that up and what you're doing essentially is just
heating up the blades you're heating up the unit we are going to dump that water
out before we put the oil in here now we're going to be putting our oil and
our beeswax that we've melted down into it we're going to start blending this up and as
we're blending this we're going to slowly add the tepid water into it through the little spigot
halfway through you should take and scrape it down from the sides with a spatula
to try to get a nice even mix so now that we've made our salve and our cream
we have some oil left over and we can put those in our containers and use that as well with
each of the recipes that i've shared with you we've ended up with a total of eight ounces of
the calendula oil 12 ounces of the calendula cream and eight ounces of the calendula salve these
are all four ounce little containers that i got on amazon and i will add that link below if that's
something you'd like for when you make it i hope you like this video i really enjoy working with
herbs if you like this video give us a thumbs up it really helps our channel out if you want to
see more videos of us working with herbs culinary or medicinal we're going to add a playlist
above here and until the next time let's grow together
