How to Make Herbal Medicine w/ Cat Ellis the Herbal Prepper

It came from the orcha. All right, So we're back. And just as we're back, I finally was able to get logged back into the chat room. But now we're getting ready to start over again. He let me just grab a quick drink of water here. We spent a long day teaching yesterday and all I did was talk for about eight hours straight. So today we're talking about how to make various herbal preparations and some of the little tricks of the trade, so to speak. Well, I was not really tricks. These are basic skills, but maybe a little bit more nuanced than what you might be thinking of. Because everyone knows how to make a cup of tea, right you know, you know a little tea bag, put it in some hot water, and you know, about three four minutes later you have a cup of tea. That's not exactly how making a medicinal tea work. And we're going to talk about tinctures. There's a little bit of an art form to that, a little bit of a little bit of should I put this? There's skill to it, there's a little bit of science to it. There's a little bit of creativity to it. So I think one of the one of my favorite things about yesterday's class that I taught was how creative people were getting, because we did a whole class just on skills yesterday and people were mixing and matching things and you know, kind of letting the intuitive process, you know, guide them in that. And and that's perfectly fine. You know that you can get very intuitive about it. You can so get very precise and detailed about it. That's however you want to approach this, it's you're you're going to as long as you're as long as you have a basic understanding of how these things are put together, you can allow yourself a wide range of freedom when you make them. So, uh, tea, we can have a we can have a hot tea, or we can have a cold tea. And what I mean by that is it's a hot it's an infusion. A lot of times you'll hear an orderless refer to tea as an infusion. And what you're doing is you're infusing your plant material in water. So you can either do this using heat, you know, steeping your plant material, your maybe perhaps your peppermint leaves or your skull cap leads or you know, something like that into some hot water. You can also have a cold infusion, and a cold infusion is nice when you need to say, uh, get something like marshmallow root and it makes it very slippery. This is it's something that's very usefulogenous and it separates out a lot of the starchiness, so you're you're just left with this sort of a very slippery, thickened liquid. Flippery elm will do it too, and you know, when you heat it up, you don't really get that thick gelatinous. I don't mean to make it sound like it's gonna come out solid, but there is a thickness to it, almost the syrupy texture when you use some of those are so for the cold infusions, we're talking about things that are demultent, things that are like marshmallow slippery elm. You know, I don't I wouldn't fairly say licoric will make it that syrupy texture, but you know it does. It is a demult and so you could use it that way if you wanted to, but I prefer to you to keep with that. When it comes to tea, like hot tea, that's primarily what we're going to be talking about, and we have either you're cold you're not cold infusions, you're hot infusions, or you have something called a decoction, and what you're dealing with is either a water extraction of delicate plant parts or a water extraction of tough plant parts. So you would use the if you were if you were using the delicate plant parts such as the leaf, the flower, that kind of thing, you would then just make an infusion. You know, your hot water and the plant material. But you're gonna let that steep from much longer than just a few minutes. You're gonna let that steep maybe a minimum of fifteen to twenty minute. You could go much longer. Like for instance, when I have metal tea, a lot of times, what I'll do is I'll take a court mason jar and I'll put my metal in it, and I will fill up the entire court jar with hot water and I will let it fit, and I usually use I like it strong, so I usually put in about a tablespoon of nettle leaf for every cup of water. That's that's what I use. But you're gonna need at least one tea spoon per cup, so I prefer it's stronger. And you know it's this is up to you. No one's gonna, you know, come around and say, you know you didn't you didn't do this right because you didn't put in a tablespoon, or you put in too much or anything like that. That's not gonna happen. So what I do is I put this in the mason jar, and I put the water over it, and I let it sit, and I let that sit until well until it's no longer too hot to touch. Because if you've ever put in hot water into a mason jar, you know that this can get very hot, very fristly, and you're not gonna be able to touch it, and it's gonna stay hot for a good long time. You know, we're talking over several hours, and I may even let us sit on the counter all day. And then once it, once it is cool enough to handle, I'll strain it out, and you know, from there, I can put it into a clean, drinsed out mason jar, put it right back of the jaw once you just cleaned it out, and I can then sip on that throughout the day, and I usually will do that like the night before, and then I have tea that I can have all day long. So that's a way, like when you see recommendation to take a tea three to four cups a day, you know, rather than make the tea three to four times a day, you can make it one time and make it in a mason jar and then just reheat it throughout the day. That's how I do that, because if I had to make tea for myself several times a day, I know myself, I'm probably not gonna do it. So, you know, this is I guess a little bit about compliance. You know, I don't like to use the term because it's a little This is more for I guess something that medical people use, the patient compliance, But that is sort of what it comes down to. If you want someone to actually take it, it has to be somewhat convenient. So you try to make these things, or make your recommendations as convenient as possible to take. So if you make you know, your day's worth of tea all at once, in four cups and batches of three to four cups, then you're more likely to just reheat that and actually take this than if you had to go and make it three four times a day. Excuse me, and I mean this is not very complicated stuff, but it's I think it's worth noting because I don't think a lot of people will actually speak their tea long enough, and then of course they come away saying, Wow, it didn't work well, she didn't work the way it should have. It wasn't steep nearly long enough. The other thing that you're going to look at here are decoctions. And decoctions are made with the hard parts of the plant. So we're talking to the root, maybe bark, and if there's like a dried fruit or a nut or something, or a seed or something like that, anything would be very hard excuse me. So with that, what you would do is you would put your plant material the same ratio into let's say a pot of water. So if you had, if you had four cups of water to start off with, you're going to bring this up to a boil and then you're going to let it simmer and you're going to do that for about twenty minutes, and after about twenty minutes, the steam has evaporated away about half of the volume, and then you would strain that and that is a decoction, and that's what you would use for those hard plant parts. And if you want, you can actually do it a second time. Let it go for another twenty minutes, and that'll reduce down to about one quarter of the of the total volume that it started out as. And I like to do that when I make syrups because once you've reduced that liquid down that much, now if you want to, you can make a syrup from that. You strain everything out and you can add in some type of sweet, something that's sick, something that is going to sweeten it up, like honey. That's a very very common popular one. You could also put in molasses, you could put in glycerine, you could put in some combination of all of those. You could put in acon syrup, you could put in maple syrup, you know whatever. You could also use a simple syrup of just sugar and water. But it doesn't really necessarily add any benefit. Even glycerin at least will add some benefits. It may not add, you know, like the nice enzymes that honey add to it. But but glitcerin does have a very soothing effect on the tissue. So let's say, for instance, you had someone a very bad cough or a very sore throat. You know, just as honey is soothing to the throat. So as glycin, you could maybe use fifty to fifty or all honey or all glitterin, and either way it is going to be very soothing to the throat. So you would strain out all that plant material and you've got your quarter or half, or however however you did it, whether you made a decoction or a double decoction, you'd strain all that plant material out, you've reserved the liquid, and you would then add to it at either equal or twice the volume of some type of a sweetener. It just depends upon how sick you prefer your syrup. If you don't care, if it's very sin then you could just do a decoction and you could just add some honey and that would be the end of that. And the way I add my honey specifically with the honey, because I don't want to cook off any of the enzymes, is that I wait until I wait until the water portion of this has cooled off only just enough so that I can just touch it with my little finger. If you touch it and it burns, and I don't advocate anyone trying to burn themselves here, be very careful, but I you know, I mean, give it a quick little test and if you can touch it and it doesn't burn your skin, then it's not going to burn the enzymes. Or of course, if you want to be a little more careful, you can always use a thermometer and just make sure that the temperature is one hundred and ten degrees or less and then you're not going to cook off those times either way. But if you end up with let's say a cup of liquid, you can then add a cup of honey, or if you have a half a cup of liquid left and you want to add a cup and a half of honey, you'll end up with about sixteen ounces board of the syrup. And that's going to the more sweetener you have in there, the longer it's going to last on the shelf or in the refrigerators, because anytime you have water in any preparation, there's only so long that you can store this, even as a refrigerator water water in a recipe is just going to invite some kind of bacteria or fungus or something. It's going to grow something funky. You know, if you start to see mold, you know, this may or may not be penezilla and then it's you know, either way, you shouldn't be ingesting that, so you always to be very careful when you're storing anything that has water. Now, way to preserve that would be to then take your syrup and add some alcohol such that twenty percent of the total volume was in alcohol, so you could do that. That's another way to preserve it. But I just tend to keep it in the refrigerator and I freeze them long term. But when someone is that I did take it out and by the time they're done with whatever cold or whatever it is, usually we're pretty close to the end of that bottle anyway, and you can kind of finish it off. So it's the sixteen ounces seems to be a nice amount for that, and you would then just take that by the spoonful, as you know, maybe as needed, if it's just if it's just forced symptom release, like maybe something that's got a cinnamon or slippery and something that's just coating the throat, and you just take that as needed. So let's keep what else UM wish I go to. But because there's not a whole lot, let me before I go on the tinctures, Before I go on pinches. Let me just talk about how you would pick your teeth, how would you pick the herbs that go into the teeth. The way I was taught was that, you know, if you think of a triangle at the top, you know, this is where you put the seventy percent. There's a little chart that we had, and seventy percent should be of herbs that deal directly with the issue that you want to address, and then at the bottom of it you had the remaining thirty percent, And you could do this evenly between them, So fifteen percent on one corner of this triangle and fifteen percent on the other. But the bottom line is is that the other two components here to consider when blending your teeth or formulating your t you should say is that you know, while seventy percent is the addresses the main cause or the main or the main symptom or the main goal you're trying to achieve, the others are supportive. So one of them should be something that handles it in very way, and then the last one should be something that is tonic tonic meaning supportive or strengthening or you know, something in that vein. So let me try to clear that up because that was probably about as clear as mud. Let's say you were trying to make a tee for someone who has a urinary track infection. One of the things that I would pick right away would be probably even amounts of juniper berry and also something that contains berberine. And we'll just stay organ graape routh for this example, and those two are local antibiotics. They will make it through the body to get to the urinary tract, and because of this, they will be able to address the infection. So you know, in other words, they're not leaving. They don't leave the body and then go around and get circulated. A saying leave the body, I'm trying to say, they don't leave the intestine, not leave the body. They don't leave the intestine. That's not where they go. They don't go into the bloodstream. But they will make it to the urinary tract. You know, they also will stay in the intestine, because you can either have things filtered to the urinary tract or to the intestine. But we'll do an anatomy class another day. But anyway, the point is that it will make it to the urinary tract, and it won't it won't get into the bloodstream and because of that, the antibiotic properties of the herbs will deal with that infection. That's right there, So seventy percent of that goes there. Then what you might want is maybe twenty percent of your blend could be something like dandelion, and that will be or something like maybe metal, something that helps to increase yourination so that you can help flush that out. So that helps that in a secondary way, So you could you could add something like dandalion or metal or cleavers or anything that's going to be a diuretic that'll just keep things slowing. And then maybe the remainder of it, you might want a combination of marshmallow or maybe corn silk or something that's going to be demulsion or soothing to the tissues. So that's how I was taught how to select your herbs and in the quantities. Now, if you have slightly different percentages, you know, it's perfectly fine. Maybe you've made those decisions for taste purposes. Maybe you just happen to like how that works a little bit better that that's entirely up to you. So yeah, so just try to remember most of the tea should be made of something to deal with the issue directly. After that, you need something there maybe that helps in a secondary way, and something that's either soothing or tonic. So something that either soothes the problem if it's inflamed, or something that's tonic and supportive and is building it up. That that is a nourishing or tonic type of ingredient. All right, So tinctures, let's talk about that, because I think there's a lot of confusion when it comes to making tinctures. Tinctures are an alcohol extraction, and we could talk about percolation. I will save that for another time if that's probably a show all on its own. We're going to talk today about maceration. And there are two different ways of doing this. You're either are going to use something called the Simplers method, which is the easiest way, or you're going to use something I'm not sure that there's a name for it, but I'm just going to call it a measurement method, because if there's a simpler method, then there's this one, and this one may be a little more precise, but it requires measuring things out, so that's what I'm calling it that. So the simplert method is you take some type of a container. I usually may be a mason jar for me, and excuse me one moment. You will will then fill up this jar with your plant material, fresher dry, and you will then cover it with alcohol. You'll pour your alcohol in. You make sure that all of the plant material is coming in contact with that alcohol, and sometimes you might have to wait for it to settle and then pour in more because there are little air pockets everywhere, and as the alcohol pours in, it's going to fill up all that space. So you might want to get like a little stir or maybe a knife, or what I like to use is that long flat tool that comes with just about every canning set, you know. The it's got like a magnet on one end so that you can get your canning lids without having to put your hands in that hot water. It's usually got this long flat end on it, and you can use that to go around the sides of your canning jars to get out air bubble. That's what I use. That's kind of the same context here, So make sure that you get your air bubbles out and you go through and you just kind of run that tool along the sides and make sure that the entire plant material is coming in contact with the alcohol, because if it's not, then it's not extracting into the alcohol obviously, so it has to come in contact with it, so you pour it all in. Now, what kind of alcohol do you use? Well, if you want, you can just use vodka. Vodka is about the correct water and alcohol ratio, because it's not it's not one hundred percent alcohol. It's most vodka is either about forty to fifty percent, which would then be eighty to one hundred proof. That's usually where most alcohol falls. Brandy is I believe, the same way, So you could use that if you wanted to use that instead. But vodka tends to be available in most places, and vodka is about forty to forty to fifty percent alcohol, and that of course means it's about the fifty to sixty percent water. So that typically what most dried herbs need to make a real proper extraction. Let's say, if you were going to measure it out, so you know, it's kind of cheating or I should I don't want to say cheating. It's sort of skipping a step to just kind of use vodka, and it may not be precise, but you're going to be in that ballpark of having the right water to alcohol water to alcohol ratio most of the time. Why would you even use alcohol Because alcohol is the best solvent out there that you can use to this because it will extract both the alcohol soluble and water soluble constituent in the plant. So if you have alcohol, then you're going to extract the most or the widest range of chemicals from from the plant. If you were to use something like glycerine or vinegar, which you can certainly do, then you may miss a few things here. They're like, they're not going to extract the real resinous constituents. They're not going there are certain oily constituents that they will not extract, but alcohol will. But in order to do so, it's got to be a higher alcohol percentage. If you have it available in your area, it's usually sold under the brand name ever Clear. You can get grain alcohol if you know someone. And I'm not going to suggest that anyone here actually moonshine, but if you happen to know someone, maybe you know they might theoretically explain to you how to do this at home, or maybe theoretically hypothetically might be able to share a little bit of this with you, but you could use that to make some of your verbal medicines if you wanted to using fresh plant material, because with fresh plant material, there's water already in it, So you could use vodka and you would still get a usable thincture, but it might be a little bit water it down. If you have grain alcohol, which is usually about ninety five percent alcohol is about five percent water. And I don't know anyone that actually does the math. I mean, I'm sure there are both out there that do. I'm not trying to say that that there aren't. I personally just don't know anyone or of the ones. So I do know they haven't said that they do. Who actually, you know, calculates to that five percent. Most of the ergolists that I know just treat it as one hundred percent because it makes for much easier math. So in that case, you know, if you have fresh plant material and try to get the highest possible percentage alcohol that you can and from you know, if it's available where you live, and get ever clear because that's going to have about ninety five percent alcohol content, and then you can water it down just a little bit to get some of the more difficult to extract constituents that I'm thinking of, like, for instance, with Echinasia, I'm trying to think. I think it's seventy or seventy five percent alcohol that you need to have. It's got to be at least that in order to get all of the constituents out of Echinaesia. And it's also very very high for cayenne. Now I'm not saying that if you only use vida that it's not going to work or to toss it out, not saying that at all, but there might be a couple of chemicals in there that just don't quite translate over. But you know you're still gonna have something that's very usable. So just use the highest percentage alcohol that you can when using fresh plant material. When you're using dried plant material, you would have to add water to that anyway. So just get vodka because it's a nice easy way, or brandy, excuse me to I'm just gett another drink of water here. I guess I did more talking this weekend than I realized. If you if you are using fresh plant material, the highest percentage alcohol you can get, whether it's vodka or brandy or ever clear, whatever is the highest. One thing I have to caution and I never thought to caution people about this before until someone did this. So whatever you do, don't go off saying, well, Kat said to just get the highest percentage alcohol, I should get the highest percentage alcohol that's safe for doing consumption. Do not get isopropyl alcohol ninety five ISO is not what you want to this what that becomes if you do make an extract that way, as you have a liniment, you have something that you can apply topically, which is perfectly fine because there's many or there are many or that you want to apply topically, but you can't ingest it. That would be poison There's a label right on it that says it's not for human consumption, that it's poisonous. But you know, you never know. Some people can get fixated on just getting the highest percentage alcohol, and if they can't find it at the liquor store, they might look at that and say, well, that's ninety five percent alcohol. That's not that's not the way to go, So just up for the vodka instead. So if I'm not being clear, please raise your hands or say something in the chat room and I'll go back and explain it, because I think tinctures probably generate the most question. So just in a quick review, that was the simplest method. You fill up the jar with your plant material, fresh or dried, and you just fill to the top with alcohol, and you let it sit for a minimum of two weeks, and at the end of two weeks you have something that's usable. But ideally you want to let it go for at least six weeks. So if you needed to, what you could do is just take an eye dropper and kind of just skim off the top if you absolutely need it to, and then you can use that dosage from there and just kind of let the rest of it continue to macerate for the six weeks. Now, what happens if you leave it in longer than six weeks, absolutely nothing. Nothing's gonna happen to it. The alcohol is not going to let it spoil, but it's not necessarily going to get a whole lot stronger. You've pretty much exhausted those herbs. There's really not much left to extract. What you can do, though, is you can swap out that old plant material but use that tincture that you just made and retincture it, so you could strain out all that plant material. You're reserving your tincture, you're reserving your liquid, and you know, clean out the jar, put more fresh plant material. And when I say fresh plans should say new plant material. So if you're using dry herbs, you would just get more dried herbs to put in there, or fresh plant material, whatever you're using, and take the tincture you made and put it right back into the jar, and you might have to top off a little bit of vodka otherwise, and let that go for another six weeks. And after about six weeks that's as that's about as much as it's gonna extract into the vodka. It's not leaving it in, isn't gonna get any stronger. It's just gonna kind of sit there for the most part. That you can do it about one more time and put like three rounds of new plant material in the same vida. But by that point the vodka's pretty much absorbed all it's going to or the grain alcohol or when whatever you are using for this. That's about three rounds of it and it's about saturated and you're not really gonna be pulling much else. Out of there. Now, if you wanted to be a little more precise about things rather than just filling the jar with plant material, I personally think that's a little bit of a waste because you don't that much plant material. I don't want to waste any herbs if I don't have to, and if you if you weigh it out, usually you'll find that you're using, in the simplest method, just too much plant material for that. Usually. Now, if you're going to use ratios and leisure this out most orbs. If you're using them fresh, we'll have a one to two ratio, meaning one ounce by weight of plant material to two ounces by volume of your solvent or menstrum. So let's say you had one ounce of fresh time, you would then have five ounces of your boda and that's what you would put into a jar. For me, keeping it very simple, I like to use a pint jars, and if I do a one to two ratio, I double it so that I'm working with two ounces of my plant material by weight and ten ounces of my solvent by volume, and that pretty much fills up or gets close to filling up a pint jar. You can also do this in court jars, and it's perfectly fine, but you're gonna need a scale and you're gonna need to weigh out your plant material and for the for the liquid portion, I have a measuring cup and I like doing it up to ten ounces because it makes it very easy to measure because it's got you know, the measuring cup has it by ounces there. And let's say I need to have sixty percent alcohol. I can take my brain alcohol and I can pour that in up to six ounces, and I can pour water in for four ounces up to ten ounces. It makes it real nice and easy that way. Or if I need, you know, seventy percent alcohol, I fill that up with my my grain alcohol up to seven seven ounces there and water up to the ten ounces and then I, you know, I combine the two from there. So that's what you would do. For I should I should say one to two is the ratio for fresh erbs and one to five. I hope I didn't just confuse anyone there. One to two is for fresh plants and one to five is for dried plant material. So if you have fresh time, it's one ounce by weight of plant material and two ounces by volume of liquid. If it's dried plant material, then one ounce let's say, time to five ounces of your ment them. If you are using fresh plant material, just try to always use the highest percentage alcohol that you have, and if it's dried you then have that. You then have the option of either just using vodka or using great alcohol and measuring out the correct percentage. Now, the next question is how do you know what that percentage is? You have to look it up. Find an RBAL book that's got that kind of thing. My book will have that. I'll tell you what all the percentages of the fifty different nerves that are in there. Certainly, if you look it up in any good RBAL book, it will it will tell you that. So that's that's an overview of tinctures. And the reason why I spend so much time on that is because it's the exact same process to make either glys right or in a setom, which is a vinegar extraction. Now that's not to say that there aren't a little bit more advanced methods of making glys right. But let's say you want to make a lemon bomb with's the right because you wanted something that would be nice, flavorful, a little on the sweet side. Maybe you can even spread it on, you know, a nice warm piece of toast to give to a child who just needs to calm down and they like something that's a little sweet. But you don't want to get them hopped up on sugar because it's bedtime and you need them to go to sleep. So can anyone see that I've done this before? So what you do is you would get your lemon bomb what's the right out and liserin. While it doesn't extract quite as well as alcohol, it is a sugar alcohol, but it doesn't it's not alcoholic, and it's not there isn't you know, an alcohol component in it such that you know you're gonna drink this and become altered by this. It's it's different. It's not alcohol like you know, you go out and you drink spirits or something like that. But it's made from these carbohydrate byproduct of the soap making process of all things. But it has a sweet flavor without spiking the blood sugar. So your children are not going to bounce off the wall from having it, and you're only having a little bit of it. You shouldn't have this in large quantities. But it's sweet it's got a little warming sensation on the tongue and it can certainly help to make medicine go down a little easier for children. What you would do is the simplest method is the easiest way to do this, And you can just get your plant material and pack it into a jar and cover it with glacer and food grade glacier. And we're not talking about the glittering that comes from like meltin poor soap kits, but food grade glucerin, which, even though it's a byproduct of the soap making industry, it's been further refined to make this edible if you were going to ingest this, but certainly you don't want to be in rusting. You know, copious amounts. You wouldn't like pour yourself, you know, a sixteen ounce glass of this and just drink it. That would not happen. Well, what you can do is you can, if you have fresh plant material, just use straight glycin. If you have dried plant material, you can use straight glitering. That's perfectly fine. You'll still get an extraction. What you can also do, though, is you can add in the water. Now, if you're wondering why you need to add in a little water with the dried plant material, the same as you would with a tincture, and alcohol based tincture. Is that the plant has been dehydrated and the water is out of it. You need to have water to extract the water soluble constituents. If the water has gone from the plant, then you need to replace that water and order in order for the alcohol or the glytherin or the vinegar to be able to do its extraction properly. So certain plants are a little bit more watery than others, and if they have a higher water content, you know, then they take longer to dry, so you may need more water in order to be able to properly extract them. So that's why sometimes you see the the differences in you know, how much alcohol and how much water, how much glitter and how much water. So in general though, you can kind of get away with about sixty percent glisser and and about forty water in general. So you could then use that over your dry herbs and just again let it sit for six weeks. With your herbal vinegars, it's the same thing. You you can jam all those herbs into your vinegar. Let its fit for six weeks and six weeks, you decant it, you get your liquid, and you bottle it. Alcohol tinctures. They're going to last you for well and forever. I mean, they're not gonna spoil. Well, they still viable thirty years from now. I don't know, but if you haven't used it in that time, you probably aren't going to be using it then at that point it's uh, you're probably going to be using these long before you ever get to that point. However, if you do see the plant migrating out, you know, see these little flex migrating out, the best you can do at that point is just shake up the bottle really well so that it's kind of easily distributed, and just to use that. All right, we are getting short on time here. I want to just check in real quickly. There's a question in the chat room here, so let me let me head over there real quick before the show is over. So looking for the questions here. If you use the weight to volume formula and the liquid doesn't cover all the plant material, what do you do? All Right? This is tricky, and the first orb that comes to mind is more and honestly, with something like that, we're talking about plants that have this mull and leaf has this real big, fluffy texture to it. It's got a lot of air in it, it's got a lot of volume to it. And the best thing you can do, if you're going to make any attempt to do this, I would just use the simplest method, but try to go through that plant material and chop it up as small as you possibly can to try to get rid of some of that fluffiness. Or the other alternative is to get a powder and you're gonna have to percolate that, and it's that's the only other way that I would know how to do that. But the other that's something I should have said earlier, which I'm glad this came up. Always try to get your plant material as small as you possibly can, because that'll give it more surface area and it'll make for a much better, mind stronger extraction than if you, you know, throw big chunks of you know, a root into you know, your bottle or your jar to make your tincture or your glyterite or you're acetum that be an herbal vinegar, or you're infused honey, or you're infused oil. You know, there's another way of also doing a glyceite slightly more advanced, and that involves a little bit of heat, but that's, like I said, a little bit more advanced. Same thing with the percolation. But if you if you chop that up, if you chop up that mullen leaf as small as as small as you possibly can, that let me see maybe two reaching double the liquid after six weeks from move the old dog with at another first. Yeah, you could absolutely do that. You could. You could just you know, keep tincturing with that same liquid and just putting and put a new plant material until it gets to the strength that you want. You could certainly do that too, but absolutely try to get it as small as possible. You know. You see I've been able to cram more mullein into a jar just because you know, it took the time to just process that, and I had to do it by hand. I couldn't the the the blade of the food processor thing just didn't it just didn't get what I wanted and I had to go there and chop, chop, chop chop until this got really teeny tiny. But even still, you know, it's very flussy, it's very light, and you know it's just it's it's tough. It's tough to do that one. So unless it's gonna the only other option I would have would the percolation and that involves the percolation cone, which you can either make or you can order a glass funnel from and if you can kind of make your own percolation cone at home. But that's something that would take like an entire hour to explain. Let me see, I want to make sure I touch on one of the there's one other thing I want to touch on before we wrap this up, because we're I've got about three minutes to explain how to make a pultice. So a poultice. Let's say you have a bug bite. Let's say you've got a nasty sting or you know, let' see it's a horse fly or it's a wasp or something has bitten you and it's just miserable. Or let's say you have the mother of all mosquitoes has bitten you and it's just itchy and it's miserable, So you can make a poultice to put on there. Of let's say, uh, plantain, or maybe if you've if you've got something like jewelweed nearby, and usually that would just be you know, you grabbing the plantain or the jewel weed and you crushing it up and putting it right onto that bite. However, and that's technically a pulton it is. But let's say you have a bigger injury, something that goes on your back or something that like a sprained ankle or something like that. What you're looking to do is you're looking to make a paste. So you could, let's say, for something like a sprain, get let's say a comfrey leaf or comfrey root, if you have that. And I have no issues using comfrey root topically, I think that I reserve the leaf. Well, I don't say I reserve the leaf, but if I were going to ingest comfrey, I use the leaf. Either the leaf or the root would be fined topically, but I would use that and I would kind of mash it up, either in a blender or if it's been dried, it's already cut very finely, and I kind of moisten it up with a little warm water. And to that you add some kind of a flower. It doesn't matter if it's you know, like all purpose, you know, a whole weed flour or white flour or whatever. It could be corn starch, it could be any kind of a powdery thing that's going to make a paste. I suppose you could even use something like potato flakes if you needed to. I have lavender flower powder that I use a lot for this because I think when someone has an injury, it's nice for them to smell the lavender and calm down, So I use that. But you could certainly use just about any kind of powder, like corn starch or arrowroot, or regular flour that you use to bake bread, and you would mix that with your wet herb. In this case, I'm choosing confrey. You could also have arnica flowers in there. You could have any number of herbs that you were using, so that maybe something like oh, something to handle bleeding instead, but maybe like yarrow, which you would not have arnica in then if that were the case, because you don't put on a broken skin. But let's say that was the case, and you had your yarrow powder or something, you could use that it's wet anyway, You've packed that right on top of the injury, and over that you would put some gauze and tape that down, and then over that put some plastic wrap around there because it's gonna leak. So you've got your paste, and then you've got your gauze, and then you've got your plastic wrap that goes around there, and if you can get some type of a compression bandage around it, that'll help hold the entire thing in place. So basically, that's all it is. It's just some type of an herbal taste that you're putting directly upon the wound, and that covers just about maybe about like eighty percent of all the verbal skills that you could need to know to make a wide variety of verbal medicine. So hopefully that clears up some of the questions people may have had about how to make these things. And you know, if you like what you've heard, connect with me by following me on Facebook, Twitter, g Plus, Pinterest, you know, drop by my website if you've got a question, if I said something that just was not clear at all, send me an email. I've got a contact form on my website at urbalprepper dot com if you subscribe to my blogs updates. I don't have a notice up there that says you get a free PDF, but you do actually get a free PDF of an ebook I wrote called or a Erbal Guide for Cold and Flu, but that's going to be switched out very soon for herbal antibiotics, And if you're already a subscriber, I'm going to be sending that to everyone too, so that'll be going out there a couple of weeks. So that's going out to the entire mailing list. And don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel. So thank you for everyone for spending your time with me. I hope you've got something out of it. This is thincat the Herbal Prepper with the Herbal Prepper Live. We'll see you again next week. 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