The Prepper Broadcasting Network - How to Make Herbal Medicine w/ Cat Ellis the Herbal Prepper

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Cat Ellis, also known as "The Herbal Prepper," is a practicing herbalist, author, and preparedness educator based in Southeastern Massachusetts on the New England coast.  She began her journey into herbs with simple interests like sachets and scents, but deepened her knowledge after using them for personal health recovery. Key Activities and ContributionsPrepper's Natural Medicine: Life-Saving Herbs, Essential Oils and Natural Remedies for When There is No Doctor (2015). Covers herbal charts, essential oils, stockpiling tips, and step-by-step remedies like nutritional syrups for flu.Prepping for a Pandemic: Life-Saving Supplies, Skills and Plans for Surviving an Outbreak (2015) – Focuses on supplies, skills, and strategies for outbreaks.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/prepper-broadcasting-network--3295097/support.BECOME A SUPPORTER FOR AD FREE PODCASTS, EARLY ACCESS & TONS OF MEMBERS ONLY CONTENT!Get Prepared with Our Incredible Sponsors! Survival Bags, kits, gear www.limatangosurvival.comThe Prepper's Medical Handbook Build Your Medical Cache – Welcome PBN FamilyThe All In One Disaster Relief Device! www.hydronamis.comJoin the Prepper Broadcasting Network for expert insights on #Survival, #Prepping, #SelfReliance, #OffGridLiving, #Homesteading, #Homestead building, #SelfSufficiency, #Permaculture, #OffGrid solutions, and #SHTF preparedness. With diverse hosts and shows, get practical tips to thrive independently – subscribe now!

It came from the archives. I finally was able to get logged back into the chat room, but now we're getting ready to start over again here. Let me just grab a quick drink of water here. I 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, um,

tricks of the trade, so to speak. Well, not really tricks. I mean, 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 get 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 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 kind of letting the intuitive process guide them in that. And that's perfectly fine.

you know, that you can get very intuitive about it. You can also get very precise and detailed about it. It's however you want to approach this. 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, tea. We can have a hot tea or we can have a cold tea, low, we can have a cold tea.

And what I mean by that is it's an infusion. A lot of times you'll hear a nervous 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, 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, let's say, get something like marshmallow root, and it makes it very slippery.

It's something that's very misologous, and it separates out a lot of the starchiness. So you're just less with a sort of a very slippery, thick and liquid. A slippery 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 going to come out solid, but there is a thickness to it, almost a syrupy texture when you use some of those herbs. So for the cold infusions, we're talking about things that are demultant, things that are like marshmallow, slippery elm.

You know, I wouldn't fairly say literally, She'll make it that syrupy texture, but, you know, it is a demulton, so you could use it that way if you wanted to, but I prefer to use heat 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 your cold, excuse me 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 part. So you would use the, if you were using the delicate plant parts, such as the lease, the flour, that kind of thing, you would then just make an infusion, you know, your hot water and the plant material. But you're going to let that steep for much longer than just a few minutes. You're going to let that steep maybe a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes.

You could go much longer. Like, for instance, when I have nettle tea, a lot of times what I'll do is I'll take a quart-mason jar and I'll put my nettle in it and I will fill up the entire quart jar with hot water and I will let it fit. when 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 what I use, but you're going to need at least one teaspoon per cup. So I prefer it stronger. You know, this is up to you.

No one's going to, you know, come around and say, you know, 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 going to 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 quickly, and you're not going to be able to touch it and it's going to stay hot for a good long time. You know, we're talking over several hours. And I may even let it sit.

the counter all day and then once it is cool enough to handle I'll strain it out and you know from there I can put it into a cleaned to rinsed out mason jar put it right back in the jar once you've cleaned it out and I can then tip 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 recommendations 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 going to do it. So, you know, this is, I guess a little bit about compliance. 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.

today. 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 steep their tea long enough. And then, of course, they come away saying, well, that didn't work. Well, of course you didn't work the way it should have. It wasn't steep nearly long enough. The other thing that you can 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 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 20 minutes, and after about 20 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 20 minutes, and that'll reduce down to about one quarter of,

the total volume that it started out as. And I like to do that when I make syrup. 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 glycerin, you could put in some combination of all of those,

you could put in Yacom 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 benefits. Even glycerin, at least will add some benefits. It may not add, you know, like the nice enzymes that honey adds to it, but, you know, But glycerin does have a very soothing effect on the tissue. So let's say, for instance, you had someone with a very bad cough or a very sore throat, you know, just as honey is soothing to the throat, so is glycerin. You could maybe use 50-50 or all honey or all glycerin,

and either way 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, 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. But it just depends upon how thick you prefer your syrup.

If you don't care if it's very thin, 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 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.

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 110 degrees or less. And then you're not going to cook off those enzymes 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 16 ounces worth of the syrup. And the more sweetener you have in there, the longer it's going to last on the shelf or in the refrigerators. Because any time you have water in any preparation, there's only so long that you can store this, even in the refrigerator. Water in a recipe is just going to be. will invite some kind of bacteria or fungus or something.

It's going to grow something funky. If you start to see mold, you know, this may or may not be Benazil and then, you know, either way you shouldn't be ingesting that. So you always be very careful when you're storing anything that has water. Now, another way to preserve that would be to then take your syrup and add some alcohol such that 20% 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 sick, I do take it out. And by the time they're done with whatever cold or whatever it is, usually they're pretty close to the end of that bottle anyway, and you can kind of finish it off. So it's 16 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 for symptom release, like maybe something that's got cinnamon or slippery and something that's just coating the throat and you just take that as needed. So let's see. What else? What should I go to next? But there's not a whole, well, let me, before I go on to Tinctures, Before I go on to the dishes, 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 70%, there was a little chart that we had. 70% should be of herbs that deal directly with the issues that you want to address. And then at the bottom of it, you have the remaining 30%. And you could do this evenly between them, so 15% on one corner of this triangle and 15% on the other.

But the bottom line is that the other two components here to consider when blending your teeth, or formulating your tea, I should say, is that while 70% addresses the main, cause 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 handled it secondary 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 is mud. Let's say you are trying to make a tea 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 say Oregon graperoof 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.

I'm not 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. They also will stay in the intestine because you can either have things filtered to the urinary track 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.

track and 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 70% of that goes there. Then what you might want is maybe 20% of your blend could be something like dandelion. And that will be, or something like maybe metal, something that helps to increase urination so that you can help flush that out. So that helps that in a secondary way.

So you could add something like aneline or nettle or cleavers or anything that's going to be a diuretic that will 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 demulcent 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 what? 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's entirely up to you. So just try to remember most of the tea should be made differently 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 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 finkers an alcohol extraction and we could talk about percolation I'm I will save that for another time but that's probably a show all on its own we're gonna talk today about maceration and there are two different ways of doing this you either are gonna 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 gonna call it a measurement method because if there's a Simplers 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 Simplers method is you take some type of a container. I usually maybe a Mason jar for me and excuse me one moment, you will then fill up this jar with your plant material, fresh or 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, 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 bubbles. That's what I use. It's kind of the same concept 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 100% alcohol. Most vodka is either about 40 to 50%, which would then be 80 to 100 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 40 to 40 to 50% alcohol, and that, of course, means it's about 50 to 60% water. So that's 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 for this, because it will extract both the alcohol soluble and water soluble constituents in the plant. So if you have alcohol, then you're going to extract the most or the widest range of chemicals 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 or there. They're not going to extract the real resinous constituents. There are certain oily constituents that they will not extract, but alcohol will. But in order to do so, it's got to be at a higher alcohol percentage. if you have it available in your area,

it's usually sold under the brand name Everclear. You can get grain alcohol. If you know someone, and I'm not going to suggest that anyone here actually moonshines, but if you happen to know someone, maybe 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, herbal medicines if you wanted to using fresh plant material because with fresh plant material there's water already in it so you you could use vodka and you would still get a usable tincture but it might be a little bit watered down if you have grain alcohol which is usually about 95% alcohol and about 5% water and I don't know anyone that actually does the mass. I mean, I'm sure there are herbals out there that do. I'm not trying to say that there aren't. I personally just don't know anyone or of the ones who I do know they haven't said that they do, who actually, you know, calculates that 5%. Most of the herbalists that I know,

just treat it as 100%, because it makes for much easier math. So in that case, you know, if you have fresh plant material, 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 95% 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 echinacea, I'm trying to think. I think it's 70 or 75% alcohol that you need to have.

it's got to be at least that in order to get all of the constituents out of echinacea. And it's also very, very high for cayenne. Now, I'm not saying that if you only use vodka, that it's not going to work or to toss it out. I'm 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 going to have something that's very usable. So just use the highest percentage alcohol that you can when using fresh plant material. 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 to, I'm just getting another drink of water here. I guess I did more talking this weekend and I realized, if you are using fresh plant material, the highest percentage alcohol you can get, whether that's vodka or Randy or Everclear, 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 said get the highest percentage alcohol that's safe for doing consumption. Do not get isopropyl alcohol. 95 ISO is

not what you want for this. What that becomes, if you do make an extract that way is you have a liniment. You have something that you can apply topically, which is perfectly fine is there are many herbs that you want to apply topically, but you can't ingest it. That would be poisoned. 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 95% alcohol. It's best. That's not the way to go.

So just opt for the vodka instead. So if I'm not being clear, please raise your hand 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 Simplers 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 eyedropper 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 up the six weeks. Now, what happens if you leave it in longer than six weeks? Absolutely nothing. nothing's going to 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 reuse that tincture 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 clean out the jar, put more fresh plant material in. When I say fresh, I should say new plant material. Because if you're using dried 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 of a little bit of vodka otherwise and let that go for another six weeks. and after about six weeks that's about as much as it's going to extract into the vodka it's not leaving it in isn't going to get any stronger it's just going to kind of sit there

for the most part you can do it about one more time and put like three rounds of new plant material in the same vodka but by that point the vodka is pretty much absorbed all it's going to or the grain alcohol or whatever you are using for this. That's about three rounds of it and it's about saturated and you're not really going to 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 need that much plant material. I don't want to waste any herbs if I don't have to. and if you weigh it out usually you'll find that you're using in the Simplers method just too much plant material for that usually now if you're going to use ratios and measure this out most herbs if you're using them fresh will have a 1 to ratio ratio meaning 1 ounce by weight of plant material to 2 to 2 ounces to 2 ounces by volume of your solvent or menstruum. So let's say you had one ounce of fresh thyme,

you would then have five ounces of your vodka, and that's what you would put into a jar. For me, keeping it very simple, I like to use pint jars, and if I do a 1-2 ratio, I double it so that I'm working with two ounces of my plant material by weight and 10 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 quart jars and it's perfectly fine.

But you're going to need a scale and you're going to need to weigh out your plant material. and for the liquid portion, I have a measuring cup and I like doing it up to 10 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 60% alcohol. I can take my brain alcohol and I can pour that in up to 6 ounces and I can pour water in for 4 ounces up to 10 ounces.

and makes it real nice and easy that way. Or if I need, you know, 70% alcohol, I fill that up with my grain alcohol up to seven ounces there and water up to the 10 ounces. And then I, you know, combine the two from there. So that's what you would do for, I should say, one to two is the ratio for fresh herbs 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, is time to five ounces of you. menstrual. 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 herbal book that's got that kind of thing. My book will have that.

It'll tell you what all the percentages of the 50 different herbs that are in there. Certainly, if you look it up in any good herbal book, it will tell you that. So that's an overview of tinctures, and the reason why I spent so much time on that is because it's the exact same process to make either glycerite or an acetum, which is a vinegar extraction. Now, that's not to say that there aren't a little bit more, advanced methods of making glycerite, but let's say you wanted to make a lemon

balm glycerite because you wanted something that would be nice, flavorful, a little on the sweet side, maybe you can even spread it on 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 balm listeride out. And listerine, while it doesn't extract quite as well as alcohol, it is a sugar alcohol, but it's not alcoholic and there isn't, you know, an alcohol component in it such that, you know, you're going to drink this and become altered by this. It's different. It's not alcohol like, you know, you go out and you drink spirits or something like. that but it is made from these carbohydrates byproducts 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 glycerin. Food-grade glycerin. We're not talking about the glycerin that comes from like melt and pour soap kits, but food-grade

glycerin, 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 ingesting, you know, copious amounts. You wouldn't like pour yourself, you know, a 16 ounce glass of this and just drink it. That would not happen. But what you can do is you can, if you have fresh plant material, just use straight glycerin. If you have dried plant material, you can use straight glycerin. That's perfectly fine. You'll still get an extraction. 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 an alcohol-based tincture is that the plant has been dehydrated and the water is out of it you need to have water to extract a water soluble constituents if the water is gone from the plant then you need to replace that water in order in order for the alcohol or the glycerin 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 differences in, you know, how.

much alcohol and how much water, how much glycer and how much water. So in general, though, you can kind of get away with about 60% glycerin and about 40% water in general. So you could then use that over your dried herbs and just again let it sit for six weeks. With your herbal vinegars, it's the same thing. You can jam all those herbs into your vinegar. Let it sit 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, forever. I mean, they're not going to spoil. Will they still be viable 30 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.

You're probably going to be using these long before you ever get to that point. However, if you do see the plants migrating out, you'll see these little flex migrating out. The best you can do with that point is just shake up the bottle really well so that it's kind of evenly distributed and just 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 head over there real quick before the show is over. So I'm looking for the question here. If you use the weight volume formula and the liquid doesn't cover all the plant material, what do you do? All right, this is tricky. And the first herb that comes to mind is mullen. And honestly, with something like that, we're talking about plants that have this, mullin 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 can do, if you can... If you're going to make any attempt to do this, I would just use the Simplers 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 going to have to percolate that, and that's the only other way that I would know how to do that. But 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 will give it more surface area and it'll make for a much better, much stronger extraction than if you throw big chunks of, you know, a root into, you know, your bottle or your jar to make your tincture or your glytherite or your acetum, that would be an herbal vinegar. or your infused honey or your infused oil. You know, there's another way of also doing on glycerite slightly more advanced than that involves a little bit of heat,

but I guess there's a little bit more advanced. Same thing with the percolation, but if you chop that up, if you chop up that mullin leaf as small as small as you possibly can, that maybe to leaching double up the liquid after six weeks or move the old dog would add another first yeah you could absolutely do that you could you could just you know keep tincturing this 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 if I've been

able to cram more mullin into a jar just because, you know, I took the time to just process that. And I had to do it by hand. I couldn't, the, 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 slussy. 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 going to, the only other option I would have would be percolation. That involves a percolation cone, which you can either make or you can order a glass funnel from and 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 of the thing I want to touch on before we wrap this up because I've got about three minutes to explain how to make a poultice. So a poultice. let's say you have a bug bite. Let's say you've got a nasty sting or, you know, it's a horsefly 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 pulpit to put on there of, let's say, plantain or. or maybe if you've got something like jewelweed nearby, and usually that would just be 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 impulsive. Technically it is. But let's say you have a bigger injury, something that goes on your back or something 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 comfy leaf or confrory 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 will be fine 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 flour. It doesn't matter if it's all-purpose, you know, a whole weed flower or white flour, whatever. It could be cornstarch. 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 to them to smell the lavender and calm down. So I use that, but you could certainly use just about any kind of powder like cornstarch or arrow root or regular flour that you use to bake bread, and you would mix that with your wet herb. In this case, I'm choosing comfrey. You could also have Arnico flowers in there. you could have any number of herbs that you were using.

So that may be something like, oh, something to handle bleeding instead, maybe like yellow, which you would not have Arnica in then if that were the case, because you don't put Arnitha on broken skin. But let's say that were the case. You had your Yarrow powder or something. You could use that. It's wet. Anyway, you 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 going to 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 paste that you're putting directly upon the wound. And that covers just about, maybe about, like, 80% of all the herbal skills that you could need to know to make a wide variety of herbal medicines. 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, Gplus, 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 herbalpreper.com.

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I hope you got something out of it. This is Cat, the herbal Prepper with the Herbal Prepper Live. We'll see you again next week. Today's broadcast has come to you through the courtesy of the Prepper Broadcasting Network. See our hosts, show schedules, archive, programs and more at Prepper Broadcasting.com. Thanks for listening.