Workshop: Practical Herbal Pharmacy
This practical, interactive and hands on workshop is an opportunity to explore and practice making the range of herbal preparations we can craft at home and in our communities, with seasonal plants that are locally accessible and often growing wild. We will be learning about the methods, appropriate uses, and applications of key remedies including infusions, decoctions, tinctures, vinegars, oxymels, and infused oils and balms.
We will also cover the connections between the healing plants of our localities and their traditional uses and medicines through history; the seasonality of herbal healthcare; tailoring our remedies to our healthcare and wellbeing needs; the theory and practice of making medicines at home including key materials and equipment; and the making of preparations that you will take home along with the recipes.
Together we will cover/explore:
- Seasonal harvesting of garden and wild medicinal plants for medicine and practices of reciprocal, sustainable relationships with our natural environment
- A range of key herbal preparations that you can make at home with their purposes, methods and rationale, and appropriate usages
- Effective and careful drying of herbs harvested seasonally, for quality herb stores through the year
- Matching preparations to people and healthcare situations e.g. herbal teas versus tinctures, children’s remedies and dosages, and first aid at home
- Kitchen medicine and making home remedies from your cupboards
- Sharing our collective knowledge and experience from our own backgrounds, cultures and healing practices to build a stronger bank of herbal healthcare in the group.
- The potency of medicines made by our hands, with plants we have grown and/or gathered ourselves from our local places, with love and care.
The session will leave you more confident and practiced in making specific herbal preparations, and with a more detailed knowledge of how and why we make them. It will be great for anyone who has already enjoyed our Introduction to Herbal Medicine workshop, or has otherwise begun their journey into herbalism.
Participants will take home a set of remedies made through the session. If you can, please bring along 4 sterilised glass jars for some of the preparations. You might also want to bring a notebook and pen for taking notes, and/or camera.
Meet Rasheeqa
Rasheeqa (Hedge Herbs) is a herbalist in her community in Walthamstow in north London. She has been practicing since 2012, offering treatment with herbal medicine and teaching about its many aspects, alongside a wider mix of work whose aim is connecting us as communities with the potential of this knowledge and craft as a way to develop healthier living systems and relationships.
She is an instigator of the Community Apothecary in her locality, a project that brings community members together around a patchwork of medicinal herb gardens where we can learn about growing, wildcrafting and making medicines together, which are then available to the community. The vision is to co-create thriving mutual healthcare systems, sharing knowledge, peer support and the model so that we can create landscapes of healing everywhere.
Price: £85
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Note for Southwark residents: Looking to book a free place? Unfortunately, our limited quota of free places for the 2022-23 academic year have now been claimed. We will be releasing a refreshed number of free places, along with a new calendar of workshops, in Autumn 2023 so please check back then. Subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on social media, at the bottom of this page, to be notified.