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 growing in our gardens and in the 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 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 3 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 is a community medical herbalist based in east London with 10+ years experience of facilitating group learning and teaching short and long courses in many aspects of herbal medicine. She is a tutor on the Heartwood Herbalism Foundation Course and a clinical trainer for the Professional Course. She is passionate about collaborative and participatory herbalism in the community, with a focus on sharing and exchanging healing traditions between the diverse cultures and knowledge of London. She is co-founder of Community Apothecary Waltham Forest in north London which is a social enterprise sharing knowledge and practices of plant medicine through community herb gardens, learning and collective remedy making. https://www.hedgeherbs.org.uk/
Price: £85/ Free for Southwark residents
Free places are available for Southwark residents aged 19+. Each resident can claim 1 place per academic year (Sept 24- Jul 25). To check whether you are eligible, please click here.
To claim your free place, click ‘Book Here’ below, and enter code ‘SOUTHWARK25’ under ‘Redeem Coupon’.
You will then be charged a £10 deposit in order to claim your place, this deposit will be refunded to you after you attend the workshop.
Please note that you will be required to fill in a Southwark Council form, including some personal information, in order to confirm your place on a workshop. Your place will not be confirmed until this has been completed in full.
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