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.
November’s Practical Pharmacy day will focus on seasonal healthcare support in the form of warming, protecting and strengthening plant and food remedies for the cold time - we will prepare an immune tonic, a cough syrup and a decoction blend for winter resilience. We’ll share strategies for physical and spiritual vitality through this time of year, and how we can do kitchen medicine, making healing foods and keeping our life fires burning.
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 is a community medical herbalist based in east London with 5 years’ experience of facilitating group learning and teaching short and long courses in many aspects of herbal medicine. 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 currently initiating a community apothecary project in Walthamstow - Community Herbal Hands - which seeks to develop networks of medicinal plant cultivation, harvesting, preparing, knowledge-sharing and use for health and well being support in our neighbourhoods.
Price: £85/ Free for Southwark residents
Free places are available for Southwark residents aged 19+. Each resident can claim 1 place per academic year (Oct 23- Jul 24). To check whether you are eligible, please click here.
To claim your free place, click ‘Book Here’ below, and enter code ‘SOUTHWARK23’ 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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