 Growing medicinal plants in your own backyard is easy and accessible. It's a great way to be more self-sufficient and to take control of your health options. Hi, I'm Celeste. I'm a mom of five and an astrologer, and I use plant medicine for myself, my family, and my clients. I also happen to grow a lot of that medicine right here in my own backyard. So today, I'm going to take you around my garden and show you how easy it is to grow your own medicine in your backyard and how that can benefit you. Let's get started. So what are medicinal plants? How do you use them and why would you want to grow them? Well, medicinal plants can be a lot of things. You would be surprised at what is classified as medicinal, and this is because a plant's medicine can be in its seeds, it can be in flowers, the leaves, the roots, the bark, or even the fruit. It can be used for both acute and chronic conditions. For example, this rosemary right here, you can use this in a tea in order to treat a headache right now, or you can also use other things to treat migraines over the long term. Plant medicine is holistic. That means it treats the whole self. So it does this by supporting major organ function. It restores hormonal imbalances. It also counteracts stress, and it takes mental health into consideration for a whole package treatment. But you can also use it just to help somebody feel better if they have a cold, or maybe they got bitten by an insect. And plant medicine is really great for everyone, all the way from children up until the elderly. And another great thing about growing medicinal plants is that you don't really need a lot of space. When I first moved here three years ago, this bed right here was the only one I had, and it was all that I needed to provide for my family's needs. I had some things in the sunny area and some things in the shady area. And over the course of a few seasons, I was able to get a well-stocked apothecary in my home. And you can do the same thing. The great thing about herbs is that once you prepare them properly and store them properly, they can last for several months up to several years depending on what preparation you use. And so you can go collecting little by little if you have a small space. And medicinal plants are great to grow because they're party survivors and they often grow like weeds. In fact, even if you aren't growing anything in your garden yet, you might already be growing medicine if your yard is full of weeds. In one of Rob's recent videos, he talks about 11 edibles that you can find growing wild around your garden or yard. And a lot of the edibles that he mentions in that video are also wild medicinal plants. So it's all about looking at your land, as he says, and looking at it from a different perspective. So right here, for example, I have some Spanish needle. So this is a wild edible that grows all over the place here in Florida. But also you can use the flowers in a tea for cough. So this is a really great way for you to look at your yard from a different perspective and see what medicine you might already be growing in your yard and then just tend to those medicinal plants. And growing medicinal plants in your yard is actually very easy. They're some of the least finicky plants to grow. Rob recently put out another video that's beginner tips for gardeners to have a successful garden. And if you check that out, that's going to tell you pretty much everything you need to know. If you apply those to your herbal garden, it should do really, really well. But there are a few things that are unique to growing herbal medicine. So first of all, you want to make sure that you're growing the right variety. So there's a lot of different varieties of plants. For example, marigolds. There's a lot of different marigolds that are just ornamental. And so you might not have the one that is specifically the medicinal calendula flower that you're looking for. So you can have, this is sweet basil, or you can also have holy basil or tosi. So both of these are called basil. Both of them have medicinal properties, but they're not the same. So you just have to make sure that you don't let common names confuse you and that you're looking at the Latin name to make sure that you're picking the right species for you. One other thing about growing medicinal plants that's really important is knowing when to pick the medicine at the right time. So for example, you might have something where you're going to pick the leaves in the spring and then you're going to pick the flowers in the summer and then finally you'll pick the roots in the fall. So you need to know exactly when to pick what so that you can gather your medicine at the most optimal time so that it can be properly used. Let's talk prep and storage because that's one of the biggest parts of having your own medicinal plants in your backyard. It's using them. So you can use things fresh. That's fine. Fresh is great for anything that has, for example, a soup or tea, a poultice or a compress, anything like that would be great to use fresh herbs with them. You can also freeze your herbs to use in teas or to do medicinal soups. I like to blend the herbs with garlic and use that in a medicinal soup. That's really great. But for the other things like oils and tinctures and vinegars, you're going to want to have your herbs dried and you can do this in a few different ways. You can do little bundles. You can dry the flowers and just put them face down and you can just hang them up or I have something like this where I just lay the flowers inside and have them dry. The main thing is you just want to make sure to keep the bundle small and to keep a lot of space in between the flowers to promote good air circulation and also make sure that it's in a warm, dry place that doesn't have a lot of humidity. And after a few days, you want to check on your things depending where you live, how long it takes to dry. Then you want to take them down and put them into containers like this and label them and also preferably put a date on them so you can use them within their optimal timeframe. And then once they're dried like this, you can put them together with oil or even with, say, alcohol like I've done here and you can make medicinal oils. You put the herbs in with the oil and you let them sit for about a month shaking them once a day and then you would strain out the herbs and you'll be left with something like this that you can use. You can use this as is or you can use this to create butters or balms or sabs or things like that. Then you also, for the tinctures, this is really good because this is made with alcohol and so these last a really, really long time so it's a really great way to build your home medicine cabinet. It also packs a lot of medicine in a really small amount so if you have somebody that doesn't like the way it tastes then this is really great to mix into a glass of water or maybe even hide it in a smoothie that's a really great option too. And it's also long lasting like I said so you can make these tinctures and then they can last you for many years. So I hope that this has given you some inspiration to get started on growing medicinal plants in your own backyard and I'm really excited to hear if you'll give this a try.