 Hi there and welcome to my channel. My name is Tracy and I am a small-scale gardener living on the prairies here in Saskatchewan, Canada. So if this is your first time joining me on my channel, I enjoy making videos on cold climate gardening, how to grow indoors during long cold winters, along with sharing recipe ideas made with ingredients grown in my garden or locally sourced. So in today's video, I'm going to show you how to make a cooling herbal body and facial spray using fresh herbs from my garden. So here on the prairies, we're about halfway through our growing season, so I have been busy collecting herbs, flowers, weeds that I enjoy using for cooking, storing over the winter, and also to make a variety of different natural body care products. So making hydrosols from your garden plants is very easy to do and it has a lot of different uses that I will go through with you later on in this video. So let's head into my kitchen and I will show you how to steam distill your herbs, flowers, and plants to make a hydrosol. Okay, so I'm just going to run you through all the equipment you need to set up your very own steam distiller. It should be easy to put together with things that you have around in your house. So first of all, you just need a deep pot and a lid that fits on securely. You'll be inverting the lid this way. A clear one's kind of nice because then you can actually see the steam distilling process happening. So you need one of those. You need a couple dishes that are oven safe. Make sure that they can withstand some heat. So I'm going to be using this little ramekin as the base and something that's got quite a wide opening in here because this is going to catch the steam from the lid and that will sit on top. So just make sure it's something that can sit securely so you'll be putting it inside the pot like this. So like that and all your herbs and water are going to go around this area. It's best if you're using distilled water and of course whichever herbs, flowers, buds, leaves, whatever kind of your favorite plant that you want to use in this process, have those ready. They can be dried or they can be freshly picked right out of the garden. It doesn't really matter. And the last thing you need to have is a good supply of ice. So, you know, you don't want to have to go out and buy bagged ice. So if you can, if you have an ice maker of your own, of course these ice packs work really well if you have a good supply of them. And if you're planning a day ahead or so, make yourself some ice blocks or in small containers or just take some water bottles, fill them up with water and freeze them overnight and these will work good as well. Okay, so we're ready to get this set up on the stove. Okay, so once you have your inverted container or dish here in the pot, the next thing you want to do is add all your herbs, flowers, and whatever you are going to be distilling. Just sprinkle them around. For my recipe here today, I'm working on making a cooling facial spray. So I've picked from my garden some fresh rosemary, lemon balm, peppermint, eucalyptus, and I'm not able to grow lavender here very successfully. So I'm going to cheat and add a little bit of a bottom lavender buds. So then next you're going to add your distilled water. And I just pour enough in here to just slightly cover the herbs about two or three inches to start with. I'm going to be adding more water throughout the distilling process as it slowly cooks away. I usually top it up two or three times, try to get the most I can out of all these herbs. So there's about three inches of distilled water in there. So you always want to make sure that everything that you're using is sterile because you don't want to have any bacteria ending up in your product after you've created it. So I always give everything a good spray with some rubbing alcohol. Sometimes I use hydrosols and lotion products that I make. So you want to make sure that you're always keeping everything as sterile as possible. So then you put your bowl on top here that's going to catch all the steam and then put your lid on, invert it. And to start with I turn on the heat at a higher temperature to get the water heated up quicker and once it starts to bubble turn it down to the lowest setting so that you have it simmering very gently. And as it simmers away you'll start to see the steam building up on the lid and just to speed up that condensation process. That's when you add your ice. Then I just let it simmer away for half an hour to an hour. You don't have to stand and watch it non-stop. You can go about your business around the kitchen and the house and just check on it just to make sure that the water hasn't all boiled away. You will also want to have some kind of jar or container to store your hydrosol in after you've poured it off so make sure you have something sterilized and ready. Okay so as you can see here the water is slowly steeping and steaming all these plants carrying all that herbal goodness to the lid here where the steam is condensing because it's hitting this cold surface that we've created with the ice and then from there it drips down into the bowl and then you are left with some beautiful hydrosol. So about every half hour or so I like to just remove the ice and check my collection of steam here. You want to be very careful because this is very hot steam so you should be wearing some kind of a a glove while you're doing this. So I like to pour a little bit off every half hour or so. Smells so amazing. It's like having an aromatherapy thing runging in your kitchen while you're you know while you're doing this. It's just a wonderful smell to have. And then after I've done this I usually check the water level just to max mount the amount of steam distilled hydrosol. I can get out of this here. So as I said the hydrosol I'm making today is to use as a cooling body spray or facial spray. What I love about hydrosols is that their aromas are often very soft and subtle compared to using something with essential oils. And the spray leaves your skin feeling cool refreshed and provides an uplifting aromatherapy property. So depending on what herbs, flowers, weeds or even fruit or vegetables you use hydrosols or floral waters can be made and used for many things. So with this process you can create a room spray, an anti-itch spray, surface cleaner, bug spray, bath tonic, facial toner, hair rinse or even a makeup remover. So if you've made any of these or have created a hydrosol not mentioned here please let me know in the comments or if you'd like to see me make more hydrosols in future videos let me know in the comments as well. So ideally hydrosols should be stored in the refrigerator to maximize their shelf life but they can also be stored in amber or dark colored glass bottles and kept in a cool dark location. So I hope you enjoyed watching me make a cooling body mist using fresh plants from my garden and that you will try making some of your own hydrosols. I would appreciate if you give this video a like leave a comment and please subscribe and stay tuned for the next video on my channel. Thank you for watching.