 Sweet Melissa, calm me down. Share yourself with me. I'm nervous and I'm restless and I long to fall asleep. Your lovely tasting leaves of mint. I'll pick them fresh today. They stimulate my appetite and relax me on the way. If one should have an outbreak of herpes down below, a poultice of Melissa would make those symptoms go. Should I fall ill and need to sweat? Here's the plant for me. No side effects that I'd regret is tasty lemon tea. So when I need to find some calm, I'm depressed and overtaxed. I plan to take some lemon balm that I might feel relaxed. In this poem by Dr. Sylvia Chantreau, you get an overview of a modest mint whose attributes are welcomed during such times of stress, anxiety, and illness. Melissa aficionalis, or lemon balm as it's commonly known, is a leafy shrub-like perennial in the Le Mansier family. You can tell by its square stems that it's a mint. All mints have square stems. Native to Europe and Asia, lemon balm has naturalized in North America and is easily grown as most mints are in zones 4 to 8. For that reason, it's best to plant in containers or areas where you don't mind it taking over your garden. You can start it from seed, cuttings, or fine plants already started in your local nursery. Pollinators, especially bees, love it. When it begins to flower, you can pinch back the flowering stalks to encourage new leaf growth. For thousands of years, lemon balm has been used culinarily and medicinally. Its lemony mint flavor is pleasant, making it easy to use with children. But the older leaves, the less tasty it becomes. Culinarily, it's wonderful in salads with chicken and fish dishes, desserts like fruit compotes, and as a tasty beverage, hot or cold. And since it's what we call a comminative, which means it aids in digestion, it's a great add-on to meals at the end as an after-meal beverage. During times of excessive stress, Mary Melissa comes to the rescue bringing calming and soothing support to the nervous system. She improves our moods, relaxes our minds and muscles, and helps us sleep when we are restless or with anxiety. She can even soothe the gums of a teething child, and the tea can be used as a mouthwash. Got a bug bite? Chew a few leaves and apply them directly to the bite to soothe the pain and decrease the swelling. If you find yourself falling ill and needing to sweat it out, make a hot tea infusion and drink it. Melissa is a diaphoretic. She'll make you sweat. Lemon bombs other attributes include being antiviral against herpes simplex 2 and has long been used with other viruses in the herpes family. It works wonders on cold sores. It's antibacterial, which is why it makes an effective and tasty mouthwash and fights inflammation of the mouth. It's a mild astringent and can be used as a pleasant skin tone. Lemon balm is also very high in antioxidants and studies have shown it improves oxidative stress and DNA damage, including x-ray damage. This modest garden herb does so much for us and is so easily grown. You can see how she will not only be of great help during times of stress, but also a tasty companion in the kitchen. I hope you enjoyed learning about Melissa today. So now that you know a little bit more about Melissa aficionados, better known as lemon balm, let's make the perfect cup of tea. I like using the mason jars, herbalist style. We've washed the Melissa, given a good washing, and we're just going to take, this is a little bit bigger than a pint jar. We're going to cut up some of the leaves. The more surface area that you expose by cutting, the more flavor you're going to get out of it. Put that in there. You can put some stems also, that's fine. And since Melissa is energetically drying but cooling, we want to watch out with that drying part, right? We live in a dry climate already, so we want to think about what else we could add to it. If we just want Melissa tea, then we could use honey, a nice raw honey. If we wanted to add other herbs, we might add a little marshmallow root, which is moistened, or some plantago, which grows in your yard most likely. It grows just about everywhere. I'm going to make a nice strong infusion. I like to have some flavor. I'm going to pour that tea with hot water. I'm going to fill that jar. It even smells good over here. I'm going to put the lid on to let it steep. You don't want to put the lid on too tight because it is hot boiling water with just one in there. And we'll just loosely put it on there and let it steep for a few minutes, and then come back and drink it. Okay, we're back, and our tea has been steeping for about 10-15 minutes, and it looks really good. Smells amazing. So let's pour a cup of tea. I have a strainer here for the leaf. You don't have to do a strainer, but you don't really want to have green tea, so use the strainer. Pour it in here. It's still pretty hot. You might want to use a hot mitt. Some of that delicious raw honey, local raw honey, right here in Longmont. Once again, you don't have to add the honey, but it's a good idea if you feel like your system is dry anyhow. So you might want to use it for that. So you don't over-dry your system, but you don't have to use it. Sometimes I drink it straight up like that without any sweetener at all, or without any other herbs in it. But today I feel like having a little raw honey. My gosh, that is so delicious. It doesn't get much better than that fresh out of the garden and right into my teacup. Good stuff. Now, you can also use Melissa medicinally in tincture form, and you could add tinctures. I don't know if you know this or not, but if you're taking tinctures, say you're taking this for medicinal reasons, say you want to have some calm or sleep at night or something, maybe having some sleep troubles and you want to try Melissa because it's so gentle. But you don't necessarily want to make the tea right before you go to bed because you don't have to make a million trips to the bathroom. You can do it, you could do it just a little, maybe a few ounces of water, either room temperature or you could add it to a little hot water. I feel like it kind of burns off a little bit of the alcohol, not burns it off, but makes it evaporate quicker. And you could do that as well. It still tastes pretty yummy. It retains its flavor pretty well, I have to say. So you could do that. You don't even have to make the Melissa tea to do that. You just make the hot water and add it that way. You can control how much water that you want to intake before bed. And the other way that we use it is in essential oil. I'm strangely out of essential oil of Melissa right now, but it comes in a very tiny bottle and it is very expensive. Five mils can cost you over a hundred dollars, but if you need it, you need it and it's really wonderful for if you deal with cold sores and anything in the herpes family, herpes virus families. It's really a good medicine, good strong medicine for that and you would do it dilute. You can find it in so many products, lip balms or gels or salves or what have you. You can make your own. And if you wanted to find out more about that, I'll think about making an aromatherapy video for the next time. So you learned something today about lemon balm. Melissa Fish and Alice, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something today. And yeah, put her to use. Let her grow in your garden, but remember, put her somewhere where she doesn't take over your yard. I look forward to having a virtual tea with you again soon. Bye for now.