How To Make Calendula Salve | Easy DIY Healing Balm For Dry Skin & Cuts

Hey friends, it's Rosalind. Welcome back to our gardens and our tiny flower farm. Today we're going to be working on a very fun project and that is making calendula salve. I grow calendula flowers in our garden particularly just to make salve with. So last year when I made the salve I had shared a short on YouTube on how to make it as well as a reel on Instagram and there was so many questions on it. I thought I would just make a complete video from the point where we harvest our flowers to drying them to soaking them in oil and then finally making our salve. It's actually a couple week process but we are going to do everything today because I have a couple of different stages of the calendula flowers going on right now. I have a certain variety of calendula that I will grow because this variety has the highest resin of medicine in it. The seeds are from Johnny's Selected Seeds but it creates this very bright orange flower and you can. Calendula is one of those flowers that you can save seed from and it will bless you with tons of seed if you let these flowers go to seed. So I had harvested just a couple of seed heads this morning. This is what your seeds will look like. So I had started the first batch of calendula plants from seed back in May and those are now all going to seed. We are in mid-September and then end of July I started another batch of calendula plants from seed and those are now just beginning to bloom beautifully. Those are the plants that we harvested from this morning. All right we are going to take these calendula flowers inside and I'm going to share the first step with you and then we'll go from there. The flowers we harvested this morning and then these flowers have been drying for at least two weeks. You want to make sure they're completely dry before you put them into oil to extract the medicines from the flowers. The reason you want your flowers to be completely dry is you don't want your oil to go rancid if the flowers would happen to have any moisture in them. The way that I dry my calendula flowers is simply just laying them out on paper towel and I will leave them here for a couple weeks until I know that they're completely dry. Oh that's our seeds. The next step is to add our dried flowers into a glass jar and we'll fill it completely. Now that our jar is filled with the dried flowers we're going to dump that flower oil over it and this oil is high in vitamin E, high in antioxidants. You can also use olive oil or the oil of your preference and we're just going to dump it over the flowers completely cover them in oil. Now we're going to cover up our jar. The jar we just got done filling and then this jar has been sitting here since August 5th. This oil is definitely ready to be turned into sap. You can see how much more orange this oil is compared to the jar that we just did today. It's more kind of more clear so it's definitely extracted the medicines from the calendula flowers. We have everything set up ready to go. First of all we want our double boiler with the boiling water in bottom. This is where we're going to add our oil in. On the top we have our oil that has been steeping, shea butter, beeswax and all of our little containers as well as we're going to add in orange essential oil. The recipe that I use has two cups of the infused calendula oil and then we are going to add in in just a little bit two ounces of beeswax and two ounces of shea butter. I'm going to dump our calendula oil into the double boiler. I actually have enough oil to do a double batch. You can see how much more orange this oil is that's infused compared to the oil that we added into the calendula flowers this morning. Isn't that amazing? Now we'll do since we're doing a double batch instead of just two ounces of beeswax we have four cups of the calendula oil. We're going to do four ounces of the beeswax. Now we're going to melt the beeswax into the calendula oil. Stir until everything is melted. The beeswax has completely melted and in this salve beeswax will act as well it will help solidify your salve as well as it will act as an anti-inflammatory to the skin and it will also help protect the skin. Next we're going to add in our shea butter. The oil has been removed from the heat but before it cools off we want to quickly melt our shea butter in here. Shea butter acts as a an essential vitamin that makes the skin soft smooth and healthier. So we're just going to stir it until everything is melted together. Shea butter has completely melted. Now before quickly before this starts solidifying we're going to add in orange essential oil. Usually I add in rose essential oil because rose essential oil is so good for the skin but since I'm currently out I'm just going to add about 30 drops of the orange essential oil because this can also help moisturize the skin. It can help balance the alkalinity and the acidity of the skin. It can help build collagen and it also can help reduce wrinkles. Can you believe that we're almost done making this salve already? It's so easy to make and it's also so healing to the skin. I like to add some into like these little jelly jars as well as just these little two ounce containers for customers or to give away as gifts. The little two ounce jars off of or containers I got off of um Amazon. Now I am not a doctor. You should always consult your doctor about these things. This is just what we use Calendula Salve for. We use it for all kinds of skin conditions and you can read up more on it but we use it as a facial moisturizer. We use it to treat minor wounds, burns, rashes, bug bites, skin inflammation since calendula flowers contain anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antibacterial and antifungal properties. The flowers can also be used in tea to possibly aid in digestion and it can possibly help detoxify the body as well. The jars are all filled and we're just going to leave them uncovered like this for about one hour, one to two hours until the salve is completely solid. The salve has been sitting here for about one hour and you can see that it's pretty solid. Oh doesn't it look so pretty? Now we can put the lids on here and get them ready for storage. When you go to store your calendula salve you want to make sure that you're storing it somewhere that stays below 75 degrees Fahrenheit so it doesn't melt. Otherwise it will become more like an oil like if the temperatures go above 75 degrees. All right friends let me know if you're trying to make your own skin healing salve at home or if you're going to start growing your own calendula flowers. Thank you for joining me around the garden today. Have an amazing week and I will see you right back here next Saturday. Bye!