Our ancestors used - and our neighbors around the world still use - plant medicines for healing and health maintenance. Alcohol does not extract significant amounts of nutrients, so tinctures are used when we want to stimulate, sedate, or make use of a poison. You will make tinctures from fresh and dried roots as well as from fresh flowers and leaves.

In this lesson, you will learn how to how make herbal tinctures. It is simple, safe, effective, and free. Tinctures are alcohol-based plant medicines.

Then you will collect your tinctures into an Herbal Medicine Chest and begin to use them. Be Your Own Herbal Expert - Pt 4 Herbal medicine is the medicine of the people. Alcohol extracts and concentrates many properties from plants, including their poisons. In your first lessons, you learned how to "listen" to the messages of plant's tastes, how to make effective water-based herbal remedies, and how to distinguish safe nourishing and tonifying herbs from the more dangerous stimulating and sedating herbs. It also makes them perfect for a first-aid kit or.

(Remember that nourishing herbs are best used in water bases such as infusions and vinegars.) The concentrated nature of tinctures allows them to act quickly.