Home herb garden
Scope, stated plainly: medicinal herbs used the way this page describes, teas, tinctures, simple salves, complement conventional medical care; they don't replace it. Everything here is legal, safe at customary strengths, and squarely inside the long tradition of household practice. Nothing here is advice to self-treat serious illness or to drop a prescription, and the moment a situation is serious, the referral page outranks this one.
Starting a medicinal herb garden
A useful medicinal garden fits in a few containers. Start with herbs that are well-studied, easy to grow, and hard to misuse: calendula (topical, wound-healing), echinacea (immune support, best at the first sign of illness), elderberry (antiviral syrup), chamomile (digestion, gentle sleep support), tulsi (stress support), lemon balm (calming, makes a genuinely pleasant tea), and peppermint (digestion, cooling). All are safe for most adults at normal preparation strengths, and all have centuries of household use behind them. In Florida, most of these grow happily through our mild winters; the trick is keeping the cool-climate ones alive through August.
Basic preparations: teas, tinctures, and salves
An infusion is just tea: dried herb, hot water, five to fifteen minutes, strain. A decoction simmers tougher material, roots, bark, seeds, for twenty to forty minutes. A tincture extracts into alcohol: herb in a jar, covered with 80-proof or stronger vodka, strained after four to six weeks; more concentrated and far more shelf-stable than tea. A salve combines herb-infused oil with beeswax for topical use. Calendula salve for minor scrapes and dry skin is the classic first project, and a good one.
Drying and storing herbs
Harvest in the morning, after the dew dries but before heat drives off the volatile oils. Bundle and hang small-leaved herbs somewhere warm and ventilated, out of direct light; spread bigger leaves and flowers on screens. They're done when they crumble instead of bending. Store in sealed glass jars away from light and heat, labeled with the herb and harvest date, because eight months from now every jar of crumbled green leaves looks identical. Most keep good potency for one to two years.
The scope boundary
Kitchen-garden herbalism for everyday complaints carries minimal risk when plants are correctly identified and used at customary strengths. Two things sit outside that boundary: using herbs as primary treatment for a diagnosed condition, and combining herbs with prescription medications without checking interactions. Herb-drug interactions are real and occasionally serious, St. John's wort alone interferes with a long list of prescriptions. The expanded herbalism page in phase 2 treats that topic with the attention it deserves.
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