hi YouTube this is Cathy Herbal prepper from herbal proper calm and today I'm going to demonstrate how I make a comfrey poultice and explain a little bit of how you would use this what this is good for why you should make that and all that wonderful good stuff so welcome back again to my my home kitchen here where all this herbal magic happens I'm going to show you something so I can get started making it and I'll talk while the comfrey is in the pot on the stove here I have in order to simplify things for me I bought myself some organic muslin bags if you have sewing skills you can absolutely make these they're very simple I don't possess those skills I have a couple of different sizes let me grab one of these this is a small bag that I have it's about whoops didn't mean to hit that camera there about maybe five by eight and it's just a drawstring bag very very simple but the muslin will allow the liquid to pass through it and when you apply it on to whatever the injured area is and I have a larger size here this would be more appropriate let me get that back there for you this would be far more appropriate if you wanted to apply onto someone's low back let's say if they had a bulging disc or something like that so what I've done is I've taken this small bag here it may be a little difficult to tell the sizes here but this smaller size bag I filled up the bottom third of it with comfrey and I'm going to put that in the stove in the stove I'm going to put this in a pot on the stove one moment and then when I add a little bit of water to it there we go so I'm going to add a little bit of water to this let me just gently heat this up because I want to soften the dried plant material just a little bit you don't need that much water let me just see you don't need that much water but I want to just soften this up just enough so that when I get the immersion blender out it really just sort of makes just a big old face all of that comfrey into the water there I'm not trying to really make a tea I just want it to be nice and soft it turn heat because that helps that process very low and you'll see when you make this it takes really no time at all no time at all let me show you what that looks like and a little tangled up on my gourds there but I wanted to show you what this looks like in the pot really not much water in there at all you really can't see let me see if there's a light I can put on there we go it's a little better anyway you can see that there's not a whole lot of water in there I just want it to I want to get all the comfrey a little wet and just soften down we're going to let that just process here I'm going to try and get this back on its stand one moment okay sorry about that I've got a number of wires here that I got to be careful of so that I wanted to make sure this camera didn't run out of battery while I was filming here this comfrey has only been on the stovetop here now for maybe maybe about 3-4 minutes total and it's nice and softened up and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take my immersion blender and I'm going to turn this into a big pile of and then I'm going to add some lavender flower powder spoonful by spoonful until it makes more of a paste as opposed to a runny mess then I'm going to put it back in one of these Muslim bags and fold it up and I like to secure it with some safety pins and then when it's done I can compost the herbs and wash out the bag and reuse the bag now if you don't have these bags that's fine you can use gauze and what you do is you get everything prepared get all the herbs prepared and you can put this in the refrigerator if you need to cool it down before you apply it to something like a sprained ankle or if you've got a problem with your wrist maybe from being on the computer too often you know whatever the injury is if you wanted to do a cold compress you would then take that paste and put it directly on the skin after its cooled and you could then wrap it with some gauze and then you'd wrap it again with some plastic wrap and then if you can put something like a compression bandage on that way it holds it all in place that's what I did when I sprained my ankle about a year ago and I'll tell you about that in just a minute because this is done I want to get the immersion blender going it's a little loud so I'm going to pause the video and I'll get that done if you don't know what an immersion blender is it's one of these little stick blenders that you just put right in the pot but it's a little loud so I'm going to pause this and get that going and I'll show you what this looks like okay so I've relocated into my office area my desk space because I'm hoping the lighting is going to be a little better than it was in the kitchen it's a very very cloudy day outside excuse me outside and I'm just not able to get a very good picture so as you can see this has now become quite soupy and it needs to become more of a paste we've got plenty of like kind of like a comfrey tea going on at the bottom and the plant material is pretty well softened and pulverize if you've got a better blender than I have absolutely go and use it but this or this gets the job done so use what you have on hand so now I'm going to put some lavender flower powder and you can use I mean plain flour you can use anything powdery and you have on hand and this is just to thicken this up now I like to use lavender powder because it's calming and when someone has an injury that bit of calming is a big help but it also helps well I mean doesn't help as much as if you are using the essential oil or if you were using the flowers themselves because it is powdered it is dried its lost some of its effectiveness but it does help somewhat with the pain so it's a little bit of added pain relief it does a good job of soaking up all that comfrey tea and I didn't put in nearly enough but I'm not putting amounts on here because it's going to be a little different every time you make these so you know if you are going to put it on a piece of gauze you would use a different amount if you were going to use a larger bag you use different amounts here I think I ended up using approximately a cup of dried comfrey leaves I don't know maybe a half a cup of water or something like that I don't think it was even a full cup it was just enough to coat it I didn't really measure it so just enough to get all the leaves moistened so that I could make a paste let's it's starting to come together it's if you can see that the lighting in here I'm hoping it's better you can see that it's not quite as wet but we're not there yet Meah grab a dryer spoon here I don't want to get my lavender powder all wet inside so you just keep doing this until you get a nice paste and then you'd put it back in the bag and if you wanted to do a cold compress you can store these in the freezer and they're ready to go I like to go in and break them up a little bit as they're freezing so they don't freeze in a big solid mass but more like you want it to be sort of free inside of the bag like you'd have with a bag of peas because that's also a wonderful first-aid trick too if you have a sprained ankle go grab a bag of frozen peas because they're you know they're moving around in that bag and it conforms to your ankle so I'm trying to duplicate that bag of peas effect with my poultice here and in the muslin bag so you go into the freezer as its as its as its freezing you take the bag out every one so I'll just sort of break up the material in there because once it freezes solid you're not really going to be able to do it this is starting to look a lot better let's I can get all of that in there it's looking a lot drier now just a little bit of liquid that's kind of dripping and the thing is that this you want it to um you want it to be a little bit wet you just don't want it horribly drippy maybe trying to see I'm almost there no if I really need any more or not um let me see now it's still a little wet this is a couple more spoonful so I grab yet another spoon ah so one moment I'm gonna go in the other room and grab a spoon finish this up and then I'll fill the back for you and show you what that looks like all right we're in the homestretch here making this this hasn't taken more than I'm gonna say Oh about that I'm looking at the recording time on my camera says 7 minutes and I've been fiddling with repositioning the camera and so on so honestly this whole process probably takes maybe five minutes total it really goes very very quickly maybe about two minutes on the stovetop a minute to blend it and then after that you put in your powder and then you stuff the bag so very very quick and as you can see it's it's not really let me see if the camera is going to come into focus here you can see it's not really drippy it's more of like this green pasty stuff and that's exactly what you want but it may look like it's just paste it may look like it's dry but let me show you what this looks like here in the bag you can see that there's still plenty of liquid actually in it it's just not it's not dripping horribly it's not making a horrible mess and the other thing is that this side is quite wet and this would be the side that you would put next to the skin so if you were applying this to a sprained ankle to a wrist or if you had the larger back you would be putting this the larger bag you would be putting this along someone's back or wherever the injury were now if you wanted to you could certainly add arnica flower and normally I do but I've run out of arnica at the moment so I just used the comfrey and the lavender powder but normally what I would do would be to put in about two parts of comfrey to one part arnica and that works pretty well but you don't want to use that if there's an open wound so only use that if you have no open wounds and it's just a sprain and that should work just fine or if you have let's say like I was saying about the low back or the upper back if there's an injury there it works very well for that kind of thing now what I would do at this point I'm just going to rest this up here so that it won't make so much of a mess here I have the bag I filled up the bottom portion of the bag and I folded the bag into thirds on top of on top of it and it's not really going through the bottom yet I'll put a little towel or something underneath that when I put that in the freezer so that it doesn't make a big mess in my freezer but it'll freeze like that it'll be just fine you want to go in the freezer and break it up a little bit like I said about the bag of peas so it gets that kind of mobility to it but it's still frozen and as you as it um sits it you know the the the frozen part of it will help with all the swelling and the pain but then your body heats going to warm it up and this liquid is going to start to ooze again and then the herbs are going to get into it now if you wanted to do a hot or a very very warm compress if to you know be sure that you don't burn anyone's skin you would take this and submerge it into either some hot water on the stove and lay down a very thin towel on the person if it was too hot you know you want to give it a little bit of insulation and then what you can do is you have the towel on their back you put this you put the hot compress on the towel you can then put a hot water bottle on top of that to retain in some of the heat and then wrap the towel over the entire thing if it's not too hot you can put it directly on them but everyone has a different tolerance for heat and you don't want to get it too too hot you could also warm up a pack like this in the microwave if you if you have one I generally don't use a microwave so I use the warm it up on the stove top method with some water so I'm hoping to get some one where I can demonstrate how you would apply this I just want to make sure this picture is clear and in focus you can see that the that comforting all that is beginning to seep through there and that's what would happen when it would be on you so you want to make sure that you when you apply this if it's going to be on an ankle or if it's going to be on your wrists or someplace where it's going to drip that you wrap that also with some plastic wrap and then put a compression bandage around it I did that with my sprained ankle and it worked wonderfully and I'm going to tell you you know this may seem very simple but this works very very well last year I sprained my ankle and within a couple of weeks after my mother who had been battling cancer for a while took a significant downturn and she was hospitalized and then ultimately she passed away now I had rolled my ankle I don't know how I didn't completely snap the ligament I was in horrible pain just a couple of weeks before she started to get really bad and I had to be up on my feet walking through hospital hallways the nursing home hallway afterwards and standing up at the wake and going through the funeral all of it I could not have done so but for the comfrey poultices that my husband was so patient with as he was trying to fiddle with this this is not you know he wasn't familiar with how to do this and I'm explaining the process and I'm in pain and I'm getting impatient and he was so wonderful through that and so after that I decided I'm never again going to go without these on hand just in case because if you're the one who's injured you just want to go grab that poultice from the freezer and throw that on your ankle it's much better to just to have these made up ahead of time so it was it was crucial it was very important it was it was what got me up and moving around so that I could you know be with my mom in her you know final moments and be there for that whole process and of course afterwards then for my father so these are very effective they bring the swelling down it brings the bruising down it brings the pain down now grass I'm not suggesting that you do this in order to keep working and you don't give your foot any rest because that is what I did I mean I had to I was in that sort of a situation where I didn't have another option but if you do not rest you're injured joint or whatever part of the body is injured and you just push through this you're probably going to injure it more and that's what I did and I ended up being off my feet for a very very long time afterwards but if you have an emergency and you have to keep going this is this could very well be that key that keeps you going until you get to the point where you can rest so this has been cat the herbal prepper from herbal proper calm reminding you please subscribe to my youtube channel you don't want to miss a video and you know combine the website check it out sign up for the newsletter that way you don't miss any updates whether it's an article a video a podcast there's lots of stuff going on you can also follow me on Facebook Twitter Pinterest now and please let me know I'm making myself as available as I can let me know what you would like me to cover what is it that you would like to know how to do what kind of first-aid you know questions do you have what kind of herbal questions do you have that would help you prep for you know a post collapse world you know this is all for you guys so you tell me what you want me to cover then I'll be glad to tackle that for you so this has been Kathy herbal prepper from herbal prepper you next time you do