hi I'm Maura gamble from album about your life and this is about making calendula salves this film it's the third part of a three-part series the first one I talked about calendula the plant and and how to grow it and the different ways that I use it in my in my poly cultural garden the second part was actually how to harvest the flowers and simply in two different ways make a calendula oil and it's this calendula oil that I use as the basis for making the salves which is what this film is about today so calendula salv is something that I love to have up on the shelf it's just a really good first aid cream to have it's great of insect bites for small cuts and bruises but it's also really great firm for chapped lips or elbows and knees and also one of the really popular uses for it this actually has a nappy rash balm so particularly great for babies so it stays safe for the whole family and what I'm going to show you today how to make it is actually edible and I really like that fact not that I'm encouraging you to eat it but I like the fact that all the ingredients that are actually part of these are things that are safe internally and externally so this is a really safe and natural remedy to have as a as a general first-aid cream in your house and what I what I can't believe is how absolutely easy it is to make this I remember a long time ago thinking oh gosh it must be really complicated to make these sorts of things but it's really just a three-step process step one make your oil step two mix all your ingredients together and melt them in a jar over a boiler step three pour it into your containers and that's as simple as that so I'm going to show you the steps and explain all the different ingredients to it which of there are only four ingredients you can add a couple of extra things if you like and I'll talk about that too so four ingredients three steps can't be simpler than that so the first ingredient that you need is of course your calendula oil now this is as I explained in the last film is essentially just the calendula flowers steeped in oil over a period of 28 days and then strained so I have some here that's ready to go beeswax so I've grated up some beeswax it came off a block like this from our local beekeeper so I know the guy who whose beeswax juice is and where it's from so I know it's pure and and it's a beautiful beeswax so I just grated some up the third ingredient is some coconut oil just a little bit of that and if you want to to make it more of a sort of a smooth type of South you can add in cocoa butter so this is actually what gets used to make chocolate if you smell it actually smells quite a bit like white chocolate and you've got to be careful if you store this in your pantry cuz sometimes people might like to go in and have a bit of a nibble it's not gonna do them any harm but it's not actually not white chocolate but the thing I like about this is it's so soft you can actually use it as a as a whip just like that straight off chopped off the block so you can buy these products really easily in most sort of health food stores or bulk food stores and or just find them locally to and from your local farmers now so the first thing you need to do is understand that the ratio and I'll write this on the side and also down below so you can can get that so basically it's half a cup of the oil of the flower oil 1/4 a cup of the coconut oil 1/4 a cup of the beeswax so that's the basics of the ingredients now if you want to add in the cocoa butter I just put in a teaspoon or two of this and that's all you need so that's the ratio and then all you need to do is grab a jar now I've picked a jar here this is a recycled jar something that I know I'm not gonna use as a food jar again because once you start using beeswax and other things inside it's really hard to clean it out so don't pick your favorite jar so once you gathered you materials all you need to do is measure them out and put them all together in the jar so what I need is 1/2 a cup of my calendula oil so I will just measure that in and again make sure that there's actually no water inside this jar we cuz if you get water in the mix it actually means that you can't store your final sale for as long it it just tends to go off in a bit moldy so this is a water free South that you can store on your shelf for six months or more okay so you got your oil in there the next one is 1/4 of a cup of coconut oil now it's almost going melty because we're getting quite haughty at the moment that I still need to spoon it out if you're in a climate where it's absolutely solid at the moment you might need to just gently warm it to make it a bit softer first alright it's about half a cup that quarter of a cup I'm sorry pop that in all mixed in together and then 1/4 a cup of grated beeswax and the reason I grated is that it just melts more quickly together so I'm just gonna pop all of that in now if you want to add something like an essential oil you can also do it at this point as well or or even right at the end but I just like things smelling natural I you know the least ingredients they're better now I am today going to put in a couple of these chunks of them the cocoa butter as well just to make it a little bit extra smoothie smoothie that's not a smoothie um so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just take this inside and put it in a little boiler of water and and till it's just melted I'm not going to boil it too quickly and just gently make sure that it's all completely blended together inside this jar so I'll just go and do that I'll be back in a second so what I've done inside is just in a saucepan have a little bit of boiling water and melted all of the ingredients together and so it's ready now simply to pour into my container so I have a few of these little tins but you could also just as well use some jars so I'll see how many containers I can get don't need my tea towel watch out the actual beeswax is gonna be quite hot inside oh yeah so it's gonna gently pour that making sure not to get any water into the jars themselves yeah so good enough I think to fill in a couple more jars and we just need to wait for them to to sit and that's it that's really step process make your oil melt it together and pull it out and then out of this amount which is really not that much we all have calendula South for over a year or perhaps these are gifts that we can make and take for Christmas thanks for watching it's laura gamble from our permaculture life i really hope you've enjoyed this three-part series on calendula and we'll give this a go because it really is just such an easy thing to do and it's a great thing to do too like I said as gifts something personal that you can make from the things that you have in your garden and the products that you can find locally and it's a really fabulous thing to be able to share with other people catch you next time see you later