Introduction
"Making a mother bud macerate is within everyone's reach" - My gemmotherapy manual - Valérie Catala
To make a bud macerate, recognizing trees and shrubs by their buds is a prerequisite. It is recommended to choose trees that you know well. They must be healthy and far from sources of pollution.
The buds must be harvested in dry weather and then immediately macerated at the place of picking in order to preserve all the medicinal virtues of the young shoots. The maceration liquid (mixture of alcohol, glycerin and water) must therefore be prepared beforehand.
Essential for making a bud macerate, these three excipients each contribute to the extraction of active ingredients.
Water extracts energy, information and water-soluble derivatives: tannins, mineral salts, water-soluble flavonoids, water-soluble vitamins and some water-soluble acids.
Alcohol extracts alkaloids, heterosides, glycosides and other acids.
Glycerin extracts essential oils, fat-soluble flavonoids, fat-soluble vitamins and also some acids.
How To
The respective proportions are adapted to the alcohol content. Glycerin can be replaced by agave syrup or honey. But other substitutes for glycerin can be proposed.
For 100 g of buds, the traditional recipe provides for a quantity of mother macerate corresponding to 20 times the mass of the dry equivalent of these buds. Determining the humidity level of the buds is therefore a prerequisite. Be careful, this level varies depending on the plant and environmental conditions, it can therefore change from one place to another and from one year to another. If we consider that the buds contain 75% water and therefore 25% dry matter, we thus obtain 20 x 0.25 x 100 or 500 g of mother macerate.
After macerating the buds/young shoots, the jars are shaken several times a day. Then, they will be filtered after the required number of days of maceration. Bottling can be done immediately after filtration. It is essential at all stages to correctly label the bottles so as not to make mistakes. For a family production, remember to indicate the date, the name of the plant used, and why not, the place of picking.
Gemmotherapy is slowly taking the place it deserves in the world of phytotherapy. Still too little known, it nevertheless allows to act deeply and gently on the body.
Learning how to make a bud macerate is a way to get started in gemmotherapy by establishing a connection with nature, with trees. This allows us to realize that the trees around us also help us take care of our health, so they have their place in phytotherapy.
