Chickweed is a versatile plant that you can find right in your backyard. Not only does it make a great addition to salads, but it also serves as a soothing skin salve. Its white flowers often peek through the grass as early as spring, and you might be curious about how to create a chickweed salve and why it’s beneficial.
Much like other common spring plants, chickweed is both nutritious and cleansing. After the long winter months, it seems like nature offers us what we need for a little spring cleaning. Chickweed is packed with a variety of nutrients. Eating it in large quantities, much like any other spring salad, allows you to reap its benefits. It helps keep dry tissues moist and can soothe internal inflammation. Many people with arthritis find that it aids in lubricating stiff joints from within. It also has a reputation for moving congestion, infections, and cysts.
To make use of chickweed throughout the year, turning it into a salve is a great option. While it doesn’t function in the same way as eating it in a salad, a salve brings its own set of benefits. Chickweed works both internally and externally to ease irritation and inflammation. A chickweed salve can be particularly helpful for those issues.
Finding chickweed in stores can be challenging, so the best option is getting it from the wild. It grows in clusters and can often be found in backyards or cultivated as ground cover. Chickweed is a low-growing, bushy plant with star-shaped white flowers with five lobes, each divided into two parts. The stem has a line of tiny hairs running down it.
However, it’s important not to confuse it with scarlet pimpernel, which looks similar but is poisonous. You can tell them apart by their flowers—chickweed’s flowers are white, while scarlet pimpernel’s are orange or red.
For making a salve, you can use fresh chickweed, but drying it first is preferable. This is because the high moisture content in chickweed can cause the infused oil and salve to spoil faster. To dry chickweed, you can use a dehydrator at a low setting for a few hours. If you don’t have a dehydrator, simply tie the chickweed into bundles and hang them upside down in a cool, dry place for a few weeks.
There are various methods to create a salve, but the quickest is using the stovetop method with a double boiler. This technique allows moisture in the plant material to evaporate during infusion. It’s the method I choose for making my homemade healing salve.
In case you’re unable to gather chickweed yourself or if it’s not available in your region, you can also purchase organic dried chickweed online.
Have you ever tried using chickweed before? How do you plan to use your chickweed salve? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments!
