Weeping Willow Apothecary

06/20/2026

I've really been enjoying adding ceremonial cacao into my herbal routine lately. 🤎🌿

There's something so comforting about wrapping your hands around a warm mug filled with plants that have been cherished for generations. Rich cacao is known for supporting mood, focus, and circulation, while rose brings a gentle, heart opening touch. The medicinal mushrooms add another layer of nourishment, helping support resilience and overall well being.

It's one of those drinks that leaves me feeling calm, grounded, and present without feeling weighed down. Like a gentle reminder to slow down and reconnect.

As an herbalist, I love that plants can nourish us in so many ways. Sometimes wellness isn't complicated it looks like creating simple rituals that care for both the body and the spirit. A warm cup, a quiet moment, and gratitude for the incredible gifts growing all around us. 🌹🍄✨

12/23/2025

12/23/2025

There is something extra special about Christmas orders, and I find myself slowing down and savoring every step of the process this time of year. Filling these seasonal orders reminds me why Weeping Willow Apothecary exists in the first place — rooted in family, tradition, learning, and deep gratitude for our community.
This recent order included a few of my favorite winter staples, all made with intention and love right here on our homestead.

🌿 Elderberry Syrup
Our elderberry syrup is crafted using organic elderberries and local Union County honey. This blend is one I’ve made again and again for my own family, especially through the colder months. It’s simple, time-honored, and made with ingredients I trust — because they’re the same ones I give to my own children.

🧼 Oatmeal Honey Luffa Soaps
These soaps are especially close to my heart. The luffas inside were grown, tended, harvested, dried, and prepared right here on our homestead. From tiny vines in the garden to a finished bar of soap, this process is a full-circle reminder of how much abundance can come from slowing down and working with the seasons. Combined with oatmeal and honey, they make a gently exfoliating, nourishing bar that feels like a little piece of the homestead in your hands.

🍵 Winter Herbal Tea Selection
This order also included our winter tea blends, featuring Golden Comfort Herbal Tea, Forest Hearth Herbal Tea, and Calm & Bright Winter Tea — all made with lemon balm and other herbs grown organically in our medicine garden. These plants were grown from seed or plant starts, lovingly tended through the seasons, and harvested by hand.

What makes this part even more meaningful is that none of this is done alone. My sweet babies are right there with me — planting seeds, watering, harvesting, drying herbs, labeling jars, and learning every step of herbalism from soil to finished product. They are learning patience, stewardship, responsibility, and the value of traditional skills that will stay with them for life. This is education you can’t buy — it’s lived, felt, and passed down.

Christmas is one of my favorite times of year to fill orders for friends, families, and members of our wonderful community. The joy of preparing gifts that will be shared, brewed, used, and appreciated during the coziest season fills my cup in a way that’s hard to put into words.

Yes, earning a profit from herbal medicine is helpful — but first and foremost, this work is for my family. It honors their help, their curiosity, and the knowledge of the craft we are building together. Every jar, bar, and bag represents lessons learned, hands working together, and love woven into the process.

Thank you for supporting small, local, homegrown herbal medicine. Every order truly means more than you know 🤍🌲✨

12/17/2025

What Winter Looks Like for Herbalists...

When winter settles in and the land grows still — trees bare, gardens resting, and the wild tucked beneath frost — it can seem as though herbal work pauses entirely. The baskets are empty, the beds are quiet, and the outward signs of growth disappear.

But winter is not empty.

For herbalists, this season brings a shift rather than a stop. While foraging slows and the gardens sleep, the work simply moves indoors and inward. Spring and summer may be the most visibly productive times of year, but winter holds its own kind of abundance — one rooted in preparation, reflection, and intention.

A Season of Slowing, Sorting, and Taking Stock

As the days shorten and the cold deepens, herbalists naturally begin approaching their craft differently. One of the gifts of working with plants year-round is learning to honor these quieter phases rather than resist them.
Winter becomes a time to take stock.

This often looks like:
🌿Sorting dried herbs into labeled jars
🌿Checking quality, potency, and storage conditions
🌿Updating inventories of roots, leaves, flowers, and resins
🌿Clearing out what is past its prime and making note of what needs replenishing

There is something grounding about handling dried plants in winter reconnecting with the scents, textures, and memories of the growing season while the land rests outside.

Winter is also when last year’s seeds are finally given proper attention.
Saved seeds are cleaned, sorted, labeled, and stored. Notes are made about what thrived, what struggled, and what deserves another place in the garden. These small envelopes hold the story of the past year and the promise of the next season. ❤️

Alongside saved seeds, this is the season for:

🌿Designing herb garden layouts
🌿Planning medicine garden expansions
🌿Choosing which plants to grow, propagate, or source
🌿Ordering seeds with intention
🌿Mapping out early seed starting timelines

Long before anything touches soil, the garden takes shape in notebooks, sketches, and quiet daydreams. ✨

Winter is Creative and Medicinal Groundwork

With fewer physical demands from the land, winter offers space for creativity to return naturally. It’s a time to revisit notes, refine formulas, and imagine new remedies and offerings for the year ahead.

This slower rhythm supports:
🌿 Developing new herbal blends and products
🌿Studying plants more deeply
🌿Learning from the successes and mistakes of the past season
🌿Reorganizing workspaces in preparation for spring

Rest and creativity are not separate here they feed one another.
Listening to the Body, Honoring Dormancy
Just as the plants enter dormancy, herbalists are invited to do the same.

Winter encourages:
✨More rest and sleep
✨Gentle nourishment
✨Quiet study and reflection
✨Reconnecting with what feels meaningful and aligned

This is often a season of recalibration.. a time to soften, reassess, and remember why this work matters in the first place. ❤️

Winter reminds us that rest is not unproductive. It is essential.

The careful sorting of herbs, the patient saving of seeds, the thoughtful planning of gardens — all of this unseen work becomes the foundation for the abundance of the seasons to come.

As the earth lies quiet beneath cold skies, winter offers us the same invitation: to pause, prepare, and dream. And when warmth returns, everything we’ve tended in stillness will be ready to grow. 💚

12/10/2025

I feel blessed every day that I get to be an herbalist, right here on my own property. My garden isn’t just a patch of plants..it’s a living medicine cabinet, a classroom, a kitchen pantry, and sometimes my quiet sanctuary all at once.
From my kitchen window, I can watch the herbs sway in the breeze. A few barefoot steps outside the door and I can gather exactly what I need for teas, tinctures, syrups, or bath products. And the kids love it too! They run through the beds, picking leaves and flowers for their own little creations, learning how to care for plants and themselves in the process.

We’ve been doing this for years now, and it’s wild to see how much abundance a little patch of land can provide. Our little bistro table tucked in the garden is one of my favorite spots. I can sit there with a cup of tea, listening to the wind in the plants, watching my children harvest, and just soaking in the quiet. And now that we’ve started growing mushrooms there’s even more life and magic in the garden.

Inside, the apothecary spills into the house. Herbs hang to dry wherever we can fit them, and two dehydrators hum almost constantly. Full jars line the shelves in my office, my kitchen shelves are full of our own organically homegrown spices and spice blends, and the smell of rosemary, mint, and lavender drifts through the rooms. It’s a lot, but it’s my kind of happy chaos.
From all of this, we make everything our family needs and enough to share (and sell) so it helps support our family. Teas, tinctures, infused honeys, bath bombs, soaps, salves, syrups, fire cider, infused oils, poultices, glycerites, bath salts, scrubs, herbal vinegars, oxymels, elixirs, balms, liniments, culinary herbs, spice blends, mushroom powders, and more.
Every season brings something new to dry, infuse, or bottle, and every jar carries the story of this land and the work we put into it.

And here’s what grows in the Weeping Willow Apothecary garden.. everything we’ve planted and tended over the years: (I'm sure I've forgotten plenty I usually only remember when I'm standing there barefoot basket in hand staring at it)
Rosemary, oregano, marjoram, thyme, many types of sage, basil, holy basil / tulsi, lavender, lemon balm, catnip, bee balm, chamomile (German & Roman), calendula (including resina), echinacea (purpurea & angustifolia), yarrow, plantain, mullein, comfrey, st.johns wart, fever few, toothache plant, bee balm, amaranth, skullcap, chicory, marshmallow root & leaf, borage, passionflower, garlic, red raspberry leaf, elderberry, motherwort, mugwort, burdock, feverfew, tansy, coltsfoot, wood betony, wild mint, and over a dozen other mints- peppermint, spearmint, chocolate mint, apple mint, strawberry mint, pineapple mint, ginger mint, lavender mint, sweet mint, curly mint, mojito mint — plus ginger, turmeric, aloe, chickweed, cleavers, lamb’s ear, lovage,rose petals, angelica, valerian, horehound, hyssop, anise hyssop, dill, fennel, hibiscus (red Roselle) ashwghanda, honey suckle, cilantro, parsley, tarragon, chives, garlic chives, lemon verbena, stevia, shiso, violet, red clover, bergamot and our wine cap and turkey tale mushrooms.

This winter, we’ll be expanding the permaculture apothecary garden, nearly doubling its size. It already provides everything our family needs, and it’s exciting to think about what else it could give us. Honestly, I don’t even know what else we could possibly add at this point..but that’s part of the fun.

Every day, I walk through the medicine garden, touch the leaves, smell the flowers, and feel this deep gratitude. It’s work, yes, but it’s the kind of work that fills my soul. That garden is our medicine, our livelihood, our teaching space, our play space, and our quiet retreat. Every jar of tea, every tincture, every bar of soap that leaves my hands carries a little piece of this place, this life, and the love we pour into it.
It’s not perfect. It’s messy. It’s full of dirt on my hands, sun on my face, and the sound of my kids laughing in the garden. But it’s ours. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.