Making a homemade healing balm from daisies

One of the first flowers to signify the start of summer is the humble daisy, they pop up in April and continue to flourish for the rest of the summer period, withstanding being trodden, mown and picked, these resilient little flowers just keep growing until the end of summer. There is nothing more beautiful that a field full of daisies and not only are they pretty, they are very useful for making a homemade healing balm.

Daisies contain arnica which is great for healing, particularly bruises. You may have noticed many creams and balms in the shops that contain arnica but most of these also contain many other chemicals and preservatives that are not good for us, so we can easily collect daisies and use them to make a simple homemade healing balm to use all year round.

Things you will need to make this balm: An oil to ferment the daisies, I use fractionated coconut oil in this recipe but you can use any oil you wish, maybe an organic sweet almond oil or organic olive oil, both which are rich in vitamin E. I chose fractionated coconut oil as it does not set like regular coconut oil which makes it a good choice to use for fermentation, it has no scent and makes a really good base for a healing balm, however as it is refined it lacks some of the properties of unprocessed coconut oil, apart from this it is gentle on the skin and will not cause people with nut allergies to have a reaction and has a longer shelf life of 2-3 years. The other thing you will need is good quality organic beeswax, you can purchase this from many online retailers such as Amazon, but if you look for local bee keepers in your area you may even find that they are prepared to give some away for free, or for a small jar of your healing balm. You will also need a glass jar with a lid in order to ferment the daisies and some smaller glass jars to store the finished balm. Finally you will need some local daisies, the more you pick the more balm you can make but for a few small jars you really don’t need to spend much more than an hour picking.

When picking the daisies, try to avoid picking next to pathways where dogs are walked for obvious reasons and also try to pick only the heads, don’t worry if you get stalks as well but the heads are really what we are after. I like to take my children picking daisies and they do love it, even if they prefer to make daisy chains, it’s a lovely bit of family time in nature and they really enjoy seeing how the daisies go from the field into a lovely homemade healing balm.

Once you have picked a nice amount of daisies, take them home and give them a really good clean in cold water, I use a colander to rinse them in a large bowl, emptying the water out and replacing it 3 times to make sure any bugs or pollutants from animals are rinsed off.

Once the daisies are cleaned, I dry them by hand to remove any excess water using a clean tea towel and then I lay them out to dry in the sun, you can leave them outside in the garden provided it isn’t too windy or you can lay them on a sunny windowsill. They usually take 24 to 48 hours to dry fully, keep an eye on them and move them around to make sure they dry evenly and to check when they are completely dry.

Once your daisies are nice and dry, put them in a glass jar, fill the jar with dried daisies and then fill just above the daisies with oil to ferment. This will allow the arnica in the daisies to be extracted into the oil and give us a lovely arnica rich base oil for our balm. Leave them in the jar for 4 to 6 weeks to ferment and make sure to swish the jar every day to move the oil and daisies around in order to help with the fermenting process. Be patient as the longer you leave them the more arnica we will end up with in our oil for a more potent healing balm.

After 4-6 weeks, it’s time to make our balm. Something to consider is how hard you want the balm to be, a 50/50 ratio of oil and beeswax is quite a hard balm but it will melt at body temperature after some working, however I prefer a 60/40 oil to beeswax ratio as this give a much softer balm and will be easier to apply.

To start off we need to strain our oil into a container using a tea strainer, I prefer to weigh the oil at this stage before I measure it in ml as this will make it easier to work out how much beeswax to use. For every 60g of oil I use 40g of beeswax. A simple calculation of dividing the weight of oil by 60 and then multiplying the resulting number by 40 will give us the amount of beeswax we need in grams for a 60/40 ratio. For example 90g/60=1.5 so 1.5×40=60g of beeswax to combine with the 90g of oil. It is also a good idea to check the oil volume in ml as I also like to add some essential oil to my balm, you can use any essential oil you like but make sure that you calculate the safe amount of essential oil that can be added to the amount of oil you have, I like to add lavender essential oil and this can be applied neat to most skin types so there is no real need to be cautious here but other essential oils can be quite potent and should be used at the recommended ratio so do your own research here if you are planning to add other types of essential oil. I like to add a lot of lavender essential oil to my balm as it is a great remedy for minor burns, so adding this to my healing balm will make the balm not only great for treating bruises but also for treating minor burns as well and it also smells beautiful.

Once you have worked out the correct beeswax to oil ratio, start off by melting the beeswax in a double boiler. When all the beeswax has melted, add the oil, little by little, stirring and keeping on the heat to prevent the wax from setting, once all of the oil has been added and the mixture is in a liquid state, add the essential oil, give it a stir and pour out into little jars.

As the balm sets the wax will contract and you end up with a little indent in the centre of the balm, to give it a lovely finishing touch you can add a dried daisy head to the centre of the balm, this makes a lovely decoration, especially if you plan to give your balm to a friend as a gift.

I hope you enjoyed this recipe for a wonderful homemade healing balm and I hope you have fun making some of your own. Please ask any questions you may have in the comments and let me know how you get on making your own. If you do not get around to making some for yourself but would like to purchase some of mine, my next batch will be ready around September 2022 and will be available to purchase in small quantities from this online store https://lilnaturel.co.uk

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