Local homegrown herbals! New! Our soaps & salves now available through Bailey's Local Foods!

We are happy to announce that some of our homegrown herbal products are now available for purchase through Bailey's Local Foods.  This will make the purchasing and pick-up more convenient for local folks who already place regular food orders through the Bailey's online system, and pick orders up at a convenient uptown Waterloo location!

Through the Bailey's site you'll now find our handmade natural soaps, including baby soaps, shampoo bars, assorted body bars, and shaving bars, and even laundry stain stick bars.  You'll find our salves including mama belly balm, calendula healing salve, back ache balm, and all purpose healing salve.  You'll also find our lipbalms - peppermint with red clover, or lavender & local honey.  One of the things that makes our soaps & salves unique is that each uses locally grown herbs such as calendula, lavender, sage, red clover, arnica, and comfrey (grown naturally or sourced from a local organic farm), as well as only pure oils and essential oils for gentle, natural healing.  We work with our herbs from start to finish, including harvesting at their peak, by us, in small batches so we know exactly how they were grown, dried and prepared.

We are very excited about our Herbal First Aid Kits and can't say enough good things about them!  They come in a convenient travel tin that fits into backpacks or bags so it can easily be taken on hikes and kept on hand for when it's needed.   The first aid remedies included are useful for headaches, sunburn, bug bites, minor cuts & scrapes, splinters, heat rash, digestive upset and motion sickness, and much more.  A complete description of the remedies included in the Herbal First Aid Kits is listed here, and also comes with each kit.

A complete line-up of our herbals is also now available through our online Homestead Herbals Etsy store, and we can arrange local pick-up here at our location to save shipping costs.

Homeopathic First Aid Workshop

Had an informative intro to homeopathy workshop here on Saturday - the topic specifically being "homeopathic first aid". Rachel Vandenberg of Healing Path Centre for Natural Medicine here in town led the workshop - fortunately we had such fine weather we could have it outdoors - which seemed fitting for a first aid workshop on natural remedies. She gave participants a good understanding of a handful of useful "key" remedies to have on hand, and recommended we keep mini first aid kits with these homeopathics as well as instruction cards, on hand (in our homes, in our backpacks for outdoor excursions, etc). The main remedies she discussed were for common ailments that don't need the indepth constitutional analysis that homeopathic/naturopathic doctors also use when assessing patients. Here's the first aid kit:

Aconite - for sudden onset of shock, anxiety, restlessness or even taking this at the first sign of a flue or cold

Apis - for bee stings, tender, burning, swollen wounds

Arsenicum - food poisoning, vomiting, diarrhea

Arnica - for mechanical injuries, bruises, sore muscles (e.g. overexertion)

Belladonna - sunstroke, sudden fever, burning skin

Calendula - for cuts to the soft tissue, superficial healing of skin

Cantharsis - for blisters and burns

Chamomilla - irritability during teething, common cold with irritability

Hypericum - for deeper wounds to nerve-rich areas, injuries to spine, or falling on tailbone

Ledum - for bruises, puncture wounds, injury to eye area

Nux Vomica - for ailments from too much of anything (food, alcohol, etc)

Rhus Tox - for red swollen itchy blisters, poison ivy, sprained joints

Ruta - for sprains, and pulled tendons

Symphytum - broken bones

Urtica Urens - sunburn, injuries that burn, itch, sting or swell into a raised area