Offered: June 2, 10am - 4:00pm
Location: Commonweal Garden
Instructor: Rachel Berry

Spend a day in the garden making your own nourishing, organic skin care.  This is an essential skill for those who want to use high quality skin care, save money, reduce exposure and reliance on chemicals, and connect more deeply with the plants around them.
 
You will learn how to collect and process herbs, from picking to preservation, as well as basic herbal medicine making skills.  We will focus on plants that are safe and easy to grow in the garden and/or abundant in nearby wild lands. Together as a class, we will make the following herbal products that you can take home:
 
* Luscious Skin Cream: Learn the alchemy of making an organic skin cream from water, oil, and beeswax. We’ll infuse it with the goodness skin-nourishing herbs from the garden.
 
* Floral facial astringent: A simple, effective facial astringent made with commonly found blossoms will help firm your skin and expel dirt and oil from your pores.
 
* Facial Scrub: make a pure, gentle facial scrub from nearly all edible ingredients
 
* Lip Balm: Nourish dry, chapped lips with a hand-crafted lip balm made with 100% local ingredients

After completing the class, you will have:

- a set of organic herbal skin care products to take home
- the recipes and know-how to make them again and again at home
- basic knowledge of how to make a medicinal oil and salve
- the ability to make great gifts fort hose that appreciate high quality, local and organic products
- a list of resources for getting started at home and expanding your herbal repertoire, including a list of very useful plants that are relatively easy to grow in your backyard.

Course Fees

Class size is limited - register early!

Click here to register.

Class fee: $95 per person (includes all materials)
               $85 per person if you bring a friend (and register together)

Instructor: Rachel Berry

Rachel blends her background in community health, women’s health, medicinal herbs, and sustainable living practices to inspire and promote home-scale herbalism.  She created Backyard Botanics, a family herbal body care business in the Sierra Foothills, to offer high quality herbal self-care made with local ingredients. Her training includes years of self-study and practice working with herbs for home remedies; formal training programs with Donna D’Terra, Kathi Keville and Candis Cantin; and studying health and health care practices among traditional healers in Chiapas, Mexico.  She holds a master's degree in Health Psychology and worked many years as university instructor in women’s health and as a public health advocate for women and children. 

Commonweal Garden is familiar ground for Rachel — she lived and worked there for the first several years of its development as the Regenerative Design Institute. In these gardens, she learned to connect more deeply to the natural world, use the local plant life to nourish herself, offer herbal first aid to course participants, and create pure and effective herbal care for her family.

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