Introduction
"Making a mother macerate of buds is within everyone's reach" - My Gemmotherapy Manual - Valérie Catala
To make a bud macerate, recognizing trees and shrubs by their buds is a prerequisite. It is recommended to choose trees that you know well. They must be healthy and far from pollution sources.
The buds must be harvested in dry weather and then immediately put into maceration at the harvest site in order to preserve all the medicinal virtues of the young shoots. The maceration liquid (a mixture of alcohol, glycerin, and water) must therefore be prepared in advance.
Essential for making a bud macerate, these three excipients each contribute to the extraction of active principles.
Water extracts energy, information, and water-soluble derivatives: tannins, mineral salts, water-soluble flavonoids, water-soluble vitamins, and some water-soluble acids.
Alcohol allows the extraction of alkaloids, heterosides, glycosides, and other acids.
Glycerin extracts essential oils, liposoluble flavonoids, liposoluble vitamins, and also certain acids.
In the contemporary era
The respective proportions are adjusted according to the alcohol content. Glycerin can be replaced with agave syrup or honey. However, other substitutes for glycerin can be proposed.
For 100 g of buds, the traditional recipe calls for a quantity of mother macerate corresponding to 20 times the mass of the dry equivalent of these buds. Therefore, determining the moisture content of the buds is a prerequisite. Be careful, this rate varies depending on the plant and environmental conditions, so it can change from one place to another and from one year to another. If we consider that the buds contain 75% water and therefore 25% dry matter, we thus obtain 20 x 0.25 x 100 or 500 g of mother macerate.
After the buds/young shoots are put into maceration, the jars are shaken several times a day. Then, they will be filtered after the required number of maceration days. The bottling can be done immediately after filtration. It is essential at all stages to correctly label the bottles to avoid mistakes. For home production, remember to indicate the date, the name of the plant used, and why not, the place of collection.
Gemmotherapy is slowly gaining the place it deserves in the world of phytotherapy. Still too little known, it allows for deep and gentle action on the body.
Learning to make a bud macerate is a way to get started in gemmotherapy by establishing a connection with nature, with trees. This allows us to realize that the trees around us also help us take care of our health, so they have their rightful place in phytotherapy.
