Making your own gemmotherapy

This is a translation of the original article published last year on my French blog.

What we need

45° organic grain alcohol

I know...
I’d need a much stronger alcohol, but, that’s very hard to find legally in France.

Besides, I want to avoid an alcohol stuffed with pesticides, so, even if the grain alcohol I use is organic and doesn’t guarantee zero pesticides, the concentration of pesticides is surely lower than a vodka from Lidl.
Liquid raw acacia honey

Why honey?
It’s more interesting than glycerine, made from rapeseed…

What’s more, a former colleague produces acacia honey nearby and he does it with respect for his bees.

Finally, acacia tree is a wild tree so it’s never spread on.
2 × 200 ml “Le Parfait” glass jars

Preparation before bud harvest

I prepared the solvent in 20 min:

1/3 acacia honey from a local producer
2/3 grain alcohol

For example, for 100 g of honey, we use 200 ml of alcohol.

I shook it for 2 min to dilute the honey in the alcohol, and there you have enough for several outings.

Spring test in 2023

February 19, 2023

We went to pick up the first buds of rosehips.

The girls showed their excitement, on the lookout for even the smallest bud, which wasn’t easy to find that day.

Aurélie helped me too, and we picked about 30 g in 150 ml of solvents, divided between two “Le Parfait” jars.

At 15.8 euros per 30 ml vial, we would have 79 euros of solution for 7.28 euros of gross product with the DYI method, according to this formula:

2 × 2.83 euros per “Le Parfait” jar
100 ml alcohol for 3.75 euros (at 25 euros per liter)
50 g honey for 70 cents euros (at 14 euros per kilogram)

See you in 3 weeks for filtration and bottling drop by drop.

Meanwhile, we’d be going back in 2 weeks: we’ll find a lot of buds then!

March 5, 2023

We went back to picking. And, as expected, we found plenty buds!

Of course, to preserve biodiversity and plant health, we don’t pick:

terminal buds, which help the plant to grow
more than a third of the buds so that the plant isn’t weakened.

Rosehips are so abundant around Tournon-sur-Rhône that our harvest taxes them in a small manner.

This will allow us to enjoy the accessory fruits next winter! Yum 😋

Tincture-making follow-up

After a month, the gemmotherapy became darker.

On April 24, 2023, I filtered 65 ml of solution, or just over 2 vials of 30 ml, which costs over 31.60 euros at market price (organic store).

In our case, it came to 4.45 euros (omitting the jars and vials we recycled from previous vials purchased in the store).

Other than that, is the quality the same? Hard to say. After a year of using it, in the spring of 2024, we almost used up all of it and it helped during the winter.

In February 2024, we went back to pick up new buds to make a new batch.

Sources in French

Here are the articles that helped me make my gemmotherapy:

Credits: Top image courtesy of Life in the Apple Garden 🍎 on Pexels.