Making Yarrow Oil

It's Yarrow time again.  It is blooming and I needed to gather it before the thunderstorms come this afternoon.  This is almost a quart size jar and inside are all the flowers and some leaves from the yarrow in my garden.  They are submerged in extra virgin olive oil.  

There's about equal amounts of herb and oil.  Most recipes use dried herbs but I thought the fresh would be better as the ingredient you want to infuse the oil would not have degraded from being dried.  Perhaps it is the water in the plant that they want dried out.  I'm not sure and this is an experiment.  If it goes wrong there is always next year or I can try again with just leaves.

Some recipes say to heat the olive oil, others say not as it cooks out the good stuff.  I'm going with not heating, I will just let it sit for some weeks.  I ordered some natural beeswax so I can make salve from some of it too.

Yarrow is excellent for wounds, but make certain they are totally clean first because it speeds up the closing and healing of wounds.  It's antiseptic and anti-bacterial.  Along with the yarrow wound wash I made here, the oil and salve will be good to have on hand.

And I have a bag full of dried cleavers to experiment with as well.


9/4/2012
I had the yarrow oil steeping for some time.  I opened the jar today to see if it was ready and it had a yucky moldy scum on the top so to be safe I threw it all out.  My conclusion is that fresh plant material is good for tinctures but for oils you need to use dried plant material.