How I thrive Living a Simple Life | Cozy Herbal Crafting at Home

I have a confession to make. I make videos about slow, intentional living and peaceful moments of my day, but lately I've been living neither slowly nor peacefully. I've alluded in my recent videos that life has felt very full and hectic lately, and it truly has. So today, I wanted to slow things down, stay at home, and work on some quiet herbal crafting. It's been a long while since I shared an herbal crafting video with you, so I hope you enjoy this day of crafting as much as I did. I'll be sharing three crafts with you today. A homemade herbal incense blend, a floral syrup, and a mead recipe with lemon balm from my garden. All of the recipes will be typed out or linked in the description below. There's barely a month of spring left, and it was a new moon on this day, so I wanted to burn an incense to refresh my space as I prepare for a new season and moon cycle. I'm using a mixture of herbs, frankincense and lavender that I recently bought at a market, as well as a variety of dried sage that I picked myself. It smells refreshing and uplifting, and I wish I could share this scent with you through my screen. Whether or not you believe in the energetic power of plants, there's something refreshing about making a conscious effort to cleanse and uplift your personal space. I hope you can hear me well, but I thought while I was out here I could show you a bit more of my garden that I've started back in March. I realized that I showed the process of me clearing the space out, but I've never actually shown you the planting of anything or how it's doing. But look at this beautiful purple. I think this is called opal, black opal basil, or something like that, and I'm very pleased because I've never been able to grow basil, even though apparently it's one of the easiest things to grow. Not in my case, though. And then I'm doing everything in pots this year. So this is some calendula. It's kind of dirty from the heavy rainfall that we've had, but it's doing pretty well. And then over there in the coffee cans, I still have to transplant these into larger containers, but I have some forage, which I'm still on the fence on if it's going to do well. So, dill, more calendula, and a couple others that I can't see right now. In this big pot, I have some hollyhock, which I've always wanted to grow because to me that is the quintessential hobbit flower. And so far it's doing okay in its new home. That was one of the ones I was growing in these little coffee cans, and it's now in its permanent place, hopefully. More forage, which the brown leaves are not a good sign. A little sprig of menth there that I need to transplant into a big pot, because hopefully it will spread really well and I'll have lots of menth tea. I have some cornflower there. And then over in this corner, oops, the sun's coming out, my coworker gave me some St. John's Wort. This is the same lady that gave me the menth and lemon balm, so I'm very, very grateful for this. In fact, I think it might even flower this year. So that is very exciting. This will eventually be a giant shrub, which is why I've planted it at the edge of this foundation here. And then just yesterday I spent the afternoon planting my tomato plants. Last year I couldn't do any, so this year I'm hoping to have an abundant harvest. Maybe I shouldn't have planted it super close to the mugwort patch, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it. So yes, I have a variety of vegetables, herbs, and flowers that I hope will flourish into an abundant little cottage garden. So just wanted to update you on that. Hi London! You like lemon balm? Okay, so I have just picked my beautiful basket of lemon balm, and I picked a few of my wild flowers. They're already fading from the rain, but I still wanted to include them in my late spring altar. So today I'm thinking I'm going to make my lemon balm mead, and while I'm waiting on the water to boil and cool down, I'll make my wild rose syrup. So while the water cools down for the mead, I'll make the syrup, and I just thought we could have a nice, cozy herbal crafting day, especially as it's supposed to rain all week and I think it's the perfect excuse to stay inside. Alright, so let's get started. So despite the huge mess I made, this is so pretty.