Comfrey Salve

E takes part in an online wild foods conference for homelearners.  He decided to make a how-to demonstration of his salve making to share there.  I thought it would be fun to share it here as well so without further ado...salve making by E.


This is some comfrey. I am going to make a salve with. You can do this the same way with lots of different plants like calendula, plantain, chickweed and lots more.

This is me chopping some fresh comfrey leaves that I am going to use.

I have chopped them smaller.

Here they are in our chocolate fondue pot. I have used a crock pot when I made calendula salve. You can also use a regular pot but you have to make sure it does not burn because my mom did that once with calendula. The oil is really fast at heating up so you have to watch the temperature. This chocolate fondue pot uses a candle tealight for heat and so it never burns.

This is a picture of a big tub of olive oil.  We use olive oil usually, this time we used grapeseed oil.

This is the comfrey with the oil poured in.

Here is the candle. I heated it for about 5 hours. If you are using a pot on the stove you don't heat it so long. In the summer we use a glass jar put in the sunshine instead, the sun heats it and we leave it for weeks.

Here is the comfrey after a few hours. See that the oil is green.

Here it is being poured into a jar. It is being strained so there are no leaves in it.

Here it is strained and green. This can be used like this as an infused oil.

I have chopped off some of my beeswax. This will make it thicker and creamy. If you add lots of beeswax then it will be pretty hard. I like adding not that much because I like it creamy and easy to spread.

I melted the beeswax in a pot.

Then I poured in the comfrey oil. I mixed it together for a few minutes on very low heat.

Then poured it into jars. It still looks green and liquid but not for long.

Here it is all hardened and ready to use. Sometimes you can add a couple drops of lavender essential oil to make it smell nice and help preserve it.

Have you ever tried making a salve? If you have I would like to hear what kind and what you used it for. I have only made comfrey and calendula salve.