Week 6: A Lot of Lemon Balm

Our Second Run of the Still!

Preparation

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The morning started with the distillation prep work. First, we pulled all of the still materials out of the shed and made a simple bread dough with flour and water to seal the still when it came time to do the run. Then, we harvested all of our lemon balm from the Medicine Garden by the Ethnobotanical Longhouse with permission from Marja Eloheimo; the lemon balm was spreading insanely fast and taking over the North bed, as well as trickling into the trails where it did not need to be. It’s a nice feeling to be able to use weeding as a time of harvest in any garden; instead of just throwing the excess lemon balm into the compost, we are able to use it for our distilling, which I am super grateful for. We brought the lemon balm to the still, washed off all of the dirt, and stuffed it into the inner chamber of the still. The chamber was filled a little over halfway, without any stuffing or compacting of the plant material.

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The Run

Then, we were able to fully set up the still and get the process going. We inserted the inner chamber and sealed it with the bread dough. We hooked up the burner and the water and then the waiting period began. It took around 20 minutes for the hydrosol to start pouring out, and this time around, the hydrosol actually smelled really nice compared to our first run. As we watched, I thought I saw some oil separating out onto the surface of the hydrosol as we drained the liquid out, but ultimately, we did not get any oil out of this run. We let it go for around an hour before calling it a day and bottling up our hydrosols to go.

What I Learned

This run was a great learning experience for me. First, it showed Laura and I that we are capable of working the still without any supervision or guidance, which provided a lot of relief for our Taste program workshop this coming week. Second, it really showed us how much plant material is necessary to run the still. Even with as much lemon balm as we harvested, we got close to no oil at all, which was disappointing, but again, an important learning experience for us. For a small-scale herb garden like on the farm, making essential oils with a still really isn’t going to work out, since no amount of plant material the garden could produce would ever be enough (unless the garden was dedicated to growing one type of aromatic herb). I’m feeling anxious about the amount of material we will be able to gather for our next two workshops, as the lemon balm in both the Herb Garden and the Longhouse Garden is growing thin. Either way, our workshops will at least provide a demonstration of how to set up the still, run it, and information on hydrosols and their usage, which I know both Laura and I were interested in from the start.

Finally, both of these runs have taught me that maybe investing in new, non-damaged parts for the still would be beneficial for future students interested in what we are doing. Using the bread dough to create a seal on the dented inner chamber is a cool learning experience, but the process of scraping the baked bread dough off of each piece after everything has cooled off is infuriating and takes over an hour to complete. The thought of having to do that two more times this quarter already has me exhausted.

Putting the Pieces Together

This quarter, I have been wearing many hats: I am taking 8-10 credits in the Taste: What We Hunger For program which includes a 4 credit in-program ILC, 8 credits in the Medicine of Community and Place program, and I am dedicating 8-10 hours of each week to my Food and Ag internship surrounding the Herb Garden at the Organic Farm. I have been learning so much through all of these opportunities and am very proud of everything I have achieved so far, but up to this point, all of these different hats feel very disconnected from one another, when really, they all have a lot in common as I work through them. That is why for the rest of this quarter, I will be incorporating a section on my website that is dedicated to highlighting the connections between my programs and internship. I am excited to start putting all of these puzzle pieces together in this final quarter of my second year.