Get whelmed. Start here!
Starting with anything herb, tea, coffee, wine or natural remedy related is annoying at best, completely overwhelming at worst. So many resources are at our disposal. Everyone’s a tincture maker and mushroom expertise courses are hundreds of dollars. (And since they might be life saving you can’t start without them). Everyone and their grandma is making infused oil over the sink and that one cayenne tincture might prevent heart attack if only you knew which cayenne and how much glycerin goes in there.
Frustrating, I know.
Let’s rant some more. Get it out. There’s a reason you have trust issues and it’s because:
All the books and the blogs have the same advice while somehow also managing to say nothing past a starter kit shopping list.
You just realized each free newsletter is a hollow funnel into a paid course.
But this community is not about that.
If there’s a tea already bagged up, affordable and ready to go, and just as good, I’m not writing an entire post on how to make it at home for double the price, time and effort.
It is very unlikely you hear from me about roasting coffee beans over the stove. (I mean, maybe as a fun experiment.) Although it looks cool and I’m sure it smells even better, I’m much more likely to give you the exact steps on how to find a good pre-owned espresso machine online and deep clean it before use.
I think we can drop the need to make things complicated when everything about societal progress is to make things simpler for ourselves.
No extra courses to pay for, no additional books to buy or first come first served flash offers that are meant to build excitement and loyalty but frankly just makes everyone feel left behind.
Remember the days when HerbMentor was $7 a month? I was there too, happily giving them my money. I gathered a lot of info and never did anything with most of it. Sound familiar?
Maybe you too have a graveyard of PDFs and unread articles haunting your reading list.
The reason is simple. If the information is delivered in a way that’s not capturing our attention, we won’t engage with it. Duh. It could be free or a thousand dollars, the principle still applies.
(This is not an HerbMentor diss, I love HerbMentor and would recommend it to anyone.)
Jsut because something is free doesn’t mean we don’t value it, and just because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth our time.
This is why this platform is different, it keeps you accountable throughout the recipes and in fact it evens tells you which one to go try before you keep reading that one article with the fun title you’re way more interested in reading.
Guess what, that starter shopping kit may be fun but if you never start, you just wasted your money and no one even tricked you into a free newsletter for it. (don’t beat yourself up, I once bought a full 37-piece cake decorating kit on day five of a fast. But that’s a story for another post.)
No hidden costs, no exclusive clubs, no psychological marketing traps. Just useful knowledge I’ve gathered living in three different countries and two continents. All in one place.
So if you’d rather read one post about which electric kettle to use instead of opening fifteen YouTube tabs to cross reference coffee influencers, welcome! You are home!
Please note that in my posts, I may be recommending the exact products I use, because you may get different results with different brands (which is ok but I like to know a recipe will work when I take the time to complete it and if you are like me, you will get the exact process to do so.)
Camille Charles is the voice behind The Minimalist Herbalist. Herbal researcher. Best-selling author. Professional over-doer of tinctures. Consumer advocate. Currently earning a doctorate in curriculum design, on a mission to make herbal education less confusing and more honest.
She believes learning about herbs should feel empowering, not overwhelming. You’ll find her distilling rose water in an Instant Pot, repurposing olive jars for cacao butter, and making overnight nettle infusions like it’s a sacred ritual. She talks way too much about womb health, nettle, and why your juicer is probably lying to you.
If there’s an herb for it, she’s tried it, and probably turned it into a teachable moment.
Grab a cup. Tea’s brewing.