Pine Resin Salve
Take your skin care homestead salves to the next level
While one might see the 30 acres of our wooded land as a missed opportunity to farm profitably when we limit ourselves to a sustainable homestead, I welcome the trade-off in beauty, restoration, and the diversity of wild, natural medicine at my fingertips.
About a quarter of our land is a row-cropped farm turned four-decade-old abandoned Christmas tree farm. The swathes of spruce and pine forest welcome us when we return home, shelter us from harsh winds, and insulate us from the heat of summer. They bear the brunt of nature’s assaults and inevitably sustain damage. The tree’s natural defense to protect itself from disease, fungus, microbes, and more is to ooze a sticky, gummy resin from its wound.
For some reason, perhaps the ultra-deep freeze we suffered in 2022, our trees had more open wounds than I’ve noticed before. Typically, I’ll scrape the bits from the stumps and logs of fallen trees over a year after they come down and get enough to fill a few tins with salve. But this year I was able to harvest quite a bit from the live trees- over two full pints of resin!
While we mustn’t remove all of this beneficial substance, we can mindfully harvest some to create a salve with the same qualities to aid our skin’s wounds as the tree does its own. To that end, pine resin, also called pitch, is appropriate where we would want a stimulating, drawing, and inflammatory immune response on the skin. Pine resin is used in topical applications where antimicrobial, antiseptic, and antifungal actions are desired.
I also prefer to use Pine Resin Salve in the barnyard on livestock wounds where it’s hard to bandage and a traditional salve rubs off. This tacky salve has a little more grip and lasts between applications. It’s the first jar I grab when one of our cows gets an open sore on her udder and the speedy improvement is remarkable.
Now that I have a decent stockpile of Pine Resin Salve, I will be up-leveling my herbal Drawing Salve recipe with the next harvest.
Pine Resin Salve Recipe
Use the same substance a pine tree creates to protect itself from the outside to protect your skin during healing by crafting a pine resin salve complimented by calendula-infused oil.
Pine Resin Salve Ingredients
1 cup pine resin
½ cup calendula-infused extra virgin olive oil
2-3 Tablespoons beeswax
Pine Resin Salve Directions
Prepare the calendula-infused olive oil. Loosely pack a pint jar with fresh, sticky, resinous calendula blossoms. Fully cover with olive oil. Place the jar in a small saucepan filled halfway with water and heat the oil on the warming burner for several hours. Cool the oil and strain out the flowers.
Prepare the pine resin. Place the pine resin in a quart jar with the calendula oil. The oil helps thin it out for straining. Return the jar to the saucepan on the warming burner until melted. Strain out the debris with a wire mesh strainer. Repeat if necessary and use a couple of layers of open-weave cheesecloth to catch the finer bits.
Prepare the salve. Add the strained oil-resin to a clean jar with 2 tablespoons of beeswax. Return it to the saucepan of water and warm to melt the wax. Test the consistency by chilling a bit of liquid in the freezer. At room temperature, it should have the consistency of triple antibiotic ointment. Add more beeswax or olive oil if necessary. Pour into salve tins and cool.
Notes:
You could substitute plantain-infused olive oil for the calendula as a complimentary herb to generally benefit the skin.
Dishes can be cleaned with a paste of baking soda and/or coarse salt. It may take a few times, but they will eventually come clean.
You can save the strained debris and return it to the jar and cover with olive oil to make another oil infusion or salve. It will not be as thick of an ointment but it will still have more benefits than a plain salve.
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