I've been teaching herbal medicine to college and graduate students full time for more than two decades. I've seen many things in academia that have tested, delighted, intrigued, and humbled me over the years. But what has perhaps been  most formative to my professional career is to experience it all over again for the first time through the senses and instincts of my own children.

My kids imitated me working in the garden, harvesting handfuls of comfrey for my patients, sackfuls of nettles for dinner, and packing the van for a weekend of  seaweed identification in the field. They learned to anticipate the tastes of bitter, pungent, and sour... and I, in turn, learned where to draw the line between barely tolerable and most dreadful. Once they were mobile enough to push a chair to the table, clamber up and help garble, smash, mix, and wash, I learned that saying "no" was most often harder than cleaning up a bit of mess later. They were herbalists. They wanted to pick, taste, mix, apply... They wanted to know the names of the plants. They wanted to know the scientific names of plants. They wanted to show off how much they know about plants! They were dismayed that other kids at school had no awareness of plants.

Finding a way to validate this instinctive brilliance while also connecting them with other kids that like herbs was the birth plan of Herb Lab Kids. We recognized that there are some kids who already know, still more who really want to know, and the urge to mix, stir, formulate, taste, and apply, is pretty universal. Kids deserve to learn how to recognize medicine in nature and they also deserve to learn how to use it and take care of their own basic needs.  Herb Lab Kids guides them safely. It provides them with the tools to pursue this lifelong passion all on their own.

Having made these remedies dozens of times in the University Herb Lab, I can usually predict that about 10% will dislike the taste or smell at first. I know there will be an allergy that triggers a scratchy throat or itchy skin in about 1 out of 100. I also know that stimulating new taste receptors affects brain development and digestive function in a positive way, and allergy sufferers can benefit enormously from learning herbal approaches to managing it.