Making St. John’s Wort oil while the sun shines..

Here’s a picture of the St. John’s Wort I picked on Tuesday, now dried and covered over with organic olive oil in a kilner jar on my windowsill. Notice the black spots on the flowers and leaves? Well they’re not little insects! They are in fact tiny glands containing the pigment and active constituent hypericin. With any luck (for ‘luck’, read sufficient sunshine!), this will infuse into the oil, turning it a deep red colour in a few weeks. Let’s see how that ‘luck’ turns out!