Made Honeysuckle Infused Olive Oil

In Connecticut Japanese Honeysuckle is classified as an invasive plant. This has been planted as an ornamental vine by homeowners for years. The plant flowers here in June.

In June I read of Honeysuckle Infused Oil and decided to try to make some. This was my first experiment in making an oil infused with the scent and properties of a flower blossom.

This was the base recipe I intended to use.

In the recipe it advises to strain the blossoms out every 24-36 hours and replace with new ones to infuse more, and to repeat that.

For my batch I followed the recipe perfectly for one time. I then had a smaller amount of blossoms for the second infusion. I was too busy to go wildcraft more blossoms so I stopped there. The original recipe wants you to be able to smell the scent or taste it, in the oil. I could not. Still I decided to keep it and use it.

I was worried about water content in the oil so I covered it with cheesecloth and let it sit for two weeks. I figured any water left would evaporate. Here is a photo of the finished honeysuckle infused olive oil.

I then made a salve using just the olive oil and beeswax. This I use as a hand salve at the end of the day. I was surprised that when I heated the oil gently to make the salve the oil released the scent. It was heavenly!

Homemade salves are ridiculously simple to make and perhaps 90% less expensive than buying salves prepared from a store or from a cottage industry. However, I have an appreciation for the small batch maker of these as they are timely: when wildcrafting your own plant matter there is often a small window of opportunity to gather and the concoctions must sometimes be made immediately. If the crop is small due to weather conditions, the supplies can be in such low demand that making a large amount or steady supply of a product may not be possible. It also takes time and energy to make the infusions. Also if something goes wrong in the process, it may be too late to harvest more fresh supplies, until next year.

I found when using this salve it has a strong scent of honeysuckle (despite having two batches of blossoms only). Therefore next year when I do this again I will do only two infusions per batch, I see no reason to waste the blossoms to make it stronger than that.

I did notice a difference between my sweet almond oil with apricot kernel oil and beeswax salve that I made in February, compared to the olive oil (only) with beeswax. The olive oil only batch is not as moisturing to my hands. While some herbalists and handcrafters choose to use olive oil for hand salves and lotions because it has healing properties I plan to use more of the apricot kernel oil as that is more moisturizing for my skin.