Incense Recipes Based On

Locally Grown Ingredients

Grow Your Own Incense

Growing your own incense ingredients is great fun and further deepens one’s connection to the incense.

Many ingredients can be grown in a pot by a kitchen window, on a patio, or in your garden.

When feeling out of balance, stressed, run down and weak or even ill, we can often revitalize ourselves and restore our mental and physical well being and vitality by re-synchronizing our life with the rhythms of nature.

When we create our incense, or prepare our foods, using locally grown organic or ethically wild-harvested seasonal ingredients, and when we take the time to appreciate and enjoy them, we harmonize the pulse of our minds and bodies with the heartbeat of our local natural environment.

Locally grown ingredients provide the freshest source of aromatic herbs, flowers, spices, and even resins to use in our incense.

They’re richer in the precious volatile oils that give them not only their fragrance but also their healing and energetic properties.

It’s good for our planet too!

Using local ingredients decreases the use of those that need to be shipped in from somewhere else.

Using local ingredients reduces over-harvesting, fuel consumption, carbon exhaust, packaging, and waste.

Another key reason for using local ingredients is that by doing so we support and strengthen our local community, its farmers, and its economy.

Organic farmers love their lands, the plants they grow, and the people they feed.

They’re very interesting people who love to talk about plants, and any fragrant ones they may be growing or could grow for you to use as incense.

Seeking them out is a great aromatic adventure and we’ve met some truly wonderful people this way.

Your local farmers market is a good place to start. Talk to the farmers and share your interests. Ask if they grow any plants whose parts are aromatic: either its leaves, flowers, or roots?

Perhaps they would grow a couple of new plants for you or help you grow them yourself? You get the idea.

Harvesting resins & wild herbs on public lands

State and Federal Parks and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issue seasonal permits to allow harvesting of tree resins and wild herbs on public lands, check with your local and National Parks Dept., Forest Service, or BLM for more information.

Many aromatic herbs and some trees you can grow yourself.

For local sources, check your local farmer’s markets. While you’re at it enjoy local organically grown foods too. Ask if any of the farmer’s belong to a CSA (Community Support Agriculture) or Organic Food Cooperative.

CSA’s and Organic Food Cooperatives offer scheduled deliveries of local herbs and foods from a group of local growers in order to offer a more diverse selection of organic foods with each delivery.