Our Apothecary
The PMP Apothecary team transforms plant material—grown, donated, or collected—into herbal medicine. Every week our apothecary team, which includes PMP staff and volunteers, engage with medicinal plants.
Apothecary volunteers:
- harvest, process, and dry the medicinal plants from the homestead gardens
- make tinctures, teas, salves, oils, and other remedies
- compound herbal tinctures and teas for clients
- make medicines for distribution at our health clincs and for community partners
- work together to keep the apothecary stocked, clean, organized, and tidy
The herbs and remedies produced by our Apothecary team supply personalized herbal formulas for our Greenfield Healing Clinic, and Farmworker Healing Program, as well as remedies and bulk herbs for distributions and other community events.
The PMP Homestead
The PMP homestead is located in Conway, MA. Our homestead includes a greenhouse and large medicinal plant garden that source the plants in our apothecary. In the early spring, we start thousands of herb seedlings in our greenhouse. These seedlings make their way back to our homestead garden and out to community gardens in Holyoke, Turner’s Falls, Springfield, and Greenfield. The PMP homestead garden produces the majority of the herbs needed for our programs.
PMP demonstrates and supports community members to learn about organic growing practices, ethical land stewardship, and ways to be in right relationship with local ecosystems.
Grow a Row Program
Our Grow-a-Row program supports our apothecary to meet the expanding demand for herbs in our community! Local growers, educational farms, community groups, community gardens, and home gardeners plant, tend and harvest herbs that eventually find their way to our apothecary. Most of these herbs become teas that are offered through our Herb Distributions programs in Springfield, Turners’ Falls, and Greenfield. If you’d like to grow herbs for PMP, please be in touch!
The name “People’s Medicine” celebrates the coevolved relationship between humans and plants since the beginning of human life. Every culture in the world has used plants as food and medicine. Knowledge of plants has been passed down in communities, as life saving medicine, as kitchen table remedies, or as parts of sacred ceremonies. And humans have even adapted to finding local healing plants, despite enslavement, and removal from traditional lands. Herbal knowledge is power, and we feel an urgency about of keeping access to this knowledge alive, and in the hands of people, not companies. Traditional remedies are the “People’s Medicine!”
Our Earth and Landcare Ethics
- We approach the Earth and its many beings with humility and reverence.
- We acknowledge that we grow and harvest plants from unceded Nipmuc, Abenaki and Pocumtuk lands.
- We give thanks for the land, the plants, and ancestral inhabitants. We honor those relationships.
- We practice reciprocity when we harvest.
- We promote organic gardening practices and emphasize local, easy-to-grow plants.
- We participate in sustainable wildcrafting of local abundant plants (bioregional herbalism).
- We refrain from using threatened plants in our apothecary.
- We educate our community against using threatened, endangered, rare or sacred plants. We teach about alternatives that are available and abundant in our bioregion.
- We educate ourselves about the historic uses and cultural contexts of certain plants and remedies.
- We don’t take more than our share and we don’t waste what we have taken.
- We share our harvests with the community.
- We reuse materials in our apothecary (primarily glassware) whenever possible to minimize waste.
- We partner with other community organizations and land stewards that share our ethics.
