This might not be as exciting as say, extracting a few liters of safrole from rootbark etc, but I'm about to go and harvest a large quantity of lemon balm (Melissa officianalis), I fancy some balm tea right now after all the work today, sweating and roasting in a small shed, on a searing hot day, with a welding torch and hotplate constantly turned up to the max.
A member of the mint family, spreads like wildfire once it gets established. I have a small plant in my garden now, split off from a larger plant and given as a gift by a neighbour a couple of houses down. Going to water it with a dilute solution of aspirin/a salicylate salt after base saponification of the acetyl group to encourage even faster growth. It was a tiny scrap a month and a bit ago, that had been picked and left to wilt for most of a day in the hot sun. Now its a healthy, moderate sized plant. With very low dose auxin activity, and addition of fertilizer, it should grow faster than the bubonic plague in a medieval city. The tea has both memory/cognitive enhancing properties, containing substances that modulate nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptor activity, and contains a potent GABA-transaminase inhibitor, makes for a nice soothing anxiolytic/gently sedating drink that tastes great...like citrus without the acid, very lemony but with a taste all of its own.
I figure I'll collect enough to make some oil from it too, reflux in water with condenser attatched to flask should allow the oil to separate, and be distilled off, no?
Other option is a solvent extraction. A simple reflux in MeOH and distilling off the methanol is attractive, but for the toxicity of MeOH, residual methanol in the oil would be damn dangerous to the user.
So...what do you guys suggest? on hand are methanol (and lots of it, 15-20 liters or so), ethyl acetate, acetone, THF, dichlor, and toluene. Chloroform could also be made via the haloform rxn, although I don't have very much acetone on hand at the moment, I'm running low. Or distillation a better idea? the intent is to pull the essential oil out of the plant material, and also, extract the things that aren't typically (to my best knowledge) in the essential oil, such as the GABA-transaminase inhibitor rosmarinic acid, and the other strongly active compounds in there.
Think I will do the same with some catnip, just for fun and practise. Essential oil of catnip sounds really nice, never, ever, ever seen it sold anywhere, but there is no reason whatsoever not to do it, or that it couldn't be done in the exact same manner as say, lavender oil is prepared, or rose otto.
A member of the mint family, spreads like wildfire once it gets established. I have a small plant in my garden now, split off from a larger plant and given as a gift by a neighbour a couple of houses down. Going to water it with a dilute solution of aspirin/a salicylate salt after base saponification of the acetyl group to encourage even faster growth. It was a tiny scrap a month and a bit ago, that had been picked and left to wilt for most of a day in the hot sun. Now its a healthy, moderate sized plant. With very low dose auxin activity, and addition of fertilizer, it should grow faster than the bubonic plague in a medieval city. The tea has both memory/cognitive enhancing properties, containing substances that modulate nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptor activity, and contains a potent GABA-transaminase inhibitor, makes for a nice soothing anxiolytic/gently sedating drink that tastes great...like citrus without the acid, very lemony but with a taste all of its own.
I figure I'll collect enough to make some oil from it too, reflux in water with condenser attatched to flask should allow the oil to separate, and be distilled off, no?
Other option is a solvent extraction. A simple reflux in MeOH and distilling off the methanol is attractive, but for the toxicity of MeOH, residual methanol in the oil would be damn dangerous to the user.
So...what do you guys suggest? on hand are methanol (and lots of it, 15-20 liters or so), ethyl acetate, acetone, THF, dichlor, and toluene. Chloroform could also be made via the haloform rxn, although I don't have very much acetone on hand at the moment, I'm running low. Or distillation a better idea? the intent is to pull the essential oil out of the plant material, and also, extract the things that aren't typically (to my best knowledge) in the essential oil, such as the GABA-transaminase inhibitor rosmarinic acid, and the other strongly active compounds in there.
Think I will do the same with some catnip, just for fun and practise. Essential oil of catnip sounds really nice, never, ever, ever seen it sold anywhere, but there is no reason whatsoever not to do it, or that it couldn't be done in the exact same manner as say, lavender oil is prepared, or rose otto.