Selfsufficientish.com

Quite right, valerian used to be commercially grown in the UK and was widely prescribed as a "minor sedative", until the land was turned over to food production during WWII. After the war a synthetic alternative was manufactured which was brand-named "Valium". It's still widely used as an anxiolytic, but is falling out of favour because it is addictive.

I'd have a hard time overdoing it on valerian tea because it's, and say it with me now, absolutely revolting!

Lemon balm... bath... sock. Now there's an image I didn't need in my head! (grumbles)

Lemon balm and elderflower is nice - at least fresh, I've never had it dried.

My parents used to make their own syrup from sugar beet after the war and told me how to do it - but you are right, it's an awful lot of work. Better to cut back on sugar altogether, and buy it for the few things where you can't do without, I think.

Just out of interest - what was the method? And wombat, what method did you use?

Quite simple mate, from memory..............

Grate them up and then mulch them in water with a potato masher, strain and boil to concentrate. I tried reducing the "beetyness" using activated charcoal and was spectacularly unsuccessful. The next step is to crystallise the sugar out by concentrating even more, but I did not know that then!

Nev

If there are any chemists on the forum, how could you make the solution more concentrated without having to boil it right down? It makes it horribly eco-unfriendly in a home setup... something involving a semi-permeable membrane perhaps?

Yep, I'm an ex-chemist! I could have tried lowering the air pressure with a vacuum pump to allow the water to evaporate more rapidly. As for the semi-permeable membrane, reverse osmosis is the way to go!

Nev