Building Your Home Apothecary

The 2024 BYHA cohort tending to the garden.

A 9-month introduction to herbalism and gardening

March–November 2025

Led by instructors Maebh Aguilar, Mercelyne Latortue, and Dominique Matti, this course is taught through the lens of herbalism as a tool for cultivating intimate, liberating, and communal relationships with the land and each other.

Important Dates for the 2025 Course

  • Application Deadline: January 20, 2025
  • Program Dates: March–November 2025. One in-person 6-hour Sunday class per month, 9am-3pm; one in-person two-hour Thursday evening class per month and 3-6 hours of garden or apothecary work shift time per month.
  • There are also homework assignments that add 2-3 hours of work outside class time per month.

Class session dates will be finalized in February 2025. Please make a note in your application if you are concerned about potential scheduling conflicts.

Time Commitment & Attendance Expectation

The course includes 15–20 hours of work per month:

  • class sessions on one Sunday and one Thursday per month
  • 3–6 hours of garden or apothecary work time per month
  • and 2–3 hours of homework time per month.

We ask you to take a moment now and consider your capacity to make the time commitment to Building Your Home Apothecary, as this class is a commitment of 15- 20 hours per month. Every year we have 4x as many applicants as we have spots. To that end, we have high expectations for class attendance. We ask that you miss no more than 1 Sunday and 1 Thursday evening. We understand people have circumstances beyond their control in their busy lives.

Course Activities

  • Growing Herbs: We plant and tend an apothecary garden through a full growing season. We start seeds in March, learn about tending the garden, and each student has a monthly garden work shift, harvesting herbs all season long. In the fall, we dig roots, save seeds, and put the garden to bed.
  • Using Herbs: We talk about how to use most of the herbs growing in our garden, as well as covering herbal actions beyond the range of our garden.
  • Making Medicine: Using plants from our garden, students learn simple methods for making tincture, tea, and infused oil. Most of the medicine we grow is distributed amongst the students for their home apothecaries, and some medicine will go towards community projects to be decided by the students.
  • Herbalism in Context: Small group discussions about herbalism in a community context; today, historically and future.
  • Community Building: This class is a community project. You’ll get to know your classmates through group work and shared tasks.

Tuition, Scholarships & Childcare

  • Tuition: Tuition for the 2025 8-month course is $850.
  • Scholarships: Scholarships covering either 25% or 50% of the tuition costs are available to any person of color with financial need. We do this to address the white washing of herbalism; we do this to address the stolen healing practices from people of color by white folks; we do this to address systemic inequalities that affect income.
  • Payment Plans: Payment plans are available for all students.
  • Childcare: Free childcare can be arranged if needed.

COVID-19 Safety & Physical Accessibility

In some sessions, we will be moving across Bartram’s Garden. Please let us know in your application if you have any physical limitations or anticipate needing any support.

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we will take the following precautions:

  • Masking indoors and social distancing outside.
  • If you have been exposed to COVID-19 or have symptoms, we will ask you to stay home until you test negative.
Due to the ever-changing nature of COVID-19, we may amend and update our precautions.

Meet the Instructors

Maebh Aguilar is a plant tender, photographer, farmer, artist, herbalist, writer and seed saver. They pay much attention to: the shapes that light makes, the inherent queerness of nature, migration, how ancestral foods feel in their body, colors, and the long memory of water. They are: Philadelphian (born, raised, living), Ecuadorian (first generation), and Irish (settler Irish-Philadelphian roots).

 

Hailing from Brooklyn, New York,  Mercelyne Latortue spent her childhood  in Haiti which seeded her passion for food, culture and the revolutionary spirit of the Haitian people. Since graduating from Temple University with a BS in Public Health, she threaded her passion into extensive experiences in the fields of nutrition education, culinary arts, and community partnerships. In her free time, you can find her out in her garden, reading a good book, catching up with her friends and family or working on her marinade (epis) business.

 

Dominique Matti is a writer, a mother, a medicine maker, and a gardener. Through creative practice, spirituality, tending the land and listening, she ritually strives to situate herself in the long story. Her work centers Black mysticism, ancestral inheritance, liberation and recovery.

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