About

I’m Thea Lindqvist. Naturally Well Today is a working record of what I make at home, what I grow on a windowsill, and how often it does not come out the way the instructions promised.

It started as a notebook. I had a small kitchen, a shelf of jars that had got out of hand, and a habit of trying things I had read about without writing down what happened. So the second batch of anything was always a guess. The notebook fixed that, and after a couple of years of it I had enough written down that it seemed worth putting somewhere.

What is here

Herbs and the plants they come from, including how to tell two lookalikes apart. Things made from scratch: a scrub paste, a lip balm, a cleaner out of vinegar and citrus peel. Tea, which gets more attention here than it strictly needs. A pantry of about a dozen ordinary ingredients and what they will and will not do. Skin, kept deliberately simple. The seasons, because most of this work is dictated by them. Owning less. And a whole section on what the word natural does not mean, which is the part I would read first.

The line I do not cross

Nothing on this site treats, cures, prevents or diagnoses anything. I am not a herbalist, a pharmacist, a nutritionist or a doctor, and I have no training in any of them. What I write about is scent, flavour, household use and the pleasure of making a thing yourself. When a plant has a genuine interaction with a medication, I say so and I tell you to ask a pharmacist, because that is a real risk and it is not mine to reassure you about.

If something on your body has changed, is not getting better, or worries you, that is a question for a clinician and not for a jar of oats.

How I work

The rule: I make it before I write about it, and usually more than once, because the first attempt is the one that goes wrong.

The kitchen is small, north facing, and has one usable window for plants. The equipment is a set of scales, a few jars, a saucepan and a sieve. Where a method needs more than that, I say so, because there is not much point describing a process that assumes a dehydrator you do not own.

Why the failures stay in

I split a batch of lip balm three times before I worked out I was pouring it too hot. I dried a bunch of mint in a warm room and ended up with green dust that smelled of nothing. Those attempts stay in the articles rather than being tidied out of them, because knowing where a thing goes wrong is most of knowing how to do it.

What this is not

No scores, no rankings, no best of anything. No sponsored article dressed up as an ordinary note. The photographs illustrate an idea and are licensed from stock libraries; they are not documentation of my own kitchen, and I would rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise.

Write to me at hello@naturallywelltoday.org. It is one inbox and I read it myself.