viola bath soak

These fetching flowers offer not only the most cheerful blooms, but one waft of its intoxicating scent, and you’ll be hooked on having these lovelies in your garden. One of my favorite parts of growing them, is that the more you harvest the blooms, the more flowers the plant will product. So, if you continually keep your violas deadheaded, they’ll bloom non-stop spring through frost. 

And it gets even better, because now you’ll have enough flowers to treat yourself with this nourishing soak.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup Epsom or sea salt

• 1/4 cup violas, fresh or dried (if use dried, use slightly less than 1/4 cup)

• 2T course sea salt

• 1T pink Himalayan salt 

• 6 drops essential oil (if desired, soak is just as lovely without)

Place Epsom salt and flowers in coffee grinder or food processor. 

Grind until the flowers are shredded throughout and mixture takes on a light lavender hue. 

Spread the salt in a thin layer on cookie sheet and place somewhere where it can sit undisturbed for 1-2 days. 

After 2 days, mix the viola salt with the remaining ingredients.

*To help evenly distribute the essential oil throughout the mixture, I sometimes first add the droplets to a small bit of baking soda and throughly incorporate. Then add that mixture into the rest of the ingredients.

**I like adding a few whole dried violas to the final mix before bottling for a little extra eye candy.

Place in a clean glass jar. Store in a cool, dry spot for six months. 

To use: Fill your tub with warm water, when the tub is half full, add in the salts. For easier bathtub cleaning, you can always bag up the salt in a tea bag, cheesecloth or muslin and place the bag in the tub at the same soaking point.