Here is a pic of the plants from last year:
The great thing about salvia is that if it is dry and kept out of light it doesn't degrade.
Here's The dried leaves before grinding:
Here they are after the long painstaking task of grinding them in the coffee grinder. I can't seem to get my blender to do it very well, the leaves just sit above the blades.
This extraction will be done with 400 grams of leaf and I'll make it into 40 grams of 10x extract. Some will be donated for the midsummer raffle here:)
I've extracted salvia a few times before and found that if you take the extra steps to make your extract clean, it will be far less harsh.
I have tried just doing a straight acetone extraction and found that the extract was to so full of tannins that it was too gooey to even smoke.
The active ingredient is not soluble in water, so you can leech some of the junk out by soaking it in cool water for a few minutes.
I use cheesescloth from the grocery store and double it up, and line it in a pot.
The ground up leaf goes in the pot and close the cheesecloth around it and fill with cool distilled water. You'll need to find something to weigh it down with to keep it submerged.
Let it sit like that for 5 or 10 minutes.
Now pull it out and ring as much water out of it as you can and put the wet leaf in a large baking pan.
Here is a pic of the nastiness in the water that would have ended up in the extract if you hadn't done this step:
Now you'll need to get that wet leaf perfectly dry again before you can go on.
Heat you stove up to 185 and through the baking pan full of the wet leaf in and stir it up every hour or so.
This will take most of the day if you have a large amount.
When you are sure it is completely dry you can load your leaf in mason jars.
I fill them up half way to leave lots of room for the acetone.
This is the part when the wife send you to the garage beacause whe puts up with lots, but acetone in the house she will not put up with.
Make sure whatever brand of acetone you use is clean, I haven't found any around here that evaporates clean from the hardware stores, but I have a friend that uses reagent grade acetone at his work and hooks me up.
You can always distill the hardware store stuff yourself.
Fill the mason jars up with acetone give it a stir.
Put the lids on upside down so the seal doesn't desolve from the acetone and cover it up with something to keep light from destroying it.
This will now soak for 24 hours, I'll go out and stir it up a couple of times.
This is as far as I've got with this, I'll finish up this log as I do it.
