You’ll have ongoing access to all the videos and online written materials indefinitely. By joining our learning community, you’ll not only have access to an amazing educational experience, but you’ll also be gaining access to a trusted source of herbal information to revisit year after year. It’s like a perpetual library card to a whole world of herbal knowledge. As a bonus, you’ll also have access to all the fresh material that we’ll be adding to the course over the years. Please note that after your 13-month enrollment, instructors will no longer be available for questions or guidance, but the connections you foster with other herbal enthusiasts will help support you through a lifetime of herbal learning.

Upon completing the course you will be able to:

• Identify, harvest, and prepare wild food + medicine from twenty-one of the most abundant and nourishing “weeds” on earth

• Teach your children the joys of foraging and preparing their own herbal remedies, laying the foundation for self-care and knowledge of the natural world

• Create your own medicine chest filled with high-quality botanical remedies made from wild medicinals

• Use tonic herbs to promote long-term health and help prevent illness

• Address common health complaints with your own high-quality teas, tinctures, syrups, and other homemade remedies

• Practice the ancestral skills of seasonal foraging and medicine making

• Put your new plant identification skills to use by learning about the other edible and medicinal wild plants growing in your neighborhood

• Gather common wild foods and prepare them into delectable + nutritious meals

• Share the abundant herbal harvest with your family, friends, and neighbors

• Create value-added medicinal and culinary products from wild herbs

• Put your new plant identification skills to use by learning about the other edible and medicinal wild plants growing in your neighborhood

• Connect with plants, the earth, and the cycles of life on a deeper level

• Integrate wild foods and herbs into your home garden

We donate need-based scholarships annually in partnership with several nonprofit organizations and through our own scholarship program (see our partnerships page). Scholarships are not currently available for the Foraging Course, only for the Herbal Medicine Making Course and the Herbal Immersion Program. However, all of the content in the Foraging Course is included in the Herbal Immersion Program.

Juliet Blankespoor is the green mastermind behind the program, and is the primary instructor and choreographer. She has been growing medicinal herbs and foraging for wild medicinals and edibles for close to three decades. Juliet has been involved with many aspects of herbal medicine, including owning an herb nursery and tincture business and directing an herbal school. Her extensive knowledge of wildcrafting, plant propagation, and cultivation comes from years of growing and harvesting medicinals for her tincture business and nursery and gardening with herbs in many different climates.

Other core instructors include Meghan Gemma, Lorna Mauney-Brodek, and Asia Suler. Read their full bios.

Most of the herbs featured in the course grow in urban areas, and we’ll cover how to forage safely in public spaces.

Most experienced wildcrafters and herbalists will benefit from our course, as we offer detailed instruction and information on the plants. Some of the material will be review, but we believe that most people will gain valuable insights, especially in the area of botany and plant identification. If you’re an experienced forager but are newer to medicinals, you’ll be sure to see the plants we cover in a new light. Look over the curriculum and list of plants covered to help you decide if the program is right for you. To get a sense of the level of instruction, watch the sample video on dandelion and read its accompanying lesson. Finally, we do offer a guarantee. We want our students to be completely satisfied with their learning!

Yes! As long as you have fifteen of the plants we cover growing in your area (see our Botanical Starlets page) and have a solid command of the English language, you’re welcome to take the course. About 10% of our students reside outside the United States. We provide metric conversions for all recipe measurements. Please note that businesses who have offered perks to our students may not be able to extend those offers to international students.

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, you have an extra year to earn your certificate, since the modules are arranged by season.

There are many ways you can approach the program. If you’re enrolling purely for your personal needs and aren’t working toward a certificate, you can take all the time in the world. You can binge watch on the weekends or slowly sip it in on Tuesday nights. That said, please know that you’ll only have access to us for questions and guidance for 13 months. And the plants that you’ll be studying have their own schedules! We’ve arranged the course lessons so that you’ll be learning about each new plant when it’s actively growing and you can locate it in the wild.

If you’re working toward the certificate, you have a time frame of 13 months to complete the program. There are several reasons you may want to aim for a certificate. The dangling carrot can help you keep your eyes on the prize, so to speak. Motivation is even more important with distance learning, where it’s easy enough to fall off the wagon. Gaining a certificate can also give a strong feeling of personal satisfaction—a milestone after hard work and dedication. Finally, the certificate may help serve your career goals.

Another benefit of completing the course in your 13-month window is that you have the advantage of being able to ask us questions and get our feedback on your assignments. This will really help you hone in on your plant identification, foraging, and medicine making skills, and you’ll become a more confident herbalist knowing that you have our support and guidance!

The bottom line is that we want the program to work for you and your life, however that looks. Each of you will have a different approach, tailored to your needs. Some of you will move through the materials quicker, while some of you will gain the same benefit but spread your learning out over a longer time period. But remember, however you engage with the program, you’ll get out as much as you put in!

This is a 375-hour program with 7 modules, each of which contains approximately 2-5 hours of video instruction and 4 to 7 written lessons. You’ll want to plan time for watching the instructional videos, reading assignments, studying for quizzes, and completing worksheets and experiential projects. Each module will take about 30 to 50 hours of your time, depending on its scope, your pace, and depth of work. To earn a certificate for this program in the allotted timeframe, you’ll want to budget about 8-12 hours a week. If you need to take a break from the course for more than a few weeks at a time from February through July, it’s likely that you won’t be able to complete some of your time-sensitive assignments, as some of our featured plants might be dormant.

If you want to earn a certificate within the allotted 13 months, we suggest starting on the coursework right away when the course opens. Many of the assignments need to be completed when the featured plant is ready for harvesting, so you’ll need to steadily move through the course each month. You’ll receive an email from us to introduce you to each module and help keep you motivated and on track.

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, you have an extra year to earn your certificate, since the modules are arranged by season.

After the course closes, you’ll have ongoing access to all the materials, but our team of herbal moderators won’t be available, and it will no longer be possible to gain a certificate. Ultimately, we created this deadline because we believe it will help motivate you to finish the program.

Yes! The material in the Foraging Course is included in the Herbal Immersion Program. If you enroll in the Foraging Course and decide you want to dive in deeper, you can deduct the tuition from the Herbal Immersion. (All of the tuition for the Foraging Course will be applied toward the tuition of the Herbal Immersion.) The Immersion is a longer, more in-depth program that focuses on growing medicinal herbs and their therapeutic uses. See the details here.

You can earn a certificate for both programs, and you'll have a full two and half years to earn an Herbal Immersion certificate in addition to the nine and half months allotted for the Foraging Course.

After satisfactorily completing all the assignments and quizzes, and submitting your experiential projects for review, you’ll receive a beautiful certificate of completion by email. All coursework must be submitted within 13 months, and you must be paid in full before receiving a certificate. The certificate will state that you completed 375 hours of coursework and list the subjects covered. (You can find the subjects and the breakdown of hours in the course outline.)

Currently, there is no certifying or licensing agency in the United States for herbalists, so there is no such thing as a certified or licensed herbalist, despite what some schools advertise. However, many people find that a certificate represents the hours and dedication poured into one’s herbal studies. Additionally, a certificate offers a sense of pride for completing the program. In any case, you will learn valuable skills that we believe are essential for foraging and wildcrafting, and the foundation for many plant-based herbal livelihoods. We want to be clear that we are not an accredited university or vocational school. We are a school of traditional herbal medicine. Read more on the truth about herbal certification.

No, this course doesn’t fully train you in all the necessary subjects to begin a practice, such as anatomy and physiology, pathophysiology, constitutional assessment, and drug/herb contraindications. If you’re interested in becoming a clinical herbalist, our Herbal Immersion Program can serve as the first step on this career path, followed by a clinical program.

We’re excited to get to know you! Our staff reviews your assignments and gives you personalized feedback and suggestions for each assignment. We also moderate the student forum, which is currently held on Facebook, and we take part in the lively discussions happening there.

If you have questions for us, we’re happy to help. In most cases, your questions will be answered by one of our staff within 24 hours, Monday through Friday. We can answer any questions directly related to course content via written communication through our website. Please note that we can’t answer general herbal questions not connected to the course content or questions about your personal health.

You’ll be able to ask us questions during the 13 months that the course runs. After this time, you’ll still be able to connect with other students via our student forum for alumni. Since you still have access to the course after your enrollment expires, you’ll have continued access to our growing bank of common Q&As. (Our herbal team isn’t available by phone, except to provide assistance with technical issues or problems related to accessing the course.)

You’ll have the option to be part of a private student forum where you can share triumphs, troubleshooting, and inspirations with a lively community of herbal enthusiasts. Currently, this forum is held on Facebook. Our staff moderates this forum and takes part in the discussions.

You can also interact with other students and our staff by leaving comments at the end of each lesson. Other students will be able to see your comments and respond. This is a good way to connect with students if you’re not interested in joining Facebook.

We have worked hard to offer this program at an affordable price and ask that you respect all the time, effort, and trust put into its creation by keeping your login information to yourself. When you sign up for this course, you enter a pact of community trust along with every one of the students and teachers. It is, of course, always okay to share your own insights and inspirations with friends and family, but building a healing community begins with respectfully supporting one another in our livelihoods. So we thank you in advance for helping us build a stronger, more trusting community by keeping your login information to yourself.

However, we do encourage sharing your course materials with your children ages 13 and up. We want to nurture the next generation of plant lovers and gardeners. This is a great program for homeschooling families with older children and teenagers interested in plants. If you wish to share the course with your children, be sure to watch our sample videos and lesson plans to gauge the level of instruction before enrolling. Please contact the school for more details if you wish to use this program for your homeschooling curriculum.

When you enroll, you’ll receive a list of foraging and medicine making supplies. The only two supplies you absolutely need are a hand lens and at least one good field guide for your region (the more the better when it comes to plant identification!). We’ll send you guidelines to help you choose the right ones.

The rest of the supplies list includes items you may already own or can improvise with what you have on hand, such as assorted mason jars, an electronic scale, stainless steel funnels and labels, pruners, shovels, garden gloves, and so on. How much you spend on ingredients and materials will differ, depending on how prolific you are with the recipes and what tools and ingredients you already own. We estimate you might spend anywhere from $100 to $300 depending on these factors. As our student, you’ll receive several discounts to various herbal suppliers.

Hands down, the biggest difference is our plant-centered approach and emphasis on sustainable wildcrafting and homemade medicines. We practice and teach a combination of bioregional and DIY herbal medicine. In addition, we provide a wealth of detailed, hands-on video instruction that is not found in other programs. Our manual is a hefty 550+ pages, full of close-up photos and detailed plant profiles. Our staff is available to answer your course-related questions within 24 hours, Monday through Friday, and we review your assignments and give you feedback on each one. We also take part in the lively discussions happening in our student forum.

Yes, all of our course videos are closed captioned. We believe in making our content accessible to everyone, so we've ensured that all videos come with accurate and synchronized captions. If you encounter any issues with the captions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact our support team.

The primary mission of the school is to educate about holistic healing, which includes discussing socioeconomic factors that affect health, safety, and freedom. A healer cannot truly practice holistic herbalism without understanding and addressing the stress, violence, and discrimination that marginalized people face on a daily level. If a person isn’t safe–or faces discrimination that affects their access to basic necessities and optimal health care–because of their race, religion, age, ability, sexual orientation, or gender identity, then their health is affected. It’s that simple.

The discrimination that affects human rights is a universal concern–transcending political affiliation. We believe these topics are central to any productive conversation regarding holistic herbalism (which takes into account how societal influences affect health, safety, basic human rights, and well-being).

Click here to read the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Anti-Racism Statement.