Essential Oils, Tests at Sunrise, Superfoods for Animals.

It seems like only yesterday that I was writing the April newsletter and now it’s June. Time always seems to go faster at this time of year. Here at Indigo Herbs we’re working morning noon and night (literally) as we are simultaneosly introducing a whole new range of products (essential oils…more below) and getting ready to take Indigo Herbs to our local festivals (more below) and of course continuing to send out all the herbs and superfoods that you have been ordering. Also in this newsletter, your monthly discount code and a short story about how Indigo Herbs spirulina is helping to save an endangered species of frog. Enjoy.

Indigo Herbs Essential Oils

After many months of hard work sourcing the finest quality and best value essential oils and carrier oils, we are now proud to announce the launch of our Aromatherapy range. 6 carrier oils and 16 essential oils are included in our range so far. And it doesn’t stop there. Our in-house therapist Claire has developed 13 different blends which will form the basis of our Indigo Botanicals aromatherapy collection. Due to be launched soon, they will be available as both 10ml essential oils and 100ml massage oils.

Sunrise Festival – New Snack Bars

Well we’ve packed up absolutely loads of Indigo Herbs products for our stalls at The Sunrise Celebration Festival and Glastonbury Festival of the Performing Arts. Including three new snack bars, ready for testing. Yes, that’s right … we have three new raw superfood snack bars ready to test out on this year’s merry festival goers, and if they are a hit, we will make them available on our website too. Two of the bars are clasically chocolately. One, the “Coco-Choc” is packed with coconut chips and the other, the “Big Bar” is deliciously flavoured with lucuma. And we have also developed the “Green Bar”. A delicious snack bar made with Wheatgrass and Spirulina as well as oats, seeds, superfood berries and Cacao Butter. It is almost alarmingly green but don’t let that put you off. It is very moor-ish. And if you are going to Glastonbury festival, print out this newsletter and bring it to our stall (top of the healing field) and we will let you try one of the new bars for free!

Superfoods for animals – Saving the Agile From in Jersey

We often receive calls from animal carers who want to bestow the benefits of herbs and superfoods on their animals. From aphrodisiacs for homing pigeons (to improve breeding success) to calminatives for horses (so they are less nervous at competitions) and a few others in between. We recently supplied one of our best selling superfoods – Spirulina – to the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust who have an endangered species breeding center in Jersey. They were ordering it to feed to tadpoles of the Agile Frog and have kindly sent us some information of exactly what they are up to… “The agile frog (Rana dalmatina) is highly endangered within the British Isles and was, until two years ago, only found in a single location on the southwest coast of Jersey. The States of Jersey, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Amphibian and Reptile Group has, for a number of years, led a restoration programme for the species. Within this project, Durrell set out to see if spawn from the single remaining pond was collected and raised in captivity, whether metamorphosed tadpoles could be released (called head-starting) and have a higher chance of surviving to maturity. Durrell has led this head-starting programme for almost a decade now and it has expanded to such a degree that for the last three years the Trust has maintained a dedicated agile frog head-starting facility within the wildlife park that is able to raise 4,000-6,000 tadpoles per year. The success of this programme has meant that tadpoles have been introduced into additional wetlands along the Jersey coast and the species has a more stable future. However as the threats to the frog remain, this programme will have to continue for some time to come. While in the past the main food item for the tadpoles was standard fish flakes, this year we are undertaking a nutrition study with a subgroup of our tadpoles, looking into growth effects of different feeds. A large part of one of the feeds is Spirulina algae and we are very grateful for your assistance.” Many thanks to Dennis Moseley – Head of Operations and Matthias Goetz – Deputy Head of Herpetology at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. To find out more, visit http://www.durrell.org/Animals/Amphibians/Agile-frog/

Monthly Discount Code

Here is this month’s monthy discount code. Don’t forget to add it to the discount code field during the online checkout process or mention it when ordering on the phone.