On grey days, and Ireland has plenty of them, Karen Stewart used to walk into her polytunnel and find it full of orange. The calendula had seeded itself among the vegetables, the way it does, with a new flower already coming up as the old one dies back. By then there was hardly room for the vegetables at all.

Chris, her husband, thought some of them would have to come out. Karen wasn’t so sure. She had a memory from years before, from a kindergarten run by a group of like minded parents, of a calendula ointment that went on a plaster whenever one of the children got hurt. She started wondering if she could make her own.

That is roughly where Karuna Essentials began. Karen grows calendula at home in Cloonloo, on the Sligo side of Boyle, and turns the petal heads into balms, oils, creams and shampoo bars, all of it done on site. She sat down with Carlo in November 2023, not long after taking the business to the Ploughing for the first time.

“You go into a polytunnel and you see bright orange sunshine flowers, like it does something to me.”

“Originally a Donegal girl”

Karen is from Donegal, though she has lived in Sligo longer than she ever lived there. She and Chris were renting in Ransboro, near Strandhill, and both loved growing their own food organically. The landlord didn’t share their enthusiasm for digging up his ground, so they started looking to buy.

They looked around Ballymote, Cloonloo and further afield, and at one point drove the roads looking for a house an auctioneer had failed to turn up and show them. Eventually they gave up. Four or six weeks later Karen bought the Sligo Champion in the shop in Ransboro, which she says she never normally did, opened the property pages, and there was the same house with 40,000 off the price. Their son went to see it the next day and Karen went the day after. They knew straight away. That was 2003.

“One foot in the nursing and one foot in holistic health”

A few months after landing, Karen started nursing with the Brothers of Charity in Abbeytown, in intellectual disability. She calls herself more of a natural person than a medical model person. She had qualified in massage therapy while living in London in the late eighties and early nineties, ran a practice in Sligo and worked in spas on cruise ships.

In September 2004 she and Chris opened a holistic health centre on Main Street in Boyle, next to Sloan’s, where there is now a herbal clinic. It ran for five years. When the crash came in 2008 they held on for about another year before the clients thinned out.

In 2006, still nursing and still running the massage practice, she started a three year course in child and adolescent psychotherapy. She says it came naturally. Even as a teenager in Donegal, young people going through a hard time seemed to end up at her family’s door. She now runs a busy therapy practice, supervises therapists and teaches. For years, she says, the children and parents who needed support came first, and the balm was the thing she would get to if she ever had time.

“I couldn’t draw to save my life”

The calendula idea came out of a creative block. Karen grew up sure she wasn’t creative, because she couldn’t draw. During the psychotherapy training she worked through a lot of that, and she was reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which asks you to write three pages of stream of consciousness every morning. The idea for a calendula balm turned up in those morning pages. She calls it divinely inspired, and admits that might sound like a cliche.

Her first batch was nine small 30ml pots, brought down to a car boot sale by the church in Cloonloo. She sold a lot of them. Some of the women there asked her and Chris to give talks at a health event, so she made another batch for that. Back then it was called Essential Calendula Balm, because she felt it belonged in every first aid box.

Then she got brave and rang a health food shop in Westport, deliberately somewhere away from home. The woman on the phone ordered twelve small and twelve large. Karen thinks that was around 2014 or 2015, and the shop still stocks her. She places the timing by her mother, who died in December 2015. By then the balm was already on the shelf in Westport.

“Seed to jar”

Calendula is the pot marigold, closer to a daisy to look at than the French marigolds in summer bedding. Karen uses the petal heads, and talks about the flavonoids and carotenoids in them and calendula’s old reputation for cuts and grazes.

Everything happens in Cloonloo. Karen and Chris grow the flowers with no pesticides or insecticides, feed the soil with their own compost and manure, and brought in new soil in 2023 for more calendula beds. The flowers are handpicked and dried, which means being glad of every sunny day, then left to macerate in grapeseed oil for several weeks. That calendula oil goes into everything else she makes.

She still can’t say how many flowers go into one jar, though she has tried to work it out. Every product has a cosmetic safety data report. At the time nobody in Ireland was doing them, so she used a UK firm. The labels have all gone on by hand, and Chris’s view is that the first big expense should be a labelling machine.

“If it’s safe enough for a baby”

The range she described runs to the original calendula balm, her biggest seller; a baby balm on the same formulation; calendula oil; a face cream; a hot cloth cleansing balm made with castor oil, cocoa butter and calendula oil; shampoo bars; lip balms; and a body oil and a perfume named for Bali. She says the balm has natural SPF, and is clear that she isn’t telling anyone to give up their sun cream.

Karen likes a lather, and admits that’s a sensory thing rather than proof of anything getting cleaner, so she found surfactants for her shampoo bars that still foam. The white bar is for normal and dry hair, with coconut flour, coconut milk powder and coconut oil. The green bar, her favourite, is for oily hair and dandruff, with lemon juice, sea salt, green clay and nettle powder.

People find their own uses. She marketed the balm to cyclists as a chamois cream and got a WhatsApp from a man in Dublin whose daughter had taken his sample and wanted a pot of her own. Market customers often tell her how sensitive their skin is.

“If it’s safe enough for a baby’s delicate skin, it’s safe enough for you.”

“That’s too big. That’s too mad.”

For years Karen talked herself out of exhibiting at the National Ploughing Championships. Chris pushed. Something smaller felt more fitting. In 2023 she went for the big one. She had never been, even as a visitor, and doesn’t come from a farming background. All she knew was that about 200,000 people had come through over three days the year before, and she had no idea how much stock that meant. So the summer went on harvesting flowers, making oil and building stock.

She applied to Local Enterprise Office Sligo for the county’s single place in the enterprise village, which would have covered part of the cost. She didn’t get it, went anyway and paid for the stand herself. The point, she says, is that she filled in the form at all. A few years earlier the paperwork alone would have stopped her.

The team was Karen, Chris, their son and a friend from Co. Clare. They talked to people from eight until half six, three days running, and by the third day the words wouldn’t come.

There was talk that year of the Ploughing going cashless. Karen explains that it was the gate tickets, with visitors pushed to book online in advance, and says a lot of farmers who decide on the morning whether the weather suits weren’t happy. She mentions a rumour that cash payers were being charged 5 euro extra at the gate, and says plainly she doesn’t know whether it was true. At her stall plenty of people still paid cash, and she was glad of it. She is very much for keeping cash alive.

“I’m not allowing the obstacles to hook me anymore.”

“Three problems and one week gone”

Customer feedback is what keeps Karen going. One woman first bought from her at Strandhill market in 2015. She is 80, buys the face cream three pots at a time, and recently emailed about the body oil to say a cat scratch, itchy earlobes from new earrings and a dry patch on her elbows had all cleared within a week. Karen never asks for these. At an event in Athy, Co. Kildare, a mother bought the cleansing balm for her teenage son, who had bad acne, and later left a Google review saying his skin had improved within days. A customer in Sligo, getting her face cream delivered by hand, called it heaven in a jar.

Karen is careful about all this. Natural products aren’t allowed to make big claims, she says, even with the published research on calendula. When she spoke to Carlo she was arranging for an Irish laboratory to test her calendula balm and oil, for things like antioxidant potential, so she could say more about her own products. She also doesn’t take the credit.

“I don’t take claim for mother nature. I’m just the conduit.”

“I did something every day”

Karen calls herself a slow burner. For years Karuna Essentials ticked along with a few stockists and repeat customers, last on the list. Coming into 2023 she made a deliberate decision to flip that. It started with getting her website done properly the previous November, and getting over a real reluctance about social media and advertising on Facebook. But she once took three months to send a friend 100 words for a Facebook page, and now the woman who helps her with reels gets what she needs that evening or the next day.

Her advice to anyone starting a small business is plain. Take one step every day, whether that’s ringing a shop or ordering twelve more jars. Don’t fixate on the end when you’re at the start. And don’t be your own worst critic: after an interview on Ocean FM she went straight to everything she hadn’t said, and none of what she did well. Find your strengths, she says, and when the “I’m not good enough” chatter starts, be curious about it and then stop it.

“Some people need to be at a zed. But you have to go to b and c and d and e before you get to a zed.”

“Nature meeting nurture”

At the end Karen asked to talk about the name. The holistic health centre on Main Street was called Karuna, and they kept it. It’s the Sanskrit word for compassion. Put it together with the “essential” from that first balm and you have Karuna Essentials. She hopes people who try the products take it as an invitation to look after themselves.

“It’s about nature meeting nurture.”

That November she was heading into the Christmas markets, including the King House Craft Fair in Boyle, and locally her products were in the Boyle Craft Shop. She signed off by thanking Carlo for having a blow in like her.

Product uses and results described in this episode are Karen’s own experience and her customers’ accounts.