New Soap & Farm Stuff

Today the farm and shop will be open for the first time as an entity independent of an event. In other words, we're open today. I wish I could share photos of what we've been up to lately, but I'm not having much luck getting them off my device and onto my pictures' file. I'm not all that tech savvy, and I'm too flippin' tired to figure it all out at the moment. The point is, the changes from earlier photos that I've shared here and now are as different as day and night. The tomatoes are knee-high, the sage is sprouting long flower cones, the chickens are laying over a dozen eggs a day, our culinary herbs are looking good, our blueberries are becoming ripe, as are the berries on the boysenberry bush, the onions have matured and have been pulled, lots of herbs are going to seed, we're making soap -- oh, the newest soap is a nod in the direction of Woodspirits' Sun and Sky soap -- a very sideways glancing type of nod. The color is 100% natural; German chamomile and homegrown calendula for the 'sun' part, and spearmint and fir balsam absolute for the 'sky' part. We were going for pale yellow and pale green. Layers were the goal, but our timing was off and instead we got swirls -- or in this case, gloops. The yellow part we scented with blood orange, petitgrain bigarade, and tagetes, and the green side we scented with fir balsam, and high altitude French lavender. We call it Sun in the Trees, I call it Alshshams fi Al'Ashjar, which is the same thing in Arabic. On the loaf that was made for the farm, we tucked little dried calendula flowers on top, on the loaf going into my Etsy shop we left plain.

Yesterday I received a BIG box of oils from my friend Bella (Kimberly Ayers). I now have a huge bottle of orange oil, another huge bottle of lemon oil, and various smaller bottles of vetyver and rose geranium. All of it is headed for the soap pot. Rose geranium soap! I haven't made a rose g. soap in a while. I also haven't made a lemon soap in ages. I remember back in the day when my cousins would ask me to make a lemon soap and I would struggle getting enough lemon oil into the soap base to make it smell like lemon. Took a few batches, but I finally figured out how to blend lemongrass into a mash-up of different citrus oils, including lemon, to make something that would actually smell lemony long after the soap cured. I'm not even going to try to make a lemon soap with that lemon oil, it's just going to be a secondary scent in a pretty soap later on.

Gotta run. The farm awaits.