Making Laundry Soap - The "Pictoral"

What you'll need for a double-batch.  Why yes, that IS my cheese grater...I used it to do this:

 Grated soap makes me happy.  It's fluffy and smells nice.

 Add 1 cup of washing soda

 

We are a high dirt/grease/motor oil/food stain family; I use heaping cups of the scrubber ingredients.

1 cup of Borax

 Heaping.  I almost always spill - powders get me every time.

 

It's going to look very full, just pop the lid on and shake it like crazy.

Tada!  

Use one tablespoon per load, two for heavy loads.  

Something about this (pretty sure it's the borax) makes my clothes very soft, I no longer use softener.  If you'd like it to smell pretty, just add a couple drops of your favorite essential oil and shake the snot out of it so it gets through to everything.

Plan & Design

Seed catalogs are quite possibly the most stimulating and ultimately depressing thing we get in the mail.  For me anyways, for Rick it's a tool catalog or maybe a bull semen catalog (he fantasizes about having Charlois cattle).  I simultaneously think almost everything would be fun to grow, then "where would we put it all, could I start that many seeds, *bah* it only grows in Arizona?!  Well those are some big, beautiful, will-get-shredded-by-summer-hail leaves after all."  This is usually followed by a frown and a recalculation of some sort. 
My mom is a landscape architect and also a horticulture major.  Yep, eight years of plants under the lady's belt.  Most of my life I took our beautiful, fun, simple gardens for granted.  I now realize that having plants, flowers, vegetables, and fruit is the exception - not the rule.  I learned to plant for textures and colors and smells.  I've loved that there was always something with fuzzy leaves to touch, for tiny hands to explore.  Planting a garden for people - not just children - to enjoy and really experience is my ultimate goal.
Now, I understand that not everyone will understand this "experience" theory.  A garden that is strictly roses, or one of only trimmed hedges and lawn with maybe a few pansies sprinkled in, isn't super-interesting.  When you have edible plants scattered throughout your beds, very short and very tall things, different scents, hidden bowls of water or leaves that catch moisture, leaves of all shapes and sizes and textures...these are the things that make me excited about working and visiting a garden.  As a child these spaces can be ones of imagination gone wild, spaces that encourage them to live outside as much as possible - not to run in to watch TV.
There are very few pleasures that rank as highly as casually picking something ripe and eating it,  incarnate liquid sunshine, whole and dribbling.  It's right up there with eating home-raised meat, eggs, and milk. 
And this, my friends, is the end of nap-time and therefore blogging time...to be continued!

Homemade Laundry Soap & A Calf Lost

Our Carrara heifer has lost her calf.  Big bummer.  A couple months ago she spotted, but didn't miscarry.  Her belly continued to swell, but has smooth, straight sides now. 

Our cows live with a herd (not ours), so we do not know exactly when or what happened.  This is one of those times I'd really like to have them out our door so that they could be micro-managed.  But, she may have just needed more time to grow, and now she has it!  The scary bit is that he thinks that Ruby may have lost her calf also.  This would really make us assess our current management, and really be a downer because we love a baby and the milk we sneak.  It would mean no cheese, butter, milk... *wahhh*

Ever onwards.

Today's very exciting news: I made laundry detergent!

Really!

No, it's easy.  Shopping for the ingredients is much more time consuming than making it.
Here's what you use:

1 bar soap (unscented, dye-free) like Ivory, grated
1/2 c Borax (available at most grocery stores)
1/2 c Washing soda (purchased at my Ace Hardware store)
Optional: Couple drops of essential oil if you've got it

Mix it.  Use it.
1 tbsp for normal loads
2 tbsp for filthy loads (ooooooh do we have these!!)

Here's the thing, this stuff works way better on my husbands nasty, oily, grimy, greasy, dirty pants than the products from the store.  I feel like I need to say it twice; way better!  Please give it a try, you'll be doing loads of laundry for pennies and they'll be just as clean - or cleaner - than before.  PLUS, my clothes are softer now, the Borax helps with softening the water.  I am still using a tablespoon of fabric softener, but only because I don't have any essential oils at this point.  Also, I like to use what I've got rather than throw it away.

My hair is still liking the "shampoo-free" method, but is now very much in the midst of the "adjustment period," which will last anywhere from three weeks to three months.  Have to get all my natural oil production balanced out, then the hair oiled naturally.  It's probably going to take a while.  I've got a lot of hair, and luckily, a few braiding skills. 

It feels very, very good to make these little things myself.  Knowing I'm saving a bit of money helps, and knowing that it is better for my family is wonderful.  My favorite part though, is that it was made here, in our home, by me!  No adding it to the shopping list!

Seeds! Our first "seed-saving" of sorts.

It is late January, and I am now pulling/cutting all of the dead stuff out of our planting beds. 
Just now.  
No no, it's totally normal for us to do things like this waaaay later than "normal." 
Anyways, the kids and I were excited to find:
- blue sidewalk chalk (immediately sampled by Cole - bleh!)
- mud!
- MORE chard making a break for it through ice (picture soon, this amazes me)
- seeds in some dead growth
- sawdust is hilarious on a small dog when you're little, humurous as a "grown-up"
- a short, fat piece of firewood is perfect for a tiny, 1 yr old butt to sit on
- I am the wood-splitting queen now that I have my own sharp axe!Ok, but really, the fun thing about this is the seeds.  Last fall we gathered some seeds (Bulls Blood Beets and white onion of some sort that we love) and were thrilled with the sheer number of them from so few plants.  The seeds we found today though - which number well over a thousand (TINY seeds) - are Snap Dragon seeds.  I'm fairly sure that I've never mentioned how much we love a Snap Dragon.  They make our children go "rrrrooooooowwwwrRR!!!"  Their tiny, fat little fingers are almost always gentle as they make the blossoms gape, exposing thier furry tongues.  These seeds are from the 18"-24" and I have an inkling that they will either be magenta or "terra cotta" - my all-time favorites.  Simple joys.  I know that their mama plants will come up again this spring (plants are incredible, if I had to live outside all winter here, I would not be coming up in the spring), but am excited by the idea of their tall stems, loaded with blossoms, all over the yard.  May be the "Year of the Snap Dragon" around here.  It may also be the summer I need glasses from trying to plant itty-bitty seeds en masse.A word about the onion seeds:  some people have a heck of a time getting onions pollinated and producing seeds in a commercial setting.  We have had the exact opposite experience.  It seems as though our house has become an oasis for those helpful bugs that do these things for us; all it took was lots of flowers and a water source for everybody.  No sprays or chemicals of any sort either, which I'm convinced they appreciate. This is our first year saving seeds (obviously not into it yet!) and - so far - it's been great.  Should they not produce plants, I'll probably grumble a bit and keep at it until it works out for us!Much Love,
EP.S.  I'm having a hard time getting this formatted right - please bear with me.

Going "Poo Free"

About a year ago, I read a blog (http://simplemom.net/how-to-clean-your-hair-without-shampoo/) about going "shampoo-free."  Met this one with some skeptiscism, but logged it in the ol' mental file. 

This last month I've been using one of Pantene Pro-V's "Natural" shampoo/conditioners and it's making me lose a ton of hair (thank God I had a ton to start with).  Not a good thing.  So before I go spend $40 for quality shampoo and conditioner, I'm trying this. 

For in-depth how-to of this, please go to the link above, but basically:
To "wash" you only need 1c water and 1 tbsp baking soda.  How's that for cost-efficient?!
To "condition" you use 1c water and 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar.

That is all!

Last night was my first round, and not only was it really easy, but my hair is much more like...well, hair today.  It doesn't have that weird synthetic feel that it usually has.  It is still smooth, but not unnaturally so.  This cleansing method also makes it feel much cleaner than an actual detergent does (read: shampoo).  My hair doesn't feel oily today, and though the feel of the vinegar rinse on the ends is different than I'm used to, it did the trick!

Here Again & Another Cow

Hello all!  I have obviously been long-absent, and I apologize.  Life has been wild these last 5 months. 

Where to start...?

How about cows?

We have a new bred heifer, bought from the Cantagree Dairy (LOVE this name) in Mendon, UT in early September.  She is another native-bred Milking Shorthorn, and while Ruby is on the beefier side of that breeding, Carrara (fancy name she came with huh?) is on the dairy side.  Meaning she has no butt and is narrow.  She could slip through a chute gate just about and she'll be two in March.  This makes a "herd total" of three head:  Ruby (3 this year), Carrara, and Opal (1 this year).  I will be milking both the older girls this spring/summer, and halter-breaking Opal.  Opal may even get entered in the fair this year if she continues to grow and look like she does - and halter-breaks without serious injury on my part.  Kidding.  Kind of.  Between haltering her and training Carrara to milk (and reminding Ruby she IS a milk cow) I'm betting that I carry some beautiful bruises this season.  At least they'll offer conversation-starters while tubing on the river...I guess, that's the biggest "plus" I can come up with.

Oh!  There is chard & spinach coming up from last years plants on the north side of the house (in a snug 4' space between our house and our fence on that side).  I did not know that they did this...and am wondering if they didn't just go dormant under all that snow we got.  Whatever the reason, it is really exciting to see green - edible green - coming up.  I am actually excited to eat the stuff simply because it's fresh; mark the date, four months from now I will hardly touch it.  Chard is that far down the list of things I'll willingly eat.  Unless there's gravy.

More to come - but cannot remember for the life of me what else I was going to write.  The gravy thing made me go blank.

I love gravy.

First Rabbit Butchered, First Farmer's Market & Catch-Up Blog

I am not sure what sort of wildness is in the air but life has been insane lately.  We're just going with it, but I'm hoping that winter brings a bit of calm to our life. 

We are moving into canning/harvest season, and I'm so excited to put up new things like Rhubarb Orange Jam, Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Filling and Fennel Relish.  Those are just what I've decided on doing today.  We'll can some pickled beets too because they're a favorite! 

We did our first Farmer's Market the 31st of July and were really successful.  The funniest part of selling was that catnip (which I took on a whim) was our bestseller.  Catnip.  I had to laugh.  Since we are overflowing with rhubarb, I also took some rhubarb cobbler kits and sold two of the three.  I was pretty excited about them because they were our first "value-added" product and they sold!  It was good to talk to people about what our goals are, where we are now and whats in the works for this coming season - I can now talk about these things much more smoothly than before.  My friend Christina sold her beautiful bags and other hand-sewn products across the way from us, and we met several other vendors (of course) so it was interesting to see what was available.  I am not certain we will be doing a booth there more this summer - though I certainly enjoyed it - simply because of the time requirement and because I cannot take the kids down at this point.  Richard took them home this time, but had to take the day off to do so, and as far as economics goes, it makes much more sense to have him work than sell produce for half the income.  Once this kids are bigger this won't be a consideration, but until then, unless we have more high-dollar items to sell, we're undecided on how much we'll be going down.  I am a bit disappointed by this but ultimately enjoy selling from home much more.

Last night I butchered one of our two young bucks.  Initially used the "broomstick" method for killing them, but didn't do it correctly so ended up taking thirty seconds (forever! i don't really know how long) to kill a rabbit that should have taken five.  Not the best deal.  I felt horrible that it wasn't as quick as it should have been, but learned and will be better with the next one.  Killing something with your hands is much different than shooting it.  More intimate, which made me more thankful because I felt the life leave.  Earlier this week I cooked a Foster Farms chicken, and was disgusted by the unhealthy smell of it - so much so that I almost threw it away.  Processing the rabbit I was struck by how clean and healthy the meat looked and smelled, and  it made me happy that we are providing that quality for our family.  If we all had an intimate knowledge of the animals that we ate, I'm certain there would be much lower consumption nationally.  We're going to fry it tonight, so I will post on the quality/taste etc then.  We will be butchering the second buck this week sometime between Tuesday and Thursday, hopefully it goes much much quicker!!