Peppermint soap

I picked up a couple of lovely soapwort plants from Fat Cat Farm a few years ago. The chickens ate some of the plants but I managed to keep one alive in the front. This year I ended up with my soapwort growing into the path so I decided to make liquid soap for the house. Looking around in the front I also noticed that I have more mint than I can use all winter for tea so I decided to pick some of the mint to scent my soap.

Looking around I found a couple of guidelines for using fresh soapwort leaves and stems as opposed to using the root in the winter time. In short the ratio was 2 cups of soapwort to 4 cups of water. Bring this to a boil and then simmer for 15 minutes. I simmered the soapwort and the mint together so that it could get some of the mint oils as well. I then let the soap cool completely. After this I strained the soap into my old soap bottle and added a couple of sprigs of mint for extra scent and the batch was ready to use. I used the soapwort pieces to scrub dishes until it was all gone.

The result was a lovely peppermint scented soap that I will definitely make again. Next on my list of things to try - liquid soap made from soapnuts.

Ivan is a helper

I think in this case images speak for themselves. Ivan is a helper, although sometimes you dearly wish he wasn't so into the farming lifestyle.

Vanilla - Making your own

You can find many different recipes online so I'll give you a quick note on how I made mine and some few suggestions.

How to make homemade vanilla extract:

1. Cut vanilla beans down the middle but leave a little section still connected. Use 3 beans per cup of vodka. I used a quart jar so I used 12 beans for 4 cups of vodka.


















2. Place in clean jar.

















3. Add vodka.

















4. Close and shake. Shake periodically your first day and then again whenever you think about it.

















5. You can start using your vanilla whenever it smells ready. (Mine were ready in 2 weeks)

Note: I would highly suggest you use good vodka (Grey Goose or something equally good or better). If you use something like borski then you'll end up with something that smells/tastes like store vanilla but that is of much lower quality than you can make.

I now pronounce the front - Herbalicious and Edible!

When we first moved in we noticed a boxwood at the corner of the fence that was not on our plan, but hey it provided shade for the cats so we let it stay. Well, it just kept bothering me; it did not provide anything edible, it was big and unruly, and it smelled bad. We were finally able to dig the boxwood out (with the help of a wonderful Holly) and put in a Pomegranate (Wonderful). Its a bit small at the moment, but it will grow into the corner and provide shade for the cats and allow grapes to weave through the fence. Yaay for another milestone! Also for the front - the chickens killed all the baby artichokes so we only had one artichoke this year. The asparagus are growing well and we plan to have a much bigger harvest next year. What I'm hoping to do is put in a few more bushes (maybe blueberry?) and add lavender and rosemary to the strip near the driveway since that area seems to be pretty rocky. I'm hoping to tame that strip a bit more next year so it won't just look like a strip of overgrown oats and wheat.

And because I drank a ton of homemade chai and feel like if I have all the energy in the world... here are a ton of pictures from the front.

Pictures include - the baby pomegranate in the corner (the fuzzy pic), almonds in the tree, our braeburn apples, amish pumpkins, and the three sisters +(amish pumpkin, wapsi valley corn, home beans, and some borage)

Keeping up with the blog

Summer tends to be extremely busy with the garden, so we don't always have time to sit down and write down things we would like to post about. To try to catch up, let me see if I can briefly describe what we've been up to.

Front yard is all planted and we're seeing what works best for next year. We continue to do crop rotation in the front to maximize our return in produce and to keep bugs and disease to a minimum. We also incorporate a ton of companion planting to see if that will help our yields. We have two chickens who make it out to the front in a fairly regular basis. Although they have ravaged one of my strawberry beds (and ate all the potatoes) they are keeping the slugs, snails, and rolly pollies down to a minimum, which is working well for me. The chickens are being trained to go up front, lay their eggs, eat some bugs, and then hurry on to the back yard. We'll see if this works long term. In the front we have, berries, grapes, apples, mint, lemon balm, strawberries, rosemary, sage, savory, comfrey, watermelon, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, popcorn, corn, onions, potatoes, garlic, almonds, tomatoes, basil, peppers, and chives growing. We had a fabulous run on berries this year, with three of us going out and eating berries every single day in June and we were still able to make some berry scones and ice cream. I'll expand the berry section next year to double it's existing area as well as planting additional plants along another fence. Our goal is to have so many extra berries that we can actually make jam and maybe some berry mead.

Talking about mead - my italians flew off and in my despair I did not take the boxes down in a fairly timely manner... which only worked to my advantage since the boxes were then populated by a local wild swarm and they are working fairly hard to build up their numbers.

The backyard is thriving as well, but as it turns out this is a much longer post than I originally thought and I'm tired and need to repeat my day tomorrow.. Good night all!

In the pictures we have - Sungold tomatoes, buckwheat, squash, strawberries, and popcorn with a golden melon flower peeping through.