Making Soap

Making soap has become a little side hobby of mine over the years.  A friend of mine gave me a crash coarse in making soap a few year ago, so now a few times a year I make a couple batches for myself.  I have really dry and sensitive skin, so I make a point to use ingredients that are soothing to the skin.  My favorite recipe uses aloe, cucumbers, chamomile tea and oatmeal to enhance the soothing nature of the soap.  I have found that my skin has had far fewer problems in the years since I starting making and using my homemade soap.

I start the process by making the "water" portion of the soap.  First I make a small pot of chamomile tea and while it cools, I measure out the aloe and the cucumber for the batch of soap.  Everything used to make the soap is measured in ounces and I do my best to record the amounts used so I can repeat the recipe when I want to.  I puree the aloe and cucumber in a blender and then add the chamomile tea until I reach the desired amount.

After that I carefully measure out the lye and add it to the water mixture slowly.  Lye is very caustic, so I make sure that I am wearing protective clothing, gloves and goggles when I am handling this mixture.  Adding the lye to the water causes an exothermic reaction and the mixture gets very hot, very quickly - over 180 degrees in seconds, so I cool it in an ice bath to bring the temperature down to 125 degrees.

Meanwhile, I measure out and melt the fats I will be using in my soap.  I use a mixture of beef tallow, palm oil and coconut oil in my soap.  I have used other oils, but I like the firmness of the bar that I get from this combination.

Once the fats get close to the mixing temperature of 125 degrees, I turn off the heat and slowly add the lye mixture to the fats and begin to mix them together using a stick blender.

It takes some time, but the mixture eventually thickens as saponification begins to occur.  Once it reaches trace I add in the ground oatmeal and mix it a little bit longer.  After everything seems well blended I pour the soap into my mould.

Here it rests for 24 hours until it is firm.  Then I remove the soap from the mould and cut it into bars and line them up on the counter to cure.  The curing process takes two to six weeks to complete.

This much soap would easily last me over a year, but I like to give some away during the holidays so I will most likely make a few more batches before the year is over.  

Making soap is a fairly simple project and only takes a little time to make a large quantity of soap.  It is also an inexpensive project if you have all the equipment that you need.  I have a box of supplies dedicated to making soap that includes everything I need, like the mixing pot, the thermometer, the stick blender and other utensils. My only costs for making soap now are the oils and other ingredients, though I get the cucumber and aloe for free out of my garden.  I usually order my oils from a soap making supplier online since I can buy small batch quantities for a decent price with little hassle.  This batch of soap cost me less than $15 for 24 3-4oz bars of soap.  Not a bad price to pay, and I know exactly what went into making this soap - no added chemicals, fragrances or dyes.  This soap is just soap and it doesn't dry out my skin like so many soaps that I have tried in the past.  I have to say that I have been so happy with the results, that I haven't used store bought soap in over five years.

Fall Garden Beds

After I harvested my onions and potatoes, I had a few empty beds that I wanted to plant some quick growing crops in.  In one of the beds I planted peas and they are cruising along nicely.  Only a few weeks after they went into the soil, they sprouted and grew enough to need a trellis.  I normally put up the trellis before I plant, but at that time, I didn't have enough of the right kind of fence, or the supports to hold it up.  I was since given a free section of old chicken wire fence and decided to use that to make the trellis for the peas.  I still didn't have good supports to hold it up, but I cobbled some out of rebar, 2x4's and baling twine.  I had to be careful as I set it up so I didn't damage any of the young pea seedlings, but I managed to squeeze it down the middle of the row with little harm to the plants.  A few days later the peas have found the trellis and have reached out their tendrils to pull themselves up.  I hope it stays warm long enough to get a little crop out of this patch.  I didn't get much out of my spring peas and they are one of my favorite things to eat!

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The other bed that I planted was simply a salad bed with a variety of lettuce and spinach.  Those crops can tolerate a bit of cold and I will probably cover them with a little hoop house in a few weeks to keep them going into winter.  It sure will be nice to harvest salad greens in the cold of winter if I can make this work.

Most people think of fall as the time for the garden to be winding down, but with a little foresight, you can still squeeze a few more crops out of the soil if you plan it right.  I think I planted the peas about three or four weeks ago, and the lettuce two or three weeks ago.  With the cold season on it's way I won't have to worry about the lettuce or spincah bolting from the heat.  I also made sure to choose frost tolerant crops to extend the garden season as much as possible.  I know they won't survive the deep freezes of winter, but the garden can feed me a little while longer yet.

Bountiful Fall Harvests

The solstice has come and gone and the garden is slowing down, but that's not to say it's finished yet.  I am harvesting less often, but when I do go out to pick vegetables, I still get good quantities of most things.

Take these cucumbers for example.  I have only harvested about four times in the last two weeks and each harvest is about this size.  Right now I have two gallon bags full of cucumbers waiting to be pickled in the fridge.

The tomatoes have finally started ripening now that they have the heat and humidity of the greenhouse to help them along.  I hope to get a few more harvests like this one so I can make plenty of tomato sauce this winter.

The peppers are finally starting to change color too, but they are very slow to fully ripen.  I only picked a handful of them this last harvest, hoping to leave some of the bigger ones to change color more.

The Jalepenos on the other hand have just gone to town.  I have had plenty of those in the past few weeks and am going to try turing this harvest into poppers for the freezer.  I have already made plenty of salsa, so I needed to come up with another way to preserve this harvest.  Should make for some good snacking this winter!

There are other things that I am still harvesting here and there like yellow squash and greenbeans, but I am barely getting enough of those to fill out the dinner menu.  I will probably keep trying to eat those fresh while I can, since I am not harvesting enough to make preserving them worth my while.  The winter squash should be ready soon and I will have plenty of those to eat this winter.  I am looking forward to hardier meals as the weather cools down.  I think I will have plenty of variety to choose from thanks to my lovely productive garden!

Constructing A Temporary Greenhouse

The season is rapidly cooling here and nights have been dipping down into the thirties here in the past few weeks.  There was frost on my car just a couple nights ago, though I got lucky and didn't get much damage in the garden.  It was my wake up call to get some protection over my warm weather crops like the tomatoes and the peppers.  Those two crops were very slow to get going this year, and I was hoping for bigger harvests off of them before the year was through.  To help them out I decided that I needed to cobble together a greenhouse to help protect them from the cooler nights as well as boost thier heat during the day.

I started by pounding some two foot legnths of rebar into the ground outlining the bottom of the greenhouse.  I was happy that I planted the tomatoes and the peppers in adjacent beds because it meant that I could build the greenhouse around both the beds and still have a walking path down the middle.  Once I had the rebar where I wanted them, I slid the pvc pipes over the ends and bent them towards the center where I connected some of the ends with T connectors.  The center pole was connected with a cross connector and the end poles were secured to the T-posts that were doing double duty supporting the tomato trellis.  The framework was further secured with some recycled baling twine.  Once the framework was finished, I covered the frame with a pair of clear plastic painters tarps.  The sides were weighed down with rocks and the plastic was secured to the frame with some clamps.  The ends were rolled up and weighed down with rocks as well, but I rolled the ends in a way that made them able to be left a little open to ventilate during the heat of the day.  I just need to unroll the ends a little bit to close it up for the evenings.

Now that I have this greenhouse in place I will be able to enjoy a little longer growing season for my tomatoes and peppers.  Perhaps I will be able to can many jars of tomato sauce yet!  

What Became of the Flower Garden

The flower garden was a struggle for me this year.  I spread some wildflower seeds too early in the season and then didn't water them enough, so they never came up.  Then the bed was repeatedly overgrown with ragweed though I weeded sections of it when I could.  I ended up scattering a second round of seeds throughout the bed after one of my thorough weeding sessions and have been rewarded with a nice variety of colorful flowers in my yard.  I mulched the second sowing of seeds so that may have helped them stay moist enough to germinate even with my inconsistant watering of this bed.  I hope that these flowers have enough time to make seed before the first frost so I can continue seeing flowers here next year.

The Great Potato Harvest 2016

This year I grew two 3x10 foot beds of potatoes.  I planted three different varieties: Yukon Gold, Kennebec, and Purple Viking.  I started harvesting the yukon gold a few weeks ago by digging up one plant at a time and leaving the rest to grow more.  I decided to dig up all of the remaining potatoes in stages.  Almost all of the plants had died back and the beds were becoming overgrown with weeds from the mulch I used (rotting hay).  The first bed yielded the rest of the Yukon Golds and about half of the Kennebecs.  The second bed was dug up a couple weeks later and revealed a very decent sized harvest of the Purple Vikings and the other half of the Kennebecs.  I was plesantly surprised by the huge size of some of the potatoes.  Apparently the overgrowth of weeds in this bed didn't impact the harvest much at all.

Together both harvests filled two boxes that I had saved from canning peaches.

I would guess the total harvest is in the realm of 50-60 pounds without counting the potatoes that I have been eating along the way.  I will be keeping them in a closet in the coolest room in the house.  Hopefully this will keep me in potatoes until next spring if I'm lucky.  Depending on how long they last, I might try to grow three beds next year.

Salsa Season is Here!

This summer's heat loving vegetables took their time this year so I am only just starting to get enough tomatoes ripening at once to make a batch of salsa.  Until now I have been throwing the tomatoes that ripened here and there into the freezer so I can turn them into tomato sauce at my leisure.  The peppers have been taking their time as well, but I do have a few that are starting to change color, so I'm sure I will be able to harvest a good number of those soon.

Over the past couple of days I picked a number of good sized tomatoes as well as a decent amount of cherry tomatoes.

I sliced them into small chunks and started fill the pot with 10 cups of a variety of chopped tomatoes.

I then went out to the garden and picked out some of the less than perfect peppers that I could find.  Many of them had blemishes that I had to cut out, but I was able to find a small assortment of bell peppers for the salsa.

I removed the seeds and the stems and chopped them into small chunks then added them to the tomatoes in the pot.

 I love the variety of colors of the peppers.  It's going to make some pretty salsa!

Next I chopped up five cups of onions and added them to the pot.  I tried to use up as many of the tiny onions as a I could from my recent harvest, so it took quite a while to accomplish this step.

The last thing I added to the pot was two and a half cups of chopped jalepenos.  I picked a bunch a couple of weeks back and they have been patiently waiting in the fridge for all the other veggies to catch up.

To the main mix of veggies I added some apple cider vinegar, salt, cilantro and garlic, then put the whole thing on the stove to boil.  It made a very colorful mix once it was stirred well.

Once the mix boiled for ten minutes I transferred it into jars and put them in the canner for twenty five minutes.  The end product was beautiful and I ended up with a total of eight pints and a little left over for snacking.

As soon as they cool down they will moved to the pantry, though I'm not sure where they will fit on the shelves.  My pantry is getting very full this year and I'm loving it even though it's been a lot of work.