Port Potager

Yes, you read that correctly. As our temperatures ricochet between 75 and 25 degrees, we've been experiencing high winds for several days. I know, I know —  it's always windy here , so what's the big deal? Well, this go-around was enough to take out the cable, a massive tree limb, and our poor, domesticated aloe plant. It was great to have the windows open over the weekend, but on Monday the wind really picked up, and our aloe ended up on the floor, with three smushed leaves. The photo above shows the plant after I trimmed off the broken leaves, which is why it's now kind of lopsided. Two leaves I cut down to the base, but this one was only broken at the tip, so I decided to try to save most of it. Aloe leaves heal themselves pretty quickly, so it should be ok. I wasn't planning to harvest aloe while the plant is still so small, but it would be a shame to waste the leaves that the wind so efficiently delivered to me. Turns out that I also needed...

Today I was home with the boy child, taking walks in crunchy autumn leaves, exercising my democratic rights and privileges, and puttering around the house. Said puttering included making a couple new bars of soap.  The past several batches I've made have been variations on my original oatmeal bars , but I'm getting a little tired of those. The idea was that they would exfoliate, and they work to a degree, but not quite as much as I had hoped. When I say "exfoliate," I mean "scrub the bejeezus out of our very thick, incomparably effective sunscreen to try to get rid of it." And oatmeal soap is just a little too gentle for that. Next summer I'll work on some kind of all-natural super scrub, but for now, the exfoliation isn't so necessary. My lotion has pretty effectively solved wintertime dry skin, so this time I'm going with a non-scrubbing, gentle herbal soap. Enter the herbs I dried over the summer , comfrey and calendula:  I...

Now that all our Christmas gifts have been given, we can share how our garden gift boxes turned out without ruing anyone's surprise. For my sister, some homemade cosmetics: Here is a gift bag of oatmeal-comfrey soap  and comfrey lip balm . Check out the fancy-schmancy labels! That was my Christmas craft project last week. Some quality time with PowerPoint and sticker paper made for some professional(wish)-looking presents. For our other relatives, we put together garden gift boxes. They were each a little different, but here is a good example: Kirk nailed together the boxes from workshop scraps, and we filled them some freshly-labeled items from our store of preserves. In this box we have a bottle of dandelion wine , a jar of brined pickles , a jar of tomatillo jam, and a package of tomatillo-lime dodgers.  Kirk made the tomatillo jam back in the fall, when we picked out last major baskets of tomatillos before the frost. This is a made-up recipe, subs...

I ran out of soap, so I made some more. I decided to go with a melt-and-pour, because it is easy. I didn't quite have it in me to deal with lye and saponification calculators (yet, anyway), so I ordered an organic base and splurged on a soap mold (an upgrade from sour cream cups, which I have used in the past with no problem, but I thought it would be nice to have soap without a recycling symbol on top). I got these from goplanetearth.com , although without the mold their shipping would have been expensive. In the future I'll probably go with Organic Creations in the future. The soap base is very simple: just palm and coconut oil, lye, water, and some sorbitol (a sugar alcohol for moisturizing). I picked it because there's not all the other chemicals that are in most commercial soaps – it had the fewest amount of ingredients I could find.  Anyway, I cut off a half pound block and melted it in my ersatz double-boiler (a glass bowl over a pot of boiling water):...