Port Potager

Last week I spent some serious time in the herb garden. It could use a renovation: some are now too shaded, others are garden bullies that have spread beyond their borders, etc. Even so, there was plenty to harvest. Here's what I walked away with: That's not everything we grow, but it is a sampling of what's doing well. Things like sage and rosemary will be better in the fall, but these are some of the herbs that are ready to go at the height of summer. Basil. I cut a lot  to avoid having it begin to flower and go to seed. Even with this giant pile, I still only ended up with eight pesto cubes . Luckily, a little bit goes a long way in the flavor department. Horehound. Those globes between the leaves are its flowers, so I may have cut this a bit too late for full potency. Horehound is a bitter relative of mint used to cure respiratory ailments, and I keep meaning to use it to make some homemade cough drops.  Tarragon. It's not worth dryi...

I'm not sure what happened, but all my weekends out in the garden have done a real number on my lips. Lots of sunshine and wind have left them very dry. They are cracked at the corners. Last weekend I put sunscreen right over them, and (while important to keep them from getting burned) it just left them even drier. I don't have a "before" photo of this, and you should be glad. It wasn't pretty. They were so dry that they felt crispy and were peeling, and no amount of lip balm was enough to help. Enter my new favorite medicinal herb, comfrey: Comfrey has been used to heal cuts and burns on the skin since medieval times, when it was known as knitbone due to its healing properties. I usually just use it when I make soaps and lotions , since it is supposed to be healing and soothing to the skin. With my lips in such a state, though, I thought I could see if something a little stronger would help. So I decided to make a comfrey poultice. T...

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...

It's officially Super Cold here. When I had to leave the house this morning, it was 9 degrees out, and this evening we are expecting (perhaps) a foot of snow. The furnace in this drafty old house is getting a major workout, and that leaves us with the driest air this side of Phoenix. Forced hot air from an oil-burning furnace is about the worst of all possible home-heating combination: it’s expensive and it's uncomfortably dry. And with our largely uninsulated old house (we're working on it, I promise), it's running nonstop on days like this. And that has led to some seriously dry skin, especially for our hands. And for certain residents of this house who tend to pick at hangnails, it can be a painful time of year. Herbs to the rescue! I have been very happy with my homemade lotion , but I realize that it isn't very masculine-smelling with its rosewater and other (slightly) girly essential oils. So I decided to make a good, thick, and unscented hand balm t...

I have recently experienced a mini-viral boom of hits on my post about homemade herbal shampoo , undoubtedly fueled by Pinterest . 12 ounces of shampoo lasts me a really, really long time since my hair is so short, so I only make new batches maybe twice a year. For the latest shampoo, I also worked up a new recipe, with herbs that are gentle on my fine hair. 4C Shampoo also lathers up a bit more than my old recipe, which makes it a little easier to use (and makes a little shampoo go an even longer way). The first 3Cs of the shampoo are the herbs: dried calendula, comfrey, and chamomile: The total here is an ounce of dried herbs, in a roughly 4:2:1 ratio of calendula:chamomile:comfrey. Calendula is often used in soaps and cosmetics, comfrey is great for regenerating cells and softening hair, and chamomile smells nice — and can help highlight lighter hair with a golden tone. Simmer the herbs with about 12 ounces of water: I bring it to barely a boil, then turn ba...

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...

This year I'm trying to be a little more focused on herb harvesting and preserving. Last season I just mowed a bunch of each kind down before frost and hung them to dry on the porch. And there they stayed for the winter. It's not at all convenient to go out into the freezing cold when you run out of herbs, and being exposed to extreme temperatures hasn't exactly helped to preserve their flavor. I have read that herbs are at their best flavor just before they flower, so I'm keeping an eye on them this year to harvest them at their peak. So far, so good: horehound, comfrey, and sage were all ready to cut this past weekend.  Sage is easy to preserve because it's pretty tough — just hang and let dry. But horehound and comfrey have very thick, hairy leaves that take a long time to dry on their own. I decided to try a new (to me) technique: oven drying. According to the National Center for Food Preservation , the secret weapon in oven drying is a roll of...

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):...

I finally used up my old shampoo, so it's time for another go at recipes for the shower. This recipe is based on one from Rosemary Gladstar, and you can check out the original recipe here . I made a few tweaks based on what I had handy. Step one: make a strong tea with 1 ounce of dried herbs in 8 ounces of distilled water. Turns out an ounce of dried herbs is a LOT: I used (more or less from left to right) sage, rosemary, and comfrey. The rosemary and comfrey are supposed to be good for hair (more about this in Rosemary Gladstar's book , if you are interested). The sage is mostly for its darkening properties. I ended up doing a modified version of what was recommended for brunettes. Now, I actually have naturally light-to-medium brown hair, and it gets lighter in the summer. Aside from some misguided Sun-In use in junior high school, I have never colored it. I thought I'd give the darkening version of this shampoo a go, knowing that it is gentle, natural, and ...