Port Potager

It’s hard to believe that our trip to Costa Rica was almost two years ago, and even harder to believe that it took me this long to finally make the lip balm I was planning with the ingredients I bought at the cacao plantation we visited .  Though, to be fair, I only just ran out of the lip balm I made over three years ago . Truly, a little goes a long way. Anyway, today I finally gathered my Costa Rican ingredients: achiote and cocoa butter:   This cocoa butter was made by hand by our tour guide Priscilla , so it's unrefined. It still smells good and chocolatey, and the color is tan rather than white: Since cocoa butter is solid at room temperature, I dropped the whole container into some boiling water to melt it: While that was melting, I gathered the rest of my ingredients: beeswax and coconut oil . The proportions here are 1 part beeswax, 2 parts coconut oil, and 2 parts cocoa butter: It all gets melted together and stirred over ve...

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...

First, a bit of insight into my blogging process. I often start drafts of posts and keep them saved to flesh out later. Typically these "drafts" consist only of a title and maybe a photo or two I took on the fly — just enough to remind me of what I was thinking about. Sometimes it takes a few days (or more) to gather the information and photos that document a process from start to finish; sometimes I just get busy and can't finish a post the same day that I did something interesting in the garden or the kitchen. Anyway, I was looking through my draft folder tonight and came across a post I haven't touched since March 24. (I mean, just look at how long ago March 2013 was!) Back then I was refining a lot of skin treatments and soap recipes in a series of Herbal Apothecary posts. One item that I made but never finished writing about was a spot treatment for occasional acne. You know the sporadic breakouts you might get on a monthly basis? For me, this was usu...

Remember when I made my own shampoo ? Well, now I have some conditioner to go along with it. It's an herbal vinegar rinse, and it's really easy to make — as long as you're not in a hurry. Mine is based on Rosemary Gladstar's recipes for vinegar rinses from her book  Herbs for Natural Beauty ,  but you can also check out an adaptation of that basic recipe  here . All you need are enough herbs to fill a quart jar half way up, then enough cider vinegar to fill it to the top. Easy. The herbs I chose were sage and rosemary, and a bit of comfrey, which are the same ones I used in my homemade shampoo. The comfrey is for conditioning; the sage and rosemary for scent and for brunette hair. You could also try chamomile and calendula for conditioning blonde hair, which I may try in the summer for a seasonal change of pace when my hair gets more sun-bleached. It's a little hard to tell in the photo above, but I came up with a simple system for keeping the h...

Another shower staple I recently ran out of? Shaving gel. It took a little more searching to find a recipe for this that sounded doable (and that I already had most of the ingredients for). I found some crazy suggestions to mix shampoo and lotion and call it good. What I ended up with as a starting point was a page from wellnessmama.com , which had recipes for both a foaming shaving soap and a shaving cream. Since the soap is meant to be used in one of those foaming pump dispensers (and since I just happened to have a newly empty one lying around), that's what I went with. The cream looks awesome, but really thick, and seemed like it would be a pain to deal with digging it out of a jar in the shower.  I had to cut the recipe I found (see the link above) in half, since my foaming bottle only holds 6 ounces. Here's the measurements I used: 1/8 cup aloe vera gel 1/8 cup liquid castile soap (Dr. Bronner's lavender, so no additional essential oil required – it ha...

Remember my homemade face scrub ? I've been using it for over a month now, and (once I got used to it) I love it. There's a bit of trick to getting just the right amount on your fingertips, and massaging it gently at first, so it doesn't just slip off your hand in a big glob. It also helps to start with a dry face, so the scrub can get a grip on your skin. There is a bit of finesse involved, but the results are really worth it. I haven't had any of my occasional PMS-induced chin breakouts since I started using it, and it's not at all drying, which makes it great for winter. It's a winner! Turns out that Tiegan wasn't a huge fan, though. I can understand that – as I mentioned, there's a learning curve, and a 10-year old is likely to be more easily frustrated by it. Also, a 10-year old's gorgeous skin barely needs and exfoliation anyway, so I started looking for a less scrubby alternative for her. After some internet research, I decided on this D...

Winter is on the way, and the furnace is running most of the time, sucking every last drop of moisture out of the air. That means the season of chapped lips is upon us, and I decided to do something herbal about it. So here we have my herbal lip balm. This is a variation of Rosemary Gladstar's recipe (from this great herbal cosmetic handbook , and it worked out really well.  I used the comfrey infused olive oil that I made a while back . That's really easy: Just simmer comfrey leaves in olive oil over very low heat for a few hours, then strain out the solid stuff. It makes the olive oil even greener than before, and it smells herby and nice, though it doesn't taste like much. Comfrey is noted for its healing properties. It helps wounds heal over quickly, so for a while I was using this comfrey oil straight up on my lips; it moisturizes and helps heal any chapping or cracking. But that's kind of messy, so I wanted to get it into a more easily portable lip balm tube...

In addition to all the edible stuff we've been growing all summer, I've also been slowly building up an herbal apothecary: From left to right, we have dried lavender, dried rose petals, dry face scrub, face scrub moistened into a paste, dried chamomile, and comfrey oil. The dried flowers have all kinds of uses, both edible and not. Here I've used it for an all-natural face scrub.  You can see it in its dry form in the jar above — the white stuff in the center. This is from a recipe by herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. You can check it out here , or read the whole book , which has lots of cosmetics as well as medicinal recipes. This face scrub is called "miracle grains," and is actually a substitute for soap. It uses a bunch of kaolin clay (that's the white stuff that you see in the jar), plus ground almonds and oatmeal, and chopped up dried rose petal and lavender. The clay draws impurities out of the skin, and the other ingredients are for gentle exf...