Lessons learned in the garden

1) Unless you are a vegetarian with 500 different recipes for green beans, planting one row is sufficient.

2) One zucchini plant is more than enough to supply a family of four and half their neighborhood.

3) You must be ruthless and without mercy when it comes to volunteer tomatoes. Mercy only earns you a tomato jungle instead of a garden.

4) The first year is your "learning" year. And if things don't go well next season, the second year is a learning year too.

5) A sense of humor will save you from going insane (at least that's what the voices keep saying).

"Endangered Species Act? What's that?"

Bush wants some endangered species rules extinct

Oh, there are so many things I could say about the monumental stupidity of this. I will sum it up:

fox + henhouse = bad

I am a BAD blogger

I am very bad at keeping up with a blog. I hope the internet gods will forgive me.

Soap Fast Broken

It's been over 7 months since I last made a batch of soap for a variety of reasons. But today that nonsense is over!!

2 batches were brought forth into the world: BB's Arabian Spice and Turkish Mocha fragrances. The Turkish Mocha is absolutely divine and I will need a bigger bottle as it will be a big seller once people get a sniff! Arabian Spice is just like its name, subtle exotic spices that will carry you away to enchanting lands.

Farmer's Market Coming Soon!

The Scappoose Farmer's Market starts the 2008 season on May 17th! Same location as the last half of the 2007 season in the City Hall parking lot @ Columbia and 2nd.

Look forward to seeing every one there!

More on Palm oil

A small add-on to the post about palm oil.

There is an industry group called "The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil" and the website can be found here.

For more on the fight for orangutan survival, click here.

Of orangutans & palm oil

When I first started making soap, I used palm oil in the recipes because most of the sample recipes in books and on the internet have palm in them. Palm oil is messy because it is solid at room temp so it has to be melted, poured and weighed each time. For that reason and that it didn't seem to help the soap a whole lot, I stopped using it several years ago.

Now there is an even better reason for not using palm or palm kernel oil or, at the very least, being extremely choosey about the vendor.

As a member of the Oregon Zoo, we get a quarterly newsletter about zoo happenings. It seems they are finally giving the orangutans new digs, which they have sorely needed since I was young. Beside that article is one that predicts orangutans will be extinct in the wild within ten years!

The reason for this is man's demand for palm oil. Palm is heavily used by the biodiesel industry as well as many other common household items. Massive amounts of rainforest in southeast Asia are being clear cut to put palm plantations in their place. And without that rainforest, orangutans are not the only ones who will suffer.

About Soap

Having been on soaping hiatus since September for numerous reasons, the realization has struck that the market season is fast approaching. Today was spent tidying up the storage section of the garage. I have 19 bottles of fragrance purchased since September that are crying out to be soap.

The cleanup was inspired by meeting a great bunch of people at the Soaper's Luncheon in Portland yesterday. You can find details and pictures here thanks to Anne-Marie of Bramble Berry Supplies in Bellingham, WA. Bramble Berry happens to be the source of the aforementioned 19 fragrances. And from the sniffies at the lunch yesterday, I sense another order in the near future. *sigh*

Once the soapmaking begins anew, I will post pictures of the latest creations (assuming I get the whole blog picture-posting thing figured out by then).

Entering the Blogosphere

So I feel compelled to start blogging. It seems the thing to do these days, to be hip and trendy. And the fact that I actually wrote that should be proof that I am neither.

However it does allow an outlet for creativity and to offer information and insight about my small business. I make no guarantees about frequency or general readability of anything in this blog. But I shall endeavor to make it as interesting as I can or, at the least, not painfully boring!