Clean livin' and the lord

Guess what?

Soap's ready to use!  

It's been curing for a month in the spare bedroom.  I've visited it often.

And use it we have been--now that those long four weeks are finally over!  It is really nice stuff...very gentle and more slippery than lathery, which is what we are used to anyway since we've been using health-food-store soaps for the last few years.  It cleans well and hasn't disintegrated in our shower (but isn't kept in the trajectory of the showerhead, either, let's be honest.)  It is mild, and I like using it for my face;  I hope that it will prove helpful for Jason's eczema with continued use.

OK, here's the deal:  do you know how satisfying it is to have made something entirely new--to have the chemical reaction work correctly the first time?  I think household alchemy is pretty dang fun, personally.  I will be making soap again...soon.  I keep giving it away, and that month-long waiting period is a bummer.

I am sad to say that the essential-oil fragrance has apparently been sacrificed to the curing period in the open air.  I would like to test the pH of the bars next time to see how long it actually takes them to cure, rather than just going with the average time, which might help.  I would also like to try again with essential oils, but use strong scents like rosemary and mint.  Oh, or clove and cinnamon.  Mmm.  


I was thinking the other day that if there is one area of this homesteading experiment that I feel I have truly explored, it is the home- and human-cleaning product realms.  For most of the last year I have made, rather than bought, the following:

• shampoo
• conditioner 
• hair gel
• body lotion
• herbal salve for wounds
• face lotion
• bathroom spray cleaner
• soft scrub
• toilet cleaner
• kitchen spray/general cleaner
• floor cleaner    

More recently, I've been trying my hand at making
-soap
-laundry detergent
-bug spray
-and bay rum.  

This is such a fun genre to dabble in, and I wish that I could be privately funded to focus on and play with herbs and potion-making all the day long.  I have books on herbs that I bought while in high school, so this is no passing fancy.  [Oh, and I would go to herbalist school in a heartbeat.  I love the rich history that women have with herbs and healing--just as I love the anarchy inherent to the fact that some of the most useful herbs are what we now call weeds.]  

Ultimately, the colors and scents and gathering out in the fresh air and sunshine are a blissful way to spend your day.  I have the most wonderful mason jar full of sun-dried calendula flowers that represents hours of picking, preparing, and drying beautiful flower-heads on sunny days throughout the summer.  How can they be anything but a force for health and happiness?


I also should point out that our house and persons are as clean as they were when we were buying all of the commercial cleaning stuff.   (Notice how cleverly I worded that.  Ha!  Some of you uber-housekeepers would faint, but I think we do OK.)  If anything, I feel like my hair and skin have benefited from this simplistic routine.  I absolutely love not having a label to bother reading--and if you are concerned about the chemical soup we live in like I am, then you are probably inclined to squint at label gobble-de-gook as well.  It is very freeing to have made what you are using and know the ingredients and their quality inherently.  It is a bit of a challenge to try to recreate for myself all that we would otherwise buy, and I am sure that I will eventually need to start weighing what is worth the time-invested and what would better to buy ready-made.  For right now, though, I am having fun.


If you are interested in trying some or any of these cleanliness-creations yourself, there are  many great resources out there with recipes, tips, and suggestions.  My favorites include:

• Rosemary Gladstar's Recipes for Vibrant Health:  175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family
• Better Basics for the Home:  Simple Solutions for Less Toxic Living, by Annie Berthold-Bond
• The Wild and Weedy Apothecary:  an A to Z Book of Herbal Concoctions, Recipes, Remedies, Practical Know-How & Food for the Soul, by Doreen Shababy
• The Naturally Clean Home:  150 Super-Easy Herbal Formulas for Green Cleaning, by Karyn Siegel-Maier

  In general, let me say that I use a lot of the following, some of which is available at any grocery or drugstore  (but may be better sourced at a health food store):  

distilled white vinegar, organic apple cider vinegar, olive oil, extra-virgin olive oil, coconut oil, pure aloe vera, witch hazel, vegetable glycerin, beeswax, baking soda, washing soda, castile soap, borax, lye, fresh or dried herbs and essential oils. 

--and that just about wraps up my shopping list.  From hence, all cleanliness cometh.

Well, with the exception of dishwashing liquid, which continues to elude me.  Tricky liquid soap.   Ah, well. 

Bikes. Birds. Baking soda.

For the past several days, I've been biking my errands.  This is a very good feeling, this no-gas-consumption feeling.  And with traffic being what it is, (and with the canal path and the Monon so handy) I typically get there faster than I would in a car.  Parking alone makes me deliciously smug, especially during the summer when the suburbs empty into Broad Ripple on the weekends and traffic reaches epically nasty proportions.   I don't usually find myself effervescing about Indianapolis or IN in general, but I do appreciate the trails to which we have managed to live in close proximity during our decade in the area--they go a long way to redeem a city with such poor mass transit.

My grocery-getter bike, the Trek with all its convenient racks & panniers, is still out of commission, a long story of ambitious tinkering friends and boyfriends who commenced upon a tune-up of said Trek and ended with the bike stuck in one gear, the machine victorious over the men and now enjoying a long vacation in the garage.  Someday, I will remember to throw it in the back of the truck and have it fixed professionally, but until then, I grab a backpack and take the more stripped-down Schwinn.

In any case, and no matter what sort of bike and related equipment you have, I would like to strongly recommend getting outside in your neighborhood, whether that means taking a walk or a bike ride or being pulled in a little red wagon.   This is the time of year to stop and chat at the end of the driveway, or admire some nearby gardens, or to barter some of your homegrown lettuce for fresh eggs from your lucky backyard chicken farmer next door....

In poultry news, the girls are all doing very well.  I thought we were going to lose Roxie on Jason's birthday, probably due to heat exhaustion (although she might have ingested some red paint that had dripped into the grass from a project I was working on).  In either case, it was a rough few days that started with a limp, almost unconscious bird in the bottom of the coop.  Yikes.  Why I have to have a hypochondriac, drama-queen chicken, I will never know.  She is back to her usual sassy self now, but has yet to lay me another egg, after going strong for so many weeks.  Apparently I am not meant to have all four chickens laying at the same time!

Fern and Betty accompanied me to another chicken workshop on Sat. 6/18; it was a nice event & Fern's first venture into being an educational chicken.  All new faces in the audience, which was fun, and we held it outside this time, under a tent.  The only glitch occurred when the second presenter began her discussion of first aid and how to raise & butcher a meat flock.  Fern seemed to take offense and proceeded to squawk, loudly, until you could barely hear the woman speaking.  After stuffing her with treats and apologizing repeatedly, I finally had to have Jason pack the girls up and take them home so that we could all hear the rest of the program.  Jeez.  And, as seems to be the custom with these workshops, she promptly plopped out an egg upon getting home and was calm and docile immediately thereafter. 

The flock seem quite well-adjusted and confident of their little backyard kingdom...they have created strategic dust-baths around the place, and know where to dive for cover when something sinister flies by.  My neighbor's mulberry tree is dropping buckets of ripe fruit over the fence in the mulch, and the girls are happy to snap many of them up--the downside to this, of course, is that they then continue on to make piles of shiny black, tar-like droppings as they strut their merry way around the yard.  Ugh.  While grateful for the free chicken food, I will be glad when mulberry season is past!

And speaking of chicken food, the girls are so busy nibbling on the plants and bugs in the yard, that I rarely have to fill their feeder, and their egg yolks are a brilliant orangey-yellow.  What a great time of year to be collecting eggs from your own gals!

Inside the house, I have made another homemade-cleaner discovery, and not surprisingly, it has to do with baking soda again. 

Since I've started making shampoo & conditioner and begun to favor locally- and naturally-made bar soaps over shower gels and hand soap pumps, I've noticed one particular problem:  a lot more soap scum left behind.  Which makes sense, of course, since we are using soaps rather than detergents, but who likes to scrub their shower all the time??  Ugh, not me, that's for sure.  So the soap scum tends to build up and then I really dread attacking it.

The last time I cleaned the tub, I decided to use baking soda on a damp scrubber, since it is known to be a great exfoliator and scrubbing agent.  --And it worked.  Not wonderfully, but it did the trick with some added elbow grease and lots of flakey baking soda flying everywhere.  Eh.  Not so fun.

Back to dreading the scum.  So, today, I decided to try a "soft scrub" recipe I've found in several different books:  baking soda, with just enough liquid castile soap to make a creamy paste similar to cake icing.  Since I happen to have a bottle of Dr Bronner's in the peppermint scent, I had the added bonus of a pleasant, minty concoction. 

I think it is the aromatherapy of using essential oils--because I didn't hate scrubbing the bathtub this time.  The soap kept the baking soda from being so flakey and seemed to clear the scummy stuff with greater ease; the whole thing smelled great and left the tub and walls shiny and clean.  I used a scrubber with the paste, and a more absorbent sponge and hot water to rinse; it was a simple, pleasant process. 

I am now prowling the house, looking for scrubbing jobs, since I have some leftover after finishing in the bathroom--who knows, maybe Jason will come home to find me on hands & knees, going head-to-head with the dingy kitchen linoleum....

Then again, probably not.