O my goodness, that a amazing day! so warm, its a outside day, I will work on the inside stuff later today, we slipped off the farm and had a breakfast date at our local sunday place, it was a bit to crowded for our taste, we ending up the busy corner insteed of our normal quiet tucked away booth, so we didn’t linger but it was still a great way to start the day..
Then we headed to the our favorite local fruit tree place and got a new pear tree
And then ended up with a new kind of gooseberry, current and blackberry for good measure..
Then we spotted 12 of these on the side of the road and ended up dropping off the plants and heading right back out to pick them to use in the horse agility course! Its the last weekend before the spring pickup in our neck of the woods so we have spent some of yesterday and today, getting anything that needs to hauled out to the end of the drive done.
We put both Brandy (horse) and Girl out on tie out, so they are my awesome redneck lawnmowers 🙂 We already got the pear tree in the ground already and will soon enough with the others.
Need to get this latest patch of garden plot finished up and planted out today, its going into new strawberry plant rows. also got one of pop-up greenhouses set up this weekend, so will be working on getting it filled up this week.. and ideally getting the second one set up as well.
And heads up, I butchered out a gilt yesterday, so the blog is about to get really heavy on pig butchering, pig recipes and all related area’s there..
Ok, it was still a bit soft when it came out of the molds today, but I am very pleased, I have never redone the batch ones its been set in the mold, so while I can see that I could have used a bit more banging up and down on the muffin molds to make sure all air bubbles are out, overall I could not be more pleased..
So in the end, I made six jumbo soap cupcakes, 3 stayed huge, and 3 where cut in half, leaving me 3 nice size rounded soaps, 3 rounded but topped with the coffee bean and six regular bars of soap with a awesome pretty little top on them..
They came out lighter in color then i expect from what I had read on line but I think its because I used lard as the base (which makes a nice hard white soap) where the others were using olive oil (many soapers don’t want to use animal fats as they say they won’t sell as well) so I figure that is what lightened mine up, but its also very possable that it will be much darker by the end of the cure?
Now, I have made this basic recipe without the coffee grounds and it turned out well and so I have no reason to believe that it won’t do so this time as well.. I will keep you updated and post photos of the soap. remember your safety working around lye.. gloves, glasses and be careful!
Garden Coffee Scrubby Soap by Farmgal
Follow all the regular rules of making CP soap, make sure your oils are within 10 degree’s of each other, and I am using a blender stick method, all gear is for soaping only, nothing that is reused for food etc.
This soap will take a min of six weeks to fully cure, but it should be hard enough to cut at the 24 hour marke, it should make a fairly hard bar but of course the longer it cures the harder it wil be and the longer it will last.
Costs break down to 3.97 for a 2 pd loaf of soap, which gives you 8 4 oz bars of soap at 49 cents per bar, I don’t know about you but I have seen coffee garden soap go for as much as 4 to 5 dollars per bar of soap. This is certianly more reasonable in price provided you can use the rest of the oils/lye for other soap making thoughtout the year etc.
This should come out as a light/med brown soap with black speckles, it should be good for garden hands, but also in the kitchen for removing fish or onion/galic smels.
Clean sheet tonight, love it, its high double digits today with a good breeze, things are drying out in two hours flat, and the guest beds are in need of a good spring washing.
Look at all the baby elder’s that have self-seeded out, going to let them grow up a good bit before digging them out and transferring them to new places and give some away for the ottawa food forest. This is just one patch of them, I think I have at least 40 to 50 of them.
So busy rooting, didn’t even look up to say hello yet..
Got to the raised beds, and I see that the pea’s and beets are up..
Rhubarb growing well, my mints are starting to come up, I know this because I stepped at the wrong spot, up came the wonderful scent of fresh mint! and look at this massive almost foot and half wide of beebalm plant coming! or now that I am in the house, I can’t remember which row this was taken in, so its either a wild violet or a beebalm?
Boy do I have a “small” issue, you see from this photo, that is very clear that tooties needs her little feet trimmed, now the piggy book says once a year is good for trimming, so I am not behind on this as she is not even a year old yet! She turns one year old in June, towards the end of june, but I will need to double check to get her birthday date.
Still I can tell by looking at them, they need just a little work on them.. the real question is how? We tried to lift her and carry her like we did with kermie and it was a real fight, so it was in fact easier to let her go into her blue barrel, lift it and bring it and her in the wheelbarrol to the garden for the season, but I have got to the point, I can pet her and she hold perfectly still while doing so and that she will take a treat gently from my hand but touching her legs or feet is still a no at this time..
I have to make a choice, do I go out daily for the next weeks and work on clicker training her to let me have her feet and then slowly, ever so slowly work on a snip here and there and hope that over the next few weeks to months that I can get all four feet trimmed up, and hope that by the end of it, I have a stronger bond even if I have needed to put in many hours to get there..
Or do we do it like you would taking of a bandage.. fast, and quick.. feed her, grab her and flip, hold, listen to the piggy screams of you are killing me (so not) and have it all done in under a min per foot.. its a five min done and done.. and then I have a whole year to remind her that I bring the food, water, pats and cookies..
I know, I know, everyone is going to say.. of course set aside x amount of time per day and teach her to give her feet etc.. but gotta say that both have their strengths and their downsides..
When it comes to the big pig, its a bit easier, you just bribe her up on to the boards of her pen with cookies, one can feed her, while the other trims.. done and done, cause without a stock crate, there is no way you can make her do anything of the sort.. but the difference is that Miss Piggy is a much more calm and steady temperment.
So anyone out there got a mini-pig, and what do you do.. is it worth the time to teach the lift and give me the foot, I know that they are very smart and will remember a slight, so that play’s into it as well..
i have certainly showed enough photos of making pelts but don’t think that is the only choice by any means, I am currently turning a full size sheep pelt into a very nice size peice of leather, now, lamb leather would be very fine indeed..
This is photos showing the hair at the slip point.. Will keep you posted on how the rest of the process goes..
So good it made DH go all cave man on it lol..
My main garden is huge, and so for the sake of planting its devided into plots, each plot is 64 square feet, currently, which makes the pig working pen, because it just makes things easier to do it this way at the moment..
Pig worked..
Finished working by me, and then hand seeded out with whole barley (which had been pre-soaked for 24 hours before being seeded out)
compost from our four year old barn pile (this has sheep, pig and chicken/duck/rabbit in the mix)
close up of the compost.. ah, black gold!
A light half inch covering of compost on top of the seeded out barley and that plot is good to go!
Updates to follow on sprouting time, harvest etc..
Just another Day on the Farm 