Herbal Beauty LLC

We all know that  laundry detergent is full of nasty ingredients and can cause allergic reactions, rashes, and contact dermatitis.  A few of these ingredients are: Chlorine, Quaternium-15, Artificial fragrances, Nonylphenol ethoxylate, and Petroleum distillate. The "natural" detergents found in the stores are close to $15 and those of us with kids who have to do loads of laundry every week, can't afford to pay those prices. Also, are those "natural" detergents even natural?
Here is a very quick, easy, and CHEAP way to make your own laundry soap. It consists of 4 ingredients including Naked Beauty Bar Soap, Borax, Washing Soda, and Water. Some people have a hard time finding washing soda, I get mine at Hy-Vee Grocery stores.

Recipe:
Laundry Soap
Supplies: 1 quart Water (boiling), 2 cups or one bar Naked Beauty Bar soap (grated), 2 cups Borax, 2 cups Washing Soda
-Add finely grated bar soap to the boiling water and stir until soap is melted. You can keep on low heat until soap is melted.
-Pour the soap water into a large, clean pail and add the Borax and Washing Soda. Stir well until all is dissolved.
-Add 2 gallons of water, stir until well mixed.
-Cover pail and use 1/4 cup for each load of laundry. Stir the soap each time you use it (will gel).

Now go get dirty so you can some laundry!!

You can also add essential oils to scent and to add antibacterial properties.
You can use any Naked Beauty Bar Soap.
You can grate up a lot of bar soap of once and store some in the freezer until you are ready to make another batch.

After a week of hot weather in the 90's and over 100 it was a GREAT cool Saturday for a Farmers' Market. 
I feel lucky to be self-employed and sell our products at such a wonderful place. Surrounded by other self-employed folks selling their beautiful products and showing off their talents. You can find anything from hand sewn aprons, bird baths, wooden furniture, meat and of course FRESH and LOCALLY GROWN PRODUCE! Mmmm!
Every Friday evening we pack up our car with all of our market products and gear. We wake up in the morning at 6am and leave by 6:45 to get to the market to set up by 8am. I am glad I am a morning person!
I love the atmosphere, fresh air (way better than a office setting!) and chatting with all my customers and being there for them when they have a question about a product or are looking for something to use for a skin condition. I also love when little kids have to stop and smell the soap. It is good to see that kids know what good and healthy soap is! The market is where my customers can find my full product line, new products, and request special orders. It feels great to be selling a product that is good for the people and environment.  And even though I am "working" this is my vacation from watching 3, soon 4, little kiddos. I look forward to it every week.  Hope to see you there!

It's fun spending time with kids because it's a good reminder to always be on the lookout for exciting little adventures.  We recently went to a little lake to go swimming and there were a lot of rocks around the shore.  One of the girls found a crayfish claw, which meant they were living in the water.  John's method of catching crayfish is to feel around the bottom edges of the rocks until one gets pinned in between his fingers and the rocks.  Then when we have a few of them the girls can build little ponds and streams on the shore for their new little pet to live in.  It's a great time to learn about exoskeletons and crustaceans, along with a nice little lesson on how to hold a crayfish without getting pinched!

Well we had a ton of swiss chard.  We planted it in our backyard and it really took off.  There was a period of time when we didn't harvest any so the other day we decided to really cut it back.  We ended up with about 4 or 5 pounds of Swiss Chard.  That maybe doesn't sound like much, but 5 pounds of leaves is quite a pile.  We made a big salad, used some in scrambled eggs, enchiladas and ate some straight, but we still had a whole bunch left over.  So we decided to try and make chard chips.  We've tried Kale chips before and they were very good.  We found someone online that did chard chips so maybe they would be similar.  To make a long story short they were good, but making them was much more difficult.  Swiss Chard leaves are much thinner than Kale and they also have much more water content.  Which means that you have to be extra careful about not letting them overlap at all.  When they overlap the water gets trapped in the leaves underneath and they steam instead of dry out.  Then you just end up with a tray of steamed Swiss Chard.  It's not a terrible situation, but 5 pounds of steamed Swiss Chard is pretty hard to eat with any expediency.  I suppose you could freeze it though.  Luckily I made that mistake on only my first tray.  Needless to say I had my fill of steamed Swiss Chard that night.  I was able to pull off some good chips from the outer half of the tray.  They were good, the kids liked them and we ate almost everything.  But I think if I were to do it again I'd leave the chips to the Kale and just freeze Swiss Chard after steaming it.  Another thing to try is Swiss Chard rolls.  I'll let my plants grow back and try that next time. 

There's a big semi truck full of delicious tree ripened Georgia peaches that rolls around southern Minnesota selling peaches for cheap.  Who could pass that up?  You have to buy at least 25 pounds though.  They make stops at a whole bunch of towns around here and stay for only a few hours.  If you don't know about it then you're out of luck, and we were lucky to find out.  Here's a fun little story about John getting some peaches:

        It was an unusually hot day for us at about 101 and very humid.  On top of that our air conditioning in our car had just gone out and we had to drive about 40 miles round trip to get the peaches.  The girls were sure they wanted to come so I took them for a test drive around town in the heat just so they would know what it was going to be like.  After they decided that they were tough enough we got a couple ice packs, bottled water, some freeze pops and hit the road.  As luck would have it the peach truck was parked in the parking lot of an auto parts dealer.  I had enough freon left in a couple of cans to refill the a/c but there was a leak.  The guy at the auto parts store said I probably needed to replace the O rings.  That was about 5 bucks.  Since I had my tools there I decided to tackle the job in the parking lot on the shaded side of the building.  It's not every day that things go this smoothly, but I'm happy to say that after about 20 minutes of tinkering and peach eating we were back on the road with a/c and 24 pounds of peaches.  When we got home we cut most of them up and froze them.  We'll decide what to do with them later.  And yes, they were amazing!