It's been a beautiful summer here in Tennessee. The weather has been cooler than average, and we've been getting lots of rain which has been great for the garden. Keeping busy has been easy, and I've been trying to balance my time between keeping up with the garden and preparing for our first year of homeschooling.

In the last couple of weeks we dug up enough carrots to fill the 21.5 quart canning pot. I'm not sure how many pounds that translates to, but it was a lot! It was exhausting work because our soil isn't root vegetable friendly yet. We're slowly trying to amend our soil, but it still has a way to go. Right now the soil still has a lot of clay and it makes it difficult for root vegetables to grow. We also have an abundance of rocks! The clay soil makes it even harder to pull root vegetables up, so we have to carefully dig them out. I snagged some of those garden gloves with claws on one hand, and they worked wonderfully for digging around the carrots. My fingers hurt for days afterwards, though.

But once we got them dug up, we rinsed them off in the kiddy pool to get most of the mud and dirt off. Then we brought them inside and started cleaning them up for being canned. The plan was to can as many as possible as just plain sliced carrots, and then can a few jars of pickled carrots. I used about half and canned 12 pints of carrots in the pressure canner. I didn't get to pickling any. It was the first time using the pressure canner, and I was a little afraid. My husband and I watched videos on YouTube, and read both the manual that came with it and the Ball book that came with the water bath canner. Once we triple checked the steps we got started. We succeeded without blowing anything up! And my fears are mostly gone, and I'm looking forward to pressure canning lots more!

The day after we dug up the carrots our neighbor stopped by and asked if we wanted some green beans. We can't turn down free food so she popped her trunk and handed me a full 5 gallon bucket. Much more than I expected! Luckily we had already Christened the pressure canner, so I picked out and cleaned the beans, snapped them, and canned those, too! She had given us a type of green bean that's a beautiful deep purple until cooked called Royal Burgundy. They're a delicious bean fresh or canned. I was so grateful because we had lost our bean plants to Japanese beetles. Once I got the beans ready I had a really awesome helper who really enjoyed snapping the beans and filling the jars, and it was awesome being able to preserve food and teach the little one about canning.

In the last couple of weeks we have also added a few babies to the farm! One of our hens went broody last month and hatched an egg. She had 4 other eggs under her after the one hatched, but one of the other chickens got to them. Addie and I built a temporary Mama and Baby Sanctuary in the middle of the garden and moved Tom (the mama) and baby. Since she lost the other eggs I was hoping if I brought home some chicks that she would adopt them. Well, I was wrong. Our local Tractor Supply had chicks and we brought home 4 Isa Browns, but Tom didn't want them around. So we have 4 adorable chicks living inside for a few weeks until they're big enough to move into another pen outside.

With all this extra dirty work we've had a lot of tough stains on our clothes so I've been using the pure coconut oil soap bars as stain sticks. It works so well I wanted to share the awesomeness with everyone. You can find Niffer's All Natural Laundry Bars in the Bar Soap and Eco Bag Laundry sections in the shop. I use a simple recipe that packs a punch and lifts stubborn stains with pure and natural power. You can dampen the cloth and rub the bar directly onto the stain, or you can grate some of the soap into your laundry as an added booster. So check it out, and keep the summer memories but not the stains!

I've got more updates about our bees soon. So check back often for more updates!
Until next time, have fun and stay natural!

Just like most things in life, you usually have to wait for the good stuff. The redeeming part of having to wait, is that it's worth waiting for! I've been promising soap for almost a year, and just recently I've been officially rolling the soap off the cutting block.

I posted before about two of the scents available, but I'm excited to share that there is a third! This soap is different from the others because it has less ingredients, making it more simple, but not lacking in cleansing power. Say hello to Patchouli & Vanilla soap! Made with coconut oil and aloe vera juice, it's a super cleansing bar that won't dry your skin out. Some single oil and fat soaps can be drying. For example, the soap I make to grind into the laundry powder is a pure coconut oil soap. It could be used for skin, but I wouldn't recommend it because it's too powerful for delicate skin, but it's perfect for soiled laundry.

Let's look closer at the Patchouli & Vanilla soap. The name might indicate just two scents, but I've used a few to make a well rounded, sweet, floral, and intoxicating scent. Vanilla is a hard scent to get when you're using only 100% natural ingredients. Most vanilla scents you find are fragrance oils, some are made with other natural ingredients, but most are lab creations. I prefer to use essential oils, but there's technically no such thing as vanilla essential oil. Why? Because, unfortunately, the vanilla bean doesn't allow for the steam distillation process most essential oils are made from. Since steam distillation doesn't work, the only natural solution is creating an absolute. While researching I found this explanation about what an absolute is, and I just cannot word it better so I'm just going to quote the Soap Queen, "To produce an absolute, the plant material is placed into a drum and introduced to a solvent along with gentle heat. The solvent is then removed, which leaves behind a resin known as a concrète or resinoid. This resin is then treated with alcohol to separate the aromatic compounds."

But vanilla absolutes are incredibly expensive, so I had to find a more affordable solution to still offer bars of soap at an affordable price. My solution? Vanilla smell-a-likes! I've used a combination of Vanilla Absolute, Ylang Ylang and Peru Balsam essential oils, to create what is the most lovely sweet vanilla combination. If you don't already have a bottle of Peru Balsam in your essential oil stash - go get some quick! It's like sugary vanilla heaven. When I mixed my vanilla blend in with the dark patchouli essential oil, it was magical. Now, you can sniff the magic with your own bar of Patchouli & Vanilla soap!

I'm excited to experiment with more scents, but for now I'm sticking to the three currently available: Peppermint & Rosemary, Lime & Basil, and Patchouli & Vanilla. Creating soap is an art, and I'm still in the beginning stages. Once I've become more of an experienced soap maker be on the look out for some funky colored soaps using natural micas, shaving soaps, and who knows what else. Help me learn and expand and order today - click here to see all three scents.

It's good to be clean!

References & Mentions:
Image credit: History of the World-Part I, Mel Brooks
Soap Queen - The Truth About Vanilla Essential Oil

Hello friends! It's been a while since I've had much to post about and I'm so excited to finally have some news. Last year we began our journey in beekeeping in May 2016, and by the end of the year after weeks of heavy smoke from a forest fire we lost our bees. It was really devastating, but we pushed on and prepared for the next season.

I'll get back to the beekeeping here in a moment, but first I really want to talk about some of the exciting news with Niffer's! First, who likes soap? Everyone, right? Well, almost everyone. I know some kids who would rather have mud baths. Well, if you like soap then you'll be pleased to hear that very soon Niffer's All Natural Products will have a line of soaps! You've heard this rumor before? Yeah, you have... but now it's happening sooner than later. At this very moment, I have soap curing and hopefully by the first week of May you'll have a few scents to choose from. The first of two scents I have curing is a peppermint and rosemary blend. Perky yet soothing at the same time, it's the perfect scent to freshen up on a hot summer day. It's topped with dried sage to add an extra little herbal hint. Second in line is probably my favorite so far, a lime and basil blend. The fresh lime comes through so clean and the basil follows up giving it a spicy note. Both soaps are made with pure and natural ingredients, of course. I blended coconut, olive, and castor oils to give you great scrubbing power and combined those with shea butter for the wonderful smooth and moisturizing benefits. I'm working on a few more scent blends but I'm hoping to have at least three to choose from.

Next on the exciting news list is the announcement that the Mazama Store in Mazama, Washington is now carrying Niffer's All Natural Laundry Powder and Niffer's All Natural Dishwasher Powder. The Mazama Store offers many general items, including groceries, cleaning products, t-shirts, and more. But, what makes Mazama really unique is that they offer natural cleaning products in bulk where you can fill up containers, and reduce the need for excess packaging. I am so excited and honored to work with the great people at Mazama to offer great natural cleaners and reduce packaging waste. If you get a chance to visit, or live in the area, please be sure to stop in and get a bite to eat and some coffee, and of course fill up your jar of Niffer's cleaning powders. Check out their website to learn more, and then stop by their Facebook page where they've got great pictures of the AHH-mazing views from the trails nearby. Plus, I love their goat logo! Who doesn't like goats?

In other farm news, we've started the garden and already have some happy sprouts. We scaled it back this year to a 50'x50' space from the 28'x128' space last year. I'm also planning on limiting the varieties of produce. So far we've planted collards, red beans, mustard spinach, peas, green beans, beets, and inside we've started 12 total tomatoes (6 different varieties) and 19 total peppers (6 varieties). In the coming weeks I'm going to plant 12 more tomato plants to have a total of 24. We also started some cabbage and cucumbers indoors. One of our awesome neighbors (because we have a lot of amazing neighbors) let us borrow his seed planter. What a great help that was! We were able to get about 20 rows into the garden in about an hour and a half. Last year it took me days and days to get all the seeds in. Thanks Robert!

Back to the bees...

This year we did a lot of things differently, which I'm going to cover in a separate blog post. Today, I'll just give the quick version. It rained the day we had to install the bees into the hive which created a lot of stress on our end. Everything we read talked about waiting another day before installing them, but my husband had to go to work and we couldn't wait. We made it happen, and three days later when I checked to make sure the queen was released from the queen cage I was happy to find she was. The second hive, however wasn't happy about my intrusion so I had to come back the next day. But it rained again. So, five days after installation I verified the second box's queen was released. Then we waited. This past Saturday, one week and 5 days after installation we opened the hives again to see if the queen was laying eggs. The hives were beautiful, full of new comb and honey and pollen. The bees were busy, and tucked perfectly inside the cells were perfect little bee larva. We found the queens in both hives, wandering through doing her queenly business. We removed the queen excluders from under the hives, and closed everyone up. So far, both hives are far happier than last year's was at this stage. I'm hoping we have a successful first year! I'm going to try to get a full post about how we installed the bees in a day or two. We did it in a more nontraditional way, and I'd like to share what we did and then continue to update as the year goes on.

Until next time, I'd love to hear from you. Do you keep bees? Have you ever ignored the traditional methods? What is your favorite scent of soap? Do you prefer soap with color or just naturally colored with the oils and butters used? If you had three hands, what would you use the third for? Comment below, email, or find me on Facebook! 

Happy Spring!

Hello, hello my friends. It's been a long time! Just about four months since the last time I wrote a blog. There isn't much I can say to defend my absence; honestly, I've just been lazy. The cold weather, holidays, and stress around the farm have made me a bit reclusive. Simply, I've been trying to avoid the computer. I glance at my emails a few times a day, I still check Facebook, but I've been purposely trying to be distant.

One of the biggest disappointments during my absence has been our loss of bees in November. We had a single hive that left during a two week long, 200-300 acre, forest fire, less than a 1/4 mile away. I was devastated, and I am hoping they found a new home before the temperatures dropped. The smoke was so heavy for so long, we think it drove them out. Once the fire was out, the temperatures dropped in the teens. The cold temperatures kept us from being able to open the hive and check on the bees. We didn't realize they were gone for almost a month. But, live and learn. Next year we're going to try a new location on the farm, a different kind of bee, and hopefully start out with two hives rather than one. 

When life gets too stressful, what do you do to help yourself relax? I enjoy watching movies with my daughter. Her insight is usually surprising and funny. I also enjoy crafts, and I've been working on a few different needlework projects, a couple cross stitch and now embroidery. This summer I decided I wanted to use the winter months to learn embroidery. It's not nearly as confusing as I expected.

So, what's new with Niffer's you might ask? One thing is our new packaging. You might have already ordered some, but if you aren't aware, we have new eco-friendly packaging for laundry powder. The paper bags with Kraft paper labels, are more environmentally friendly, and easier to recycle. I had some nudging from a wonderful patron, and I am so glad he brought the subject up.  I strive to be as environmentally friendly as possible, and the goal is to reduce as much as possible the plastic products used in product packaging, labels, and shipping. You can find Eco-Bags in the Laundry Powder section of the Niffer's Store. Currently available in two sizes, Eco-Bag 128 oz. & Eco-Bag 48 oz. What's the best part of Eco-Bags? The price! The savings to us by using cheaper packaging and labels is passed on to you! You get more for your money!

Also, laundry powder is now made with pure coconut oil bar soap made IN-HOUSE! That's right! Niffer's All Natural Products is starting to make soap! For now, anyway, the soap is purely for laundry powder purposes only. Soon, we'll be able to introduce body soap. I'm still working on formulas for body soap, but hopefully before we're all getting too dirty in the garden I'll have a good formula worked out. Hopefully, just in time to wash away winter and welcome spring!

Until then, my friends, I hope you stay warm through the last months of winter. I hope you forgive my absence, and I hope to hear from you! I'd love to hear what your favorite soap scents are, and if there are any other products you'd like to see me try to make.