Happy Earth Day!

To celebrate, we are offering a full recipe sheet of our time- tested eco-friendly cleaning recipes and FREE sweet orange essential oil (wonderful for cleaning).

Get a 1/3 oz bottle of Sweet Orange Essential oil with a $25 (retail value $7) or a 2 oz. bottle of Sweet Orange essential oil ($24 value!) with a $50 order. That is a GREAT deal, we just want to encourage you to try some homemade natural eco-friendly cleansers.

Offer good in store or online, now through Saturday April 23. Just mention the Earth Day special in the customer comments part of the shopping cart, and we will include your essential oil and recipes. :)

Sweet! The Radish Magazine did a great article about natural cleaning products, featuring Prairieland Herbs items and our favorite natural cleaning recipes. Check it out!

If natural cleaning is your gig, check out our natural home cleaning products, including our awesome natural laundry gift set, here.

Our good friend Amber wrote this wonderful, and very honest review of our laundry soap, and gave me permission to post it here. Thanks so much Amber! :)



I forgot to give you a review of the homemade laundry soap. I am now on my third batch, so will be needing another package of the soap bars next time I visit you.
Brett was kind of negative about trying a new detergent, he is rather picky about things like that. He was convinced that switching would somehow ruin the washing machine. I think he got some kind of info to this effect from the guy who sold him the washer, but I really don't think he has the story straight... anyway...
I made the switch sometime in the Summer and didn't tell Brett. About a month or 2 later he made a comment about not going through very much Tide lately, so I fessed up. He said he had noticed his socks were a bit dingy, not as white. So I started using one heaping Tablespoon of the homemade powder detergent and about a Tablespoon or 2 of liquid Tide 2X. This seems to be a winning combination for me. Brett's clothes are often really, really dirty and greasy. He is a farmer and amateur mechanic, it comes with the job... I think we need the Tide in there to break down the grease, but a 1/2 cup or whatever the recommended amount is seems to be excessive to me. I just use a little drizzle. And every now and then I will wash the whites in all Tide, just to give them a boost of whitening, I guess.
I like the lavender scented detergent bars and will continue to prefer them. Also, a used a clothes line in the Summer and the clothes were not any stiffer with the homemade stuff than they were with Tide. We actually got used to our "cardboard bath towels" and their exfoliating properties! Ha!

Spring Class!! Make your own natural cleaning products: Want to do something good for the environment and your budget? Learn how to make natural cleaning products with basic, easily available supplies. Join Maggie and Donna from Prairieland Herbs to learn the techniques and try your hand at making samples of laundry detergent, tub scrub, and window cleaner. You'll go home with several safe natural products, and recipes for them and others --"green" and simple! Class cost - $19.00 Supply cost is $15 ; bring an empty spray bottle for the window cleaner. Tuesday, Feb. 3rd, 6:30-8:30

YOU MUST REGISTER THROUGH DES MOINES ADULT EDUCATION

Class will be held in Des Moines, at Merrill Middle School.

Well, it's official. I've been banned from work. You know it's bad when your mother calls you and says "Keep your germy self at home. If you make me sick, I will hurt you". I'm a good daughter, so I'm doing what she says. And she is at work all by herself today, so if you order, say hi to her. :)


Meanwhile, I'm doing a bit of work from home, working on the "updating the website photos" project, and adding this new and super-cool Natural Laundry Gift Set. For only $32.50 you get a full 1 lb. bag of laundry soap, a set of dryer sachets, a bottle of essential oil to refresh the dryer sachets, and an 8 oz. bottle of body and linens mists. Isn't that just the coolest? Anyone who is interested in "going green" at home would love this set. It's available in 3 scent combos - Lavender, Patchouli, or Lavender/Cedarwood, and with our $5 shipping sale, you can have this set sent to anyone in the U.S. for under $40. I think that' s just really cool.

Happy Friday!!

We've decided to start something new and exciting here on the Prairieland Herbs Blog - Freebie Friday!

Here's how it works.

Every Friday, we'll post something that we're giving away - entirely for free. It could be something small, or something large - it will vary from week to week.

If you'd like to win the item - you must leave a comment on that day's blog post.

Rules:
1) One entry per person.
2) You must have a registered ID to post - if your post shows up under "anonymous", we don't know who you are, and therefore you can't win.
3) You have until the next Thursday at midnight, CST, to enter your comment.
4) Winner will be announced the following Friday - you must check back to see if it's you!
5) International folks are welcome. We ship Prairieland Herbs items all over the world, so we'll ship our "Friday freebie" anywhere too!
6) Each eligible post will be assigned a number, and we'll use a free online random number generator to determine the winner.

I hope that makes sense, and covers everything!

Now, without further ado - this weeks Friday Freebie is a 1 lb. bag of our Lavender Laundry Soap (shown above).

We've been selling this in the shop for months and it's flown out the door so fast we haven't had enough to list online. Karla finally made a nice, big batch, so we have some to offer our online customers! This stuff is fantastic. Use it in this recipe to make your own environmentally friendly, cost-effective natural laundry detergent. It REALLy works too - we make some really stinky oily messes in the shop (think: spilled lip balm, shea butter, and essential oils!), and this detergent cleans it all out. Wonderful stuff.

So, comment away, dear bloggers - and if you can't wait to see if you've won a free lb. of this wonderful soap - feel free to stop by our website to purchase some. Remember, all domestic orders ship for only $5 - all month long.

As most of you know, we offer various classes, mostly here on the farm. And we LOVE doing so! We keep thinking about a way to offer classes online to our many wonderful customers across the world...but have yet to come up with a great plan to do so. (There are only so many hours in the day unfortunately!) HOWEVER, we do get lots of emails from our (inter)national customers about classes, so I thought I'd post about a few options here.

Our friends Tina and Maryanne, of The Essential Herbal and Lancaster Soapworks, are offering a REALLY spectacular-sounding online soapmaking class! Check out the details here on Tina's blog - they are limiting the class to a certain number of students, so I highly recommend signing up very soon if you are interested.

We are teaching a class here on the farm about Homemade Natural Cleansers. The class draws heavily on an article I wrote for the Herb Quarterly in the Summer 2008 issue. (Did you guys know that I write a monthly column for that magazine, as well as feature articles??) Anyway - it does have some really great recipes in it, if you can find a copy at your local library I'd highly recommend it. Otherwise you can order a copy from their website. I also recommend 2 books on this subject:

The Naturally Clean Home by Karyn Siegel-Maier is my favorite - it's packed with great recipes that really work.

Clean House Clean Planet by Karen Logan is also great!

We also have a great recipe for homemade laundry soap on our website,and we DO plan to add more natural home cleanser recipes to our website soon, so stay tuned.....


Last, but not least - we do offer several natural dyeing classes here on the farm - we haven't yet offered one on rust-dyeing, but I *did* write a tutorial for Hobby Farm Home magazine on how to rust-dye fabrics. It's easy, fun, and a great way to turn rusty "junk" into art. Here are a few items that are dyed with rust (all of these can be found in my etsy store, by the way...)

Note: The April Luxury Soaps are on the way here! so excited!

In the meantime, we have a few new items I'm adding to the website. Will post here as they're added. First off, our new fantastic handmade Paste Wax for wood. Perfect for spring cleaning!