Beaker is enjoying the warmer weather - mostly, because it means that he can eat all the fresh greens and herbs he wants - his favorite foods! He will eat dried grains if he has to, but....they are most certainly not his choice of meal.


From Donna's shade garden


Go-cat luxuriates in the sun...Isn't her expression just great?


I *think* spring is finally here. We aren't past the danger of frost yet, BUT..chives are about to bloom! always a cheerful spring sight.

Luxury Soap of the month is Live! Get 'em while you can!

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!

We've been selling this fantastic muscle mist out of our shop for years - it's just never made it onto the website for some reason. But, now, here it is! This powerful muscle-relaxing spray is the BEST thing for tired, achey muscles - absolutely incredible. It's got a wonderful hot/cold soothing sensation that truly penetrates deeply, and helps relieve muscle aches. Available in 1 oz. spray bottle, 2 oz. spray bottle, and 4 oz. refill size.

The sky can be really bright blue and beautiful here....it was cold when this picture was taken, but the sun was so lovely!!



You folks have been keeping us fantastically busy with orders. keep 'em coming! This was the load I took to the post office on Tuesday!!!!



We took advantage of some of the spring sunshine to photograph these beautiful naturally dyed scarves in the sunshine.

Oh my gosh. what a difference a few days make!! We had couple of warm (50-60 degree) days with abundant sunshine, and the snow and ice are GONE. yesterday was fantastic - mildly muddy, work-outdoors-in-a-tshirt weather. I (Maggie) tried my hand at pruning some of our fruit trees. I have NO idea what I was doing; I hope the poor trees forgive me!


The other interesting thing was this: We could literally see the plants growing greener as the day went on. A preliminary garden inspection showed that the parsley, thyme, mountain mint, sage, and of course weeds (dandelions in particular) were greening up. A few hours later, we SWORE they were even greener. Plants are so amazing!! They grow so quickly given a little water and a lot of sunshine....

Child labor laws....who needs 'em? :)

(Toby picked up a shovel and cleared part of our driveway the other day, just for fun. look that those red cheeks! it was cold out!)

Our Luxury Soap of the Month has arrived, and omg. is it amazing! Scented with jasmine wax, and essential oils of neroli, petitgrain and chamomile, this fantastic bar is a TRUE bargain!!! Wonderful fresh, floral scent, perfect for spring. We have 40 bars and when they're gone, they're gone!!

I'm fully convinved that Toby, my nephew, is the only person left in the Midwest who is actually enjoying this cold and icy winter. Every day the bus drops him off at PLH after school, and he spends a happy hour or so, bundled up in snowpants, jacket, mittens, hat and boots, running around the farm, sliding on the ice, playing in the snowdrifts, and generally having a good time. Ah, to be in first grade again!

We adults however are THOROUGLY sick of it. It's pretty much the ice and the cold that are most annoying. We have had a solid sheet of ice covering the farm since early December. Donna has fallen on the ice a couple of times through the winter, and Maggie did twice just this week. (thankfully we are both well padded on the rear end). It's just awful, and there's nothing we can do about it. Even the dogs lose traction and go sliding sometimes!



Even Violet is tired of winter! Here she is hiding from the horror of it all. "Wake me when spring arrives", she says.




Beaker doesn't seem to care too much one way or the other. He's a bit bored, because his "flock" is spending all their time indoors. He much prefers warmer weather, and he loves to help garden, distill, or just generally hang out outdoors with his "peeps". heh heh.

The Great Beeswax Project of 2008 is nearly done! John has spent HOURS melting, straining, and pouring beeswax into a variety of sizes - 1 lb blocks, 2 lb. blocks, .75 oz. cubes, and 2.5 oz containers. I believe he has cleaned over 150 lbs of beeswax in the last week or so. We'll get a picture of ALL of it together when he's done.....but isn't it pretty here, cooling on the table? and it smells amazing!

Here's a woodpecker, on our suet feeder we have just outside the shop. Feeding and providing habitat for wildlife is a really important part of what we do with our gardens and land.

We call Beaker our "Wax-headed cracker hound". He loooves to "help' John make candles, and has gotten bits of soywax dripped on his head and back moer than once. (It's not that hot and doesn't hurt him a bit, we swear). And he love love, LOVES Club crackers. If he hears a crinkly wrapper noise he comes right over to see if there might be cracker bits to be had! He eats veryv ery little people food (he doesn't even really like his winter food, he much prefers fresh greens and bugs and things out of the garden), but he has a serious addiction to those Club crackers!

I haven't posted about Beaker (the goose) in a while. he's doing great! We were worried about him, after we lost our ducks. We thought he'd be lonely. He has companyduring the day while we're at work - we let him out of his pen, he wanders around the farm and talks to our cats and dogs. If John is making candles or cleaning beeswax, Beaker is in heaven (he loves to help make candles!). But during the evening we have to shut him in his pen so he is safe. We've been looking at adopting some other fowl to keep him company but 1) we haven't found any, and 2) he thinks he is a dog (or maybe a person, we're not sure), and therefore doesn't actually get all that much company from other birds. But he found his own friend....




....A few months ago, we found some baby kitties in the barn. all of our pets are spayed or neutered, but this is a farm, with a nice warm barn, and stray cats come to live here. We feed them, and care for them as best we can, but they're usually wild. one had babies last summer...we caught, tamed, and adopted out 4 of them, but apparently...there was another one. We'll have to get a trap, and find a vet who will spay/neuter a feral cat, because s/he is certainly wild. BUT. S/he and Beaker are best buddies!!! Every night when we (read:John) puts Beaky away, his kitty is waiting there for him! We are thrilled he has found some "nighttime" companionship!

Sheesh. It snowed about 10 inches last night and is supposed to start blowing alot this afternoon. So Donna is snowed in and Maggie is snowed out! We packed a TON of orders yestrday - as many as we could, before the post office closed. We shipped 43 boxes - and sold 23 of our 40 "Secret Forest" soaps (so far). If we didn't ship your order yesterday, I'm sorry! We will get to it as SOON as we can get back into our shop....tomorrow, hopefully!

The new Luxury Soap of the Month has arrived, and it is SPECTACULAR! An icy-cool blast of woodsy goodness, "Secret Forest" smells like you're standing in a deep, green forest as the snow falls softly all around you. I kid you not.

There are 40 bars and when they're gone, they're gone. ENJOY!

Here is a itty-bitty sneak peek at our new labels! We've nearly got them all created now and have been using them on all the products we've made in the last few weeks. What do you think?

I (Maggie) am at home for a chunk of the day, trying to work on our new (not yet released) website. I'm learning ournew shopping cart system, which will be REALLY REALLY COOL once we get it done. For now, it is just making me swear alot. So if you hear loud, vulgar swearing coming from the central Ia area, pay no mind. It's just me.

Also, our friend Tina at Essential Herbal has a really cool post about Valentine's herbal potions on her blog. ENJOY!

It's the Great Melt of 2008. After lots of snow and ice, it's now about 50 degrees here, and the whole world is a drippy, melty, muddy mess! The mud is no fun but the warmth sure is nice!

We got our yearly beeswax purchase last week - 150 lbs of raw, delicious-smelling beeswax! It's pretty clean - the local fellow does a really excellent job of giving us the cleanest, best bits from his hives, but we still have to melt it all down, strain it through cheesecloth, and then pour it into 1 and 2 lb. bread pans to make the lovely cakes of beeswax that we use and sell all year long. melting and cleaning the wax is a long process that takes *several* days, but it smells sooooooo good!!!!

The Rosemary House ( a wonderful herb shop in PA) has a fantastic, fast-moving blog, and recently they're doing a wonderful celebration of Tea Around the World. I recommend you check it out - it's very interesting!

We had a bit of snow overnight last night - light, fluffy snow that was (fortunately) easy to shovel. When it's so light like that, it can really pile high on leaves and branches and, well, anything outdoors, making for some interesting pictures!

Today it's cold - well, all week actually. The expected high for tomorrow is somewhere around 7 degrees. UGH. :( We hope a few people will come out and see us for Sample Sunday anyway! Picket Fence Creamery are having specials and sales - their cream is VERY much on sale, and they have new flavored butters - garlic, cinnamon, honey, and garden herb (featuring our herbs!). They are delicious and if you buy 3 you can get one free! We have lots of free samples of bath salts and milk baths in our sample basket, and have our Breathe Easy items (see below)on sale both on our website and in the store!



This breathe easy set is really lovely. Even if you don't have a cold or sinus issues right NOW, the thing to do is have this kinda stuff on hand in your herbal "medicine chest". Then you can grab it whenever you start to feel stuffy and alleviate the problem of having to wait 3 days for your natural sinus relief to arrive in the mail! (I am speaking from experience here! When I don't have this stuff on hand in my medicine chest here at home, I always regret it!) These last 2 weeks we've been flooded with people calling or coming in for our Breathe Easy wand, eucalyptus hydrosol and eucalyptus essential oil, becuase they and their kiddos have icky sinus congestion. 'tis the season...unfortunately. :(



So this past week, we've been making stuff like crazy in the shop. It's been quiet, so we have time to go through and re-stock the store in a methodical and organized fashion. We been so busy, we haven't been able to do that in MONTHS! It's really nice. :) Normally we'd do something like this around October. Usually by then the garden is put to bed, and the holiday craziness has not yet hit, so we have a few weeks simply to stock up and get our ducks (geese?) in a row. But this past October was a madhouse. The weather was beautiful and we had not yet had a killing frost, so we were distilling and harvesting our herbs. We had three BIG new wholesale accounts open up, and seemed to be just crazy busy with orders.

You will also start to notice that we have entirely new labels for all of our products. For years, we have printed our labels and handcut them all. But not we've decided to redesign our labels for a cleaner, more uniform look. Plus, they are now pre-cut, saving us ALOT of time and hassle! We are using a waterproof vinyl for many of our labels as well, so we hope they will look nicer, longer. We hope you will enjoy this new look. We're working on all new photographs of ALL of our products....another huge project. We will keep you posted on our progress.

The Luxury Soap of the Month has arrived!!

And....we have 2 of them this month!

Due to a weather-related soapmaking problem, Geri was only able to provide us with 2 small batches. So we have a double-header! "Aphrodite" and "Sunrise". We have 16 bars of each...and they're going to go fast. These soaps are amazing! Containing hydrosols, silk, clay, shea butter, organic goat milk and essential oils - well, they're just fantastic. Details on the website!