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. :)

I love sandalwood. I mean, I LOVE sandalwood! Years ago I stumbled across an Aveda salon, and ended up purchasing a tiny bottle of sandalwood essential oil. It was good stuff, and I am pretty sure that was the beginning of my love for essential oils and natural scents.

There are multiple species of Sandalwood trees grown in various parts of the world. The Indian Sandalwood (Mysore) is generally the most highly prize, and is certainly the nicest to my nose. However, there are serious sustainability concerns regarding the harvest of this tree.   The trees take 20-50 years to mature, are very difficult (if not impossible) to grow commercially, and are generally harvested in its entirety - root and all. The other, related varieties of sandalwood are less fragile, easier to harvest and propagate, but are noticably different in scent.

The Aura Cacia site has several lovely pages all about sandalwood, it's uses, history, and botanical info.

And, I very much like the respectful stance of Eden Botanicals, regarding Sandalwood, and agree: It's a precious resource and should be conserved, savored, and treated respectfully.

And, if you want to purchase sandalwood, please, do be very careful! Because of it's cost, this oil is very often adulterated. Go to a quality supplier that you can trust! Personally, I'd call Roe at Sun Rose Aromatics, or Marge at Nature's Gift.

There is NO SUCH THING as "therapeutic grade" essential oils.


Let me say that one more time, just to be clear:

There is NO SUCH THING as "therapeutic grade" essential oils.

I explain this to people alot, but I get the sense sometimes that they don't believe me. I understand. Other compaines are claiming that their essential oils are therapeutic grade, and charging more for it. Trust me when I tell you that I know FOR SURE that there is another seller (no, I won't name names!) who purchases essential oils from some of our same sources, labels them as therapeutic grade, and charges an arm and a leg for them. Which I think is silly.

Here is an excellent blog post with more facts.

I only tell this so that you aren't mislead or decieved by other companies. That's all!

Here's a great blog post about a small essential oil distiller in Canada. I have a heck of a time explaining to people why we don't distill our own essential oils....they see we have an herb farm, and a still...so why aren't we making essential oils? The question is one of scale. We have a TINY herb farm (less than 2 acres, most of which is occupied with house/barn/outbuildings/store/parkinglot/miniature horses), and a tiny still. You need many many pounds of herbal matter to make OUNCES of essential oils! This article and pictures give a small taste of the size of still needed to make quantites of essential oil.

Just found this free online aromatherapy course - I haven't read through it all, but it looks really great!!

Aromahead Institute - Free online Introduction to Essential Oils class

The internet continually amazes me - the sheer amount of free, wonderful information available is truly astounding.

Happy Freebie Friday! It's a glorious sunny day here....I hope it's beautiful where you are too.

Last week's winner is JAN from NC! She found us through the one world one heart blog giveaway. Jan, drop us an email (prairielandherbs at shop dot com) to let us know your address, and what scent of body oil you'd like!)

Today's Friday Freebie is extra-cool, because: We have a GUEST GIVEAWAY!
Our friend Tina, at The Essential Herbal Magazine, has generously donated five copies of the latest issue of her magazine. It is absolutely jam-packed with herbal recipes, information, lore and more! We are sure you are going to love this magazine.
But wait - there's more! (hee hee)

Each lucky winner will not only get a copy of this fantastic magazine - but they will get to choose an 1/3 oz. bottle of essential oil (of their choice) as well as a 2 oz. bag of dried herbs (again, their choice). So you will be ready to get crafting, cooking, and creating with your herbs, after being inspired by this wonderful magazine.

This week's Friday Freebie will have not one, but FIVE winners, so sign up now!!


If you'd like to win one of these fantastic herbalicious prize bundles - you must leave a comment on today'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.

It's ridiculously cold here.

AND.

It's going to get colder in the next 24 hours. GAH!

The low for tonight is -5, with windchills as low as -30. We had lovely whiteout/blowing snow conditions driving home from the farmer's market today - always delightful.

The HIGH temp for tomorrow is -1, (can anything negative actually be called HIGH?), again, with delightful -30 windchill factor.

The low temp for tomorrow night is a wicked -14. I seriously cannot fathom it. I will be cuddled in my house, on the couch, with cats piled all around me. (The good thing about living with 8 cats - your lap never gets cold).

Right now, we're watching the wind - we have no specific plans to cancel tomorrow's Sample Sunday due to weather, BUT - if there's loads of blowing snow, our driveway or road could drift shut. I will post here on the blog if that is an issue.

Are you tired of listening to me whine about the cold? Okay. I'll post something slightly more interesting.Some of you may notice that we are slowly updating our website photos, from old crappy ones I took (hey, I did the best I could with zero photography skills and an ancient camera) to really nice spanky new ones, such as you see above.

They look pretty nice, huh? clean and professional.

Well, they were done by our resident "king of cheap DIY lighting and photo gear" guy. He can do amazing things with sheets of glass gotten for free off craig's list, yogurt lids, sticks-in-coffee-cans-full-of-cement, and bits of remnant fabric and pvc pipe.

For example, this photo above was taking in my living room - here is the "setup shot" (complete with coffee mug and dog food bowl).



This gorgeous photo was taken in a simple basement room. (see photo below).


There are loads more of these product and setup shots, complete with notes and info, on John's Flickr, if you're interested. I just think it's fascinating to see the setup behind the photos, and thought you might too. Enjoy!

Making 25 lbs. of peppermint bath salts all at once reeeeeeealy clears out your sinuses.


In case anyone was wondering.

Is that not the HANDSOMEST goose you have ever seen? He recently celebrated his first snow with a nice swim in the pond. The cool weather does not seem to bother him one bit!

Beaker is currently without fowl-friends....Unfortunately, the neighbor's dogs came down to our farm (we live in the country....no fences), and killed Beaker's duck friends. They actually tried to get Beaker too, and he was slightly injured on one of his wings, but he is fine now. Now we have to keep Beaker in a safe, roomy pen when we're not around to watch out for him.



This is or cat Tilly - Donna's cat, really. She lives in Donna's house but occasionally comes out to the shop to "supervise". The other day she positioned herself on top of our antique cash register and spent quite a bit of time there, just watching the world go by!



We have a new soap - Just Plain Goatmilk! We do get a fair number of requests for unscented products so do try to have a nice selection of fragrace-free handmade goods!



John is making candles like a crazy man, and also working on a new, floral essential oil candle. Makign a new candle takes a lot of time! First, he tries out various essential oil blends and mixtures, to get something that smells wonderful. Then, the various blends must be made into candles and thoroughly burn-tested. Here's some of the blends he was working on the past few days....when our new floral candle is ready, we'll be sure to let you know about it!

We've got some scent blends marinating to test both in candles and for our new "Guy line" (men's products)....we'll keep you posted! :)

When you buy essential oils in bigger quantities (this is 5 kg, or approx 11 lbs), you get them in these KICK-ASS sexy aluminum containers. We're getting quite a stash of these built up. I wonder what we can do with them once they're empty??