Here are some fun pictures from last Saturday's pastamaking class. I think everyone had a really good time!!

Indigo. Is. MAGIC!!

Full blog and pics here!

Terri is teaching our pastamaking class this Saturday, and she sent me these pictures...these are the class samples - YES you will get to taste these in class!! You'll learn to make pasta using an inexpensive pasta machine (I find them at garage sales all the time for $10), simple ingredients (eggs, flour, salt, oil), and very little time. Terri has LOADS of recipes for yummy pasta sauces too. Fresh homemade pasta freezes beautifully and cooks in literally minutes. You could also dry it and use it to make wonderful holiday gifts. You will make regular pasta, angel hair pasta, and ravioli. Still a few spaces available, grab a friend and register here!

It's no TRICK...we've loads of TREATS for you this October Sample Sunday! Come out to Woodward on Sunday, October 17th, from 12-5 pm for loads of fun!

Celebrated Halloween early...costumes encouraged! :)

Pick up a puzzle piece at each location (4 total - Northern Prairie Chevre, Picket Fence Creamery, Prairieland Herbs and Flowers by Donna Jean). Turn in those four puzzle pieces at your last stop, and you'll be entered to win a gift basket featuring goodies from all four stops!


Melodie Proffitt will be offering chair massage, or mini acupressure treatments for $30, and hand or foot reflexology for $30. She has done some wonderful work on many of our Sample Sunday customers, you can tell by the blissed-out expressions on their face!

Lynn Marie Parkey will be offering Reiki, herbal candies, aromatherapy charm necklaces! She can custom-create an essential oil scent blend just for you - ask her about it!

Randi Stone of Lovin' Oven will have fall inspired cookies and some frighteningly tasty treats!

Michelle White of Organic People Salon will be there with John Masters natural hair care products at 10% off and coupons for $5 off any future salon service. She will be offering $10 mini manicures too, how can you pass that up?

Clint Nelson will be on hand with his handcrafted wooden toys - it's not too early to think about holiday shopping.

Sally Kilkenny will have her wonderful handmade jams for sale!



Candy Hoops Entertainment will be there with hoops for sale ($25) and sink tye dyeing ($10 & $20 - and weather permitting) plus henna tattoos ($10) and tarrot cards ($15).



Morning Rain Massage will be offereing ear candles for sale ($25), thai chair massage ($20, done with bamboo sticks) and sweet neck and shoulder rub downs($20).

Peace Out Productions will have their stylin' upcycled creations, and Roxy Seven Salon will be offering shimmerlites, $2 a strand! Laura from Roxy Seven will also be doing pink hair extensions, 4 for $16, and all proceeds will go to keep-a-breast.org fo rthe "I love boobies" campaign, to rase awareness in teens and young adults in cancer and cancer prevention.


Laura Hess will also have her nifty neato upcycled typewriter jewelry.

We have two gorgeous adult foster cats from Panora P.E.T.S up for adoption - stop by and visit Walter and Bridget!

Bridget is available for adoption!

This is your last chance to get our soaps and shampoo bars before we have to raise the price...shop now and stock up!

Be sure to ask about our amazing class schedule, and visit our sample basket, which is chock-full of bath salts, soaps and shampoos for you to try.

Can't wait to see you!!

This is an EXCELLENT blog post about how soap is make!

http://personalcaretruth.com/2010/09/fatty-acids-and-lye%E2%80%A6-oh-my/

Happy 12th birthday to us! Celebrating 12 years by offering you 12% off ALL PURCHASES made now until Sept 20, instore and online! (classes not included)

Back in stock - our Mountain Mint soap, featuring our own mountain mint hydrosol and dried herb! A fantastic way to incorporate native prairie species into our bodycare line!

And introducing AppleJack & Oats soap, loaded with local farm-friendly ingredients! We want to source more local fats (goat's milk, and pasture-rasied organic lard and tallow) to use in soaps - they utilize LOCAL, sustainably produced ingredients that support local farmers, and make great soaps too!

Terri excels at creating clean, fresh, spa-scents and this Refreshing Rosemary is one of her best EVER. This is a clean, crisp blend of rosemary, lavender, tangerine and lemongrass essential oils. The scent is positively addicting!! Very unisex. We have 40 bars of this soap, and when it's gone, it's gone, so get yours now!

And here's what our fantastic neighbors at Picket Fence Creamery have planned for this Sample Sunday!

SAMPLE SUNDAY

Sept. 19 Noon to 5 p.m.

Admission is FREE!

(This event is held in conjunction with our great neighbors to the north, Prairieland Herbs, Northern Prairie Chevre, and in town, Flowers by Donna Jean.)

FREE local food samples: Caramel apple ice cream, elk sticks, buffalo summer sausage, Neva's cheeseball, caramel pecan apple butter, nut butters, snack mixes galore, Iowa wines, local salsa, breads, dips, and more!

Guest Vendors:

*Prairie Moon Winery, Ames, Iowa.

*Salsa by Joni, Waukee, Iowa.

*Sunrise Farms (garlic, potatoes, onions, Job's tears), Woodward.

*Two Sisters Pantry (pasta salad, breads, muffins, dips), Knoxville, Iowa.

*Jordan Clausen (wheat grass, coconut milk), Beaverdale, Iowa.

Lunch is served! Beef sandwich or brat, chips, milk and ice cream - only $5! Each item available ala carte, too! Kids' hot dog meal, $3. Music provided by HB Productions, Altoona.

Kids! Pony rides in the front pasture, wind your way through the hay maze, see the calves and pigs, face painting, free pencils and stickers!

7TH ANNIVERSARY SUPER DEALS (specials start as soon as you receive this newsletter!)

*Fresh farm eggs - 2 for $5 (Reg. $2.99/dozen)

*Pella's VanderPloeg Bakery pie and quart of ice cream - only $10

*Our own 90% lean ground beef - $3.49/lb. with 10 lb. purchase (Reg. $3.99)

*Iowa wines - 2 for $22! (And $11 for each additional bottle!)

*FREE bag of Picket Fence organic tomatoes with your $25 purchase!

Just arrived: Organic red raspberries from Woodward, organic Brussel Sprouts from Coon Rapids, a fresh supply of elk, beef, buffalo, chicken, eggs, and pork, Kalona noodles, all-natural Swiss-style muesli, raw honey and honey comb, hulless popcorn, and Pella canned beef and chicken.

That's the news for now; we hope to see you this weekend! Don't forget your coolers. Feel free to forward this message to anyone in your address book who may be interested in spending a nice afternoon in the country!

I LOVE Sample Sunday! Where else can you stomp grapes AND bellydance AND learn African Drumming, while supporting small local farms and eating amazing food?? Here's the happenings and events this Sample Sunday at our neighbor farm, Northern Prairie Chevre!
+++++++++++++++++++++


Please plan to join us, Flowers by Donna Jean, Prairieland Herbs and Picket Fence Creamery for Woodward’s Tribute to International Talk Like a Pirate Day on Sunday, September 19, from noon to 5 for food, wine, fun, relaxation, and a chance to be entered in our Treasure Chest ‘O Loot drawing!

• Happy Anniversary to US!!! Join us for our 10^th year celebration and enjoy a piece of goat shaped cake make by Carefree Patisiree!
• Bring a lawn chair and watch our 4^th Annual Belly Dance Festival – don’t be surprised if they pull you in to dance too!
• Costume and jewelry sale and swap
• Alex Mohr of Lincoln, NE will have free-will offering Middle Eastern Drum lessons. Join in the Drum Circle.
• Old Maine Brewery of Ames will have samples of their micro brews!
• Chris from Snus Hill Winery will sample several of their award-winning wines AND will host a grape stomp!! Come on out and participate!
• Milton from Sheeder Farms will be selling sandwiches!
• Delicious baked goods from Country Lane Bakery
• Sample creamed honey with Pat from Randol Honey Farm.
• Make this your stop for gourmet foods that go well with goat cheese, wine and more.
• Dreesman Buffalo meat in a variety of cuts – very healthy!! Several cuts of Sheeder Farms meats (Great for grilling - T-Bones, Iowa Chops, Ribeye, to name a few) and Skeeter Creek Elk.
• KIDS: Decorate our giant chalk board, enjoy the swing set and sand box! Don’t forget to come into Miss Tillie’s and get your free freeze pop!
• All of our kids are sold and will be leaving by the end of this month. L Come enjoy them while you can. Tours of the barn. Honeybump will be looking for you!
• Check out our 50% off table.
• Come in to Miss Tillie’s for samples of our cheese and MUCH MORE!

It's been twelve amazing years since we opened our doors, and we're going to celebrate in style! We are offering 12% off ALL PRAIRIELAND HERBS GOODS (excluding classes), Thursday, September 16 through Thursday, September 19th (Sample Sunday). Come on in and shop until you drop!

It's also "International Talk Like A Pirate Day" on Sept. 19, and we plan to participate! Feel free to dress up, talk the talk, and walk the walk, let your inner pirate out, mateys! We will also have a treasure map...find treasures on all 4 Sample Sunday locations and enter to win a treasure chest full 'o loot!! Spend $24 or more at Prairieland Herbs and get two free gold shimmerlites put in your hair! (Shimmerlites are fun, tie-in hair highlights).

Dawn Suarez, of Morning Rain Massage, will be selling hula hoops and offering free mini hooping lessons, as well as running a wonderful TIE DYE STATION! Bring $10 and any cotton or cotton blend items you want to dye. This is a TON of fun!



Lynn Marie Parkey of Gauranga Reiki will be offering $5 mini reiki sessions, free herbal consultations, $25 aromatherapy necklaces, and have delicious elderberry truffles for sale!

Stamps Family Farm will be on hand promoting their sustainably-raised pork and offering samples and information.

Sally Kilkenny will have her gourmet homemade jams and jellies for sale.

Melodie Proffitt will be offering reflexology treatments.

Laura Hess will have beautiful upcycled jewelry, and doing "shimmerlites" - fun, sparkly tie-in hair highlights.

Maddie Hess will be selling handmade upcycled t-shirt bags!



Ebersole Cattle Company will have information about their grass-fed beef, and have limited beef items for sample and for sale.

Michelle White with Organic People salon will be doing $10 mini manicures and mini pedicures, and have a wonderful line of natural hair care items avaliable for sale.

Panora Pets will have kittens and cats available for adoption! Here is Walter, one of the adoptable kitties.



Rebecca Brandow of Willow Avenue Pottery will have her beautiful handmade pottery for sale.



Maggie's naturally dyed silk scarves and yarns will be available for sale too!

We had a group of DMACC students out to tour the farm today, learning about different types of local agriculture and small business. Here's Donna, doing her "professor thing". :)

Our wonderfully talented friend Angie is teaching a papermaking class at Prairieland Herbs, Saturday, September 11, from 1-3! She took some wonderful pictures of the process. I think it's so amazing to take JUNK MAIL, and turn it into something useful and beautiful! And have fun and be creative at the same time.


This class is going to be a lot of fun - we'll play with adding dried herbs and flowers, maybe some natural colorants, and even animal fibers, to add texture and interest to the paper. Angie is a creative genius, and super-friendly. Fun is guaranteed. :)





Also you get to take your paper-making screen (provided in class) home with you, so you can make more paper at home!




If you're interested in this class, please register online!

Some photo's from yesterday's super fun Sample Sunday :)


And more, here!

(photo from Des Moines Register)

It's wet here.

Not just wet, but flooding. Flash flooding, regular flooding, power outages, water main breaks....and more rain expected Friday.

Prairieland herbs is fine. The ground is soggy, the weeds are huge, the owners are tired of the triple digit heat indexes day after day...but we are not flooded. The roads near us our open, our roofs are tight, and our basements are dry. We are grateful.

But for our neighboring cities Ames, and Des Moines, the picture is not so pretty.

Here's an excellent blog post about the local flooding.

Our soapmaker, Karla, lives 4 miles north of Ames - the city that is experiencing the most massive flooding. She and her husband were awake all Tuesday night, while the storms raged, trying to keep their basement (her soap room) dry. At one point, they had four, yes, FOUR, sump pumps running to try and keep up. Between that, and the road closings all around her area, it's going to be difficult for her to get us soap for the next few days. We may experience some shipping delays; I hope you understand.

Driving to work, I can see the ditches are full of water. Whole sections of fields are drowned out. Small creeks have turned into small rivers. Dragonflies and frogs are EVERYWHERE. Strange and beautiful faerie rings of mushrooms are popping up everywhere. We are living in a swampland!


More photos of local flooding here: Des Moines Register photos

August luxury soap of the month is here! Juicy mint! This soap could NOT be more perfect for our hot and sticky weather. It is just perfect! Minty-cool with a hint of refreshing citrus. Unisex, refreshing, cool, and smells like candy YUM! Contains a blend of mint and citrus essential oils, has big bubbly lather, and cleans like nobody's business! We have 40 bars of this soap, and when it's gone, it's gone, so get yours now!

That's right, folks...it's almost Sample Sunday time again! Join us this Sunday, August 15, rain or shine (We have two air-conditioned buildings!) for a wonderful time in the country! Here's what's happening...

Lynn Marie Parkey of Gauranga Reiki will offer 25 diffuser charm necklaces and free mini-reiki. What's reiki, you ask? It's like an energy massage! A gentle, natural way to soothe, heal, and promote relaxation. Don't be shy..give it a try. :)


Melodie Proffitt, of Mind and Body Massage Therapy will be offering $30 reflexology sessions, $1 a minute chair massage, and has beautiful new art to showcase.




Tracy Barton-Rouse of Compassionate Creations will have beautiful, yoga-inspired jewelry for sale!



Dawn Suarez of Morning Rain Massage will have chair massages, ear candles for sale, and henna tattoos, $25 hula hoops, PLUS a SUPER COOL Tye-dye station! Bring your own item(s) to dye, $10 per item, make a mess and have lots of fun doing some fun and funky tye-dyeing!



Laura Hess will be offering SHIMMERLITES, fun, washable, semi-permanent sparkling hair highights! (I wear them and get more compliments...they are so fun). Also, she has beautiful, affordable typewriter jewelry and bottlecap keychains.





Michelle White of Beautiful People Organic Salon will be offering free hair consultations and doing mini manicures for $10. (She uses wonderful Prairieland Herbs products in her full, in-salon pedicures...and is our official "prairieland herbs pedicurist" - do make an appointment with her, you won't be sorry!). She will also have some natural haircare and styling products for sale - we get asked about natural styling products ALL THE TIME so this is a great time to talk to Michelle about options and recommendations!


We have two new guest vendors this time!

The Stamps Family will be answering questions about their heritage breed, pasture-raised pork, and taking orders for 2011.


And the Ebersole Cattle Company will be here, taking reservations for their wonderful, humanely-raised grain and grassfed beef.

Last but not least, visit our wonderful fosterkitties from Panora PETS. We have kittens and adults cats, boys and girls, all wonderful and sweet and ready for their new homes! Also Panora PETS is really needing money to pay some vet bills. If you have a few dollars or even some spare change, please consider bringing it and putting it in their donation jar. Donations of food or litter are welcome as well.

Little Sabrina is waiting for her new home!

And of course at Prairieland Herbs...we will have our new August luxury soap PLUS hydrosols on sale, a basket full of free samples, and the most luscious luxurious handmade herbal bodyproducts that money can buy. We look forward to seeing you this Sunday!

Not a sight you see on the farm everyday....a group of 10 old Buicks, from across the country and beyond (one came all the way from Canada!)

Donna found this in the yard; she thinks aliens are leaving us secret messages via sticks in the ground. What do you think? What's the message??

Please, folks, consider writing your congressperson about the many concerns of the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010. To find out how to contact your congressperson, go here. If you'd like some "talking points", see the last post, or visit this wonderful blog by the Soap Queen.

Here is the letter I sent today.

Congressman Latham,

I am writing to you to express my concern about the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010' (H.R. 5786). I run a small, natural-bodycare business with my mother. We have been in business for 12 years, and are proud to support our rural economy by using local herbs, grains, honey and beeswax to create our safe, natural, handmade herbal bodycare products. We support ourselves from this business; we built it from the ground up, on a shoestring budget, and now have a dedicated and devoted client base from Iowa, and around the world. People regularly send us thank you letters for making such pure, natural, bodycare products that keep them healthy and provide them with natural, affordable, locally-made alternatives to mass-produced bodycare products. But we are concerned that this Safe Cosmetics Act, while sounding good, has many fundamental flaws.

We use time-tested, basic ingredients to craft our simple products. We do not use complex chemicals or anything unsafe. Our ingredients are similar to what you would find in your kitchen: vinegar, raw sugar, oatmeal, herbs, oils. We FULLY AGREE that cosmetics should be produced safely, labeled correctly, and sold with the utmost concern for consumer health. But we believe this bill will NOT help these things, but rather, simply force small businesspeople such as ourselves out of business.

We believe this law is unnecessary. There are already laws in place to ensure that products such as ours are properly produced and labeled. The further labeling requirements stated in this bill would only make labels harder for consumers to read and understand, not easier.

We are also concerned that there is no full exemption for small businesses such as ours. We would be subject to the same (and unnessary, in the case of small businesses), paperwork and testing laws as large corporations such as Estee Lauder or Clinique.

I have worked in this industry for 12 years, and have a very good working knowledge of how small businesses such as mine operate. As a whole, we in this industry are ethical, and PROUD of our outstandingly good products. We are supporting our local economy, and ourselves, by producing extremely high quality natural bodycare products, and want nothing more than to continue to do so. I urge you to read this bill in it's entirety, and please, do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns. I assure you that while this bill sounds good, it really will do nothing to ensure consumer safety, and simply make it hard for small, ethical businesses to compete in today's already-tough marketplace.

Thank you for your time.

Maggie Howe
co-owner, Prairieland Herbs
prairielandherbs.com

The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 - sounds good, right? I mean who doesn't want good, safe, natural bodycare products? The problem is - this bill, as written would make it extremely difficult for small bodycare product producers, such as US, to continue to do what we do best - provide small batch natural artisan bodycare products.

If you would like to continue to have the freedom to purchase affordable bodycare products from businesses such as ours, please consider signing the petition AGAINST the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010, and encourage others to do so as well!

We have no problem complying with labelling and testing laws, but this bill is badly written and lacking scientific validity.

Here are a couple of great articles about this bill.

http://personalcaretruth.com/2010/07/1602/
http://sagescript.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-safe-cosmetics-bill-will-affect.html
http://essentialu.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/07/comments-concerns-regarding-the-safe-cosmetics-act-of-2010.html