So much pretty

I love my yard.

After renting for so many years, I am so happy to be able to GROW things and PLANT things.  I feel rooted!

And I love all the thrills of discovery as the established plantings in this particular yard pop up and bloom.

giant purple columbine

small purple double columbine


Rhododendron


tall purple iris


Flax


More purple columbines because they're just so amazingly pretty.



And the last one for today, a plant that I bought because I saw it near the cash register in the greenhouse when I only went in to buy a couple herbs and it somehow got added to my total and it followed me home and it's not my fault really it was just so pretty. Ahem.

This is a Clematis texensis 'Princess Diana'.



Seriously, though, isn't that a splendid flower?!

Om nom nom...

Rice bowls for dinner!



Chicken, red bell pepper, carrot, onion, pak choi (from the garden!), and mushrooms sautéed with garlic, ginger, turmeric, and coriander. Served over brown rice and topped with fresh cilantro (from the garden!), lime juice, sesame seeds, and coconut milk.

Great googly moogly that was good.

All the kinds of soap

More soap again today.  Because of this:



That's my laundry soap jar.  Sadly, it is empty.  I sent Emma downstairs last night to do some more of her giant pile of laundry, and she came back up very quickly, telling me in triumph, "I can't do laundry, there's no soap!"  I could hear the cheering inside her head.

Well.

I have been mixing my own laundry soap for two years now, and it's great.  I did the first batch in May 2013, and then a second batch in May 2014.  The second time around, I left out the baking soda and made up the difference in volume with washing soda/borax, and couldn't tell that it made a speck of difference.  Each of those 9-cup batches lasted us a year, so here we are in May again and it's laundry soap time.

This time around, though, I paused before buying a bar of Fels-Naptha.  Soap... hmmm.  I can MAKE that!  Without fragrance or color or extra chemicals!

So I got out the lard and lye, and mixed up a quick batch of soap.  The other soaps I've made were cold-process batches, where the mixture is not cooked but rather left to sit for 4-6 weeks after molding to allow the soap to harden and fully saponify.

Today, though, I needed to do laundry immediately and couldn't wait 4-6 weeks for curing. So I did this batch as hot-process.

Since this is for laundry soap, I also made this batch with 0% superfat, meaning that all the oil will react with the lye and no oil will be left over at the end.  Normal people-washing soap is usually about 5% superfatted, since having a little un-reacted oil left over is a good thing.  Superfatted soap isn't as harsh and drying, and feels better on your skin. However, you don't want a lot of free oil floating around in a load of laundry, so no superfatting on this batch.

Hot process soap starts out the same as cold process soap: mixing up the lye water and adding it to the liquid fat.  I used 100% lard this time, since it's just for laundry and I didn't want a soap that will be really bubbly in the washing machine.  I mixed with the stick blender until trace.

Then the difference comes in.  Hot process soap is cooked to speed up the saponification.  I put it in the crock pot, on low, and let it go until all the lye was reacted (about an hour).  At the end, it sort of looks like Vaseline, translucent and silky.



Then I put it in the mold and let it cool down for a couple hours.



And then I cut it into bars.  This was a two-pound batch, and I cut it into 6 bars of approximately 5.5 ounces each (the same as a bar of Fels-Naptha).  Since this was made by hot-process, the soap is ready to use immediately!  It's still good to let it sit for a while to harden, but the saponification is complete and it won't burn like a cold process soap that hasn't cured long enough.



But this is for laundry, so I grated a bar and combined it with the washing soda and borax.  And now I'm set for another year.  Actually, I have enough soap for six years of laundry!



Each of my bars of laundry soap costs $1.54 (Fels-Naptha bar = $4.31).  The total cost of this 9-cup batch of laundry soap is $4.41.  That's about $0.03 per load of laundry.

I love being crafty.

Turmeric soap

You didn't really think there was only going to be one batch of soap, did you?



I made this late Friday night, and cut it into bars Sunday morning.  This is a two-pound loaf of olive oil, coconut oil, and lard soap.  I divided the batch before I poured it into the mold, and mixed a teaspoon of turmeric into about a third of the batter.  I poured the white first, then the orange, and gave it a swirl with a chopstick.  The white portion of the batter is scented with rosemary and mint essential oils.

Oh, and also I had to get a soap mold.  Because toys are fun.



I'm very pleased with the way this came out.

Garden 5.3.15

First harvest!  Emma and I had a lovely salad with dinner tonight, consisting of lettuce, spinach, pak choi, and lemon balm leaves.  Garden to plate in less than ten minutes.  Love it.



The garden is doing great, despite some light frosts over the past few weeks.



The lettuce we had for supper was the result of a much-needed thinning, and the other greens were selected leaves snipped off because we couldn't wait anymore.  As you can see, the Black Seeded Simpson lettuce germinated very enthusiastically and the rows are bursting.  The pak choi (closest row to the front) is starting to form little vase-shaped heads with thickened cupped stems!



The peas are almost a foot high, and the onions are approaching an inch in diameter, though I don't think any bulbs are forming yet.



The herb containers are doing well- front to back this is oregano, rosemary, lemon balm, peppermint, and lemon thyme.



The strawberry jar is blooming up a storm, the pansy box is beautiful, and the curly willow is getting all leafy.



The half barrels are still somewhat sparse, but I planted marigolds, alyssum, a coreopsis, a Shasta daisy, lemongrass and a salvia yesterday.  The snapdragons went in last weekend and are blooming great.



I bought some freesia bulbs on a whim about a month ago, and stuck them in a conveniently empty pot on the deck.  To my delight, they are growing!  I love freesia.



The primrose pot on the front porch got some alyssum for added interest,



and I planted a hanging basket (found at the thrift store for a dollar) with three white Bacopa starts.  There's another just like this hanging in the back yard.



The columbine in the front bed is just starting to bloom, with this pink one looking quite spectacular.



There's also a couple red ones that look more like the native columbine, a bit smaller and more demure.



The forget-me-nots are also starting, with this pink clump that opened a couple days ago.



The dwarf irises continue to be beautiful.



But the stars of the yard right now are the lilacs.  I have white ones...



and purple ones.



I have all the windows open, and no matter where I go, inside the house or out, I am enveloped in a cloud of fragrance.  Amazingly gloriously beautiful.

Chemistry lab

I did a little chemistry experiment yesterday. I investigated the interaction of a strong alkali with two mixed fats, and the saponification resulting from said combination.

I made soap.

First you dissolve lye (sodium hydroxide) in water. I used 85 g of lye in 225 ml of water. Lye is a very nasty, strong chemical, and it is imperative that you wear gloves and eye protection when handling it. You put the lye into the water, never ever EVER the other way around, or it might volcano up and burn you. It gets VERY hot, VERY fast, all by itself, in addition to being highly caustic and giving off fumes. I did this part of the process outside.

Love those exothermic reactions. Be careful.



I had a hard time finding lye in my town, because it’s used to make methamphetamine. None of the supermarkets or big box stores carry it, but I finally found it at a small hardware store.

You have to let the lye solution cool- it spiked up to almost 200 F in less than a minute! While it’s cooling, you melt the oils (if necessary). For this batch I used oils which are solid at room temperature: 175g of coconut oil and 425g of lard. Yes, lard. I have never in my life bought a container of lard, but now I have. Apparently it makes good soap. So there you go.



When the lye solution and oil are both about 110 F, it’s time to combine them. You carefully pour the lye (no splashing!) into the oils, and stir. I used my spiffy little immersion blender because otherwise I would have been mixing by hand for more than half an hour. I used it in short bursts interspersed with hand mixing. This combines the lye and oil, and the reaction starts.



The thing to watch for is “trace.” This is when the mixture starts to look like pudding and will hold the line of a dribble on its surface. You don’t want to mix too vigorously or too fast, because depending on the recipe the mixture might get to trace very quickly and you wouldn’t be able to get it into the mold before it sets up.  Here you can see the outline of the mixer head left in the goop after I lifted it out.  That's trace.



It took my soap less than 10 minutes to get to trace, then I quickly blended in some lime and sweet orange essential oils just for fun and poured it into the mold. I have a very high-tech mold, as you can see.



It's just a shoe box lined with aluminum foil with a layer of plastic wrap on top.  You DON'T want the raw soap to come in direct contact with the foil because lye will react with aluminum, eating it away and releasing hydrogen gas.  I used the aluminum liner because it's a pretty flimsy box and I thought it would make the sides more rigid, but I don't think it was necessary and I won't do that next time. Then I wrapped the box in towels for insulation and left it for 24 hours to let the saponification magic work.



I unmolded it tonight and cut it into bars. 



A little wobbly, but rustic is good, right?  Even though the bars are somewhat hard after only a day, they're not ready to use yet.  They need time to allow the saponification process to complete and to fully harden.  So I stood them up in the box lid and stuck it in the back of my cupboard to cure. They'll be ready to use in a month, give or take.



This was really easy, and it’s something I’ve always wanted to try. The possibilities of fragrance and additive combinations are virtually endless. I think peppermint soap may be next.  I’m not really a perfumy froo-froo kind of girl -- I tend to buy unscented if it’s an option -- but this was fun!

Garden 4.22.14

Breaking news!  I have baby strawberries!  The first two flowers that bloomed are forming fruits!



Emma went around the bed and counted all the flowers as I was weeding this afternoon.  She reports that we now have 19 open flowers, plus "eleven billion and four" that haven't opened yet.  I can't wait.

Also of note today were bleeding hearts,



and the first iris is open!