Summer is gone, Winter is coming

The last month has been a blur, with our warm nights gone we are now starting to get ready for winter.

Our first freeze happened on September 27th and it was hard enough that when we went out the next morning all my tomato vines were blackened. 

Because we saw it coming, my husband came home from work and we spent an hour or more outside harvesting everything we could  find to bring in. 

This is what we could bring in, Tomatoes, Winter Sqash, Carrots, some Peppers and only one more Watermelon. My lovely girls wanted to showoff the carrots and watermelon :)

We didn't hardly get any of the tomatoes that were on the vines and found out later after quite a few freezing nights that we could have harvested the green ones and stored them over winter and they would have rippened. Unfortunately it was too late and the vines went flat.

I felt so bad seeing them all out there but they didn't taste very well since they had froze. We are pulling the vines and all the tomatoes so I don't have them all trying to reseed next year.

I did however get a good yield of Spaghetti Squash as you can see.
I had to fight the mice over growing these guys and I only had 2 vines (out of an original 10) going but I am pretty happy with the turnout, I just hope they all were ready since we just brought in everything.

Our strawberry plants are still looking great and so are a few herbs but everything else, including my grapes are down for the season. Praying the grapes will make it thru the winter!!

We also didn't get all of the onions or potatoes, technically the potatoes can still be harvested but I am not sure how long they will store. We had friends come over on Saturday right after the first freeze and they happily took 3 rows of onions. While they were with us they shared some of their chili harvest.

One of many batches roasted.

Now that everything is dead we are ripping it all out and tilling some straw in, now we get to plant some garlic we ordered.

Hope everyone is enjoying the change in weather.

Soap and More Soap

Thursday morning we gathered up our supplies and went to my mother in laws so we could make soap.

The day started off pretty bad, our scale seemed to be really off and once sorting the supplies we discovered we had only half the lye we thought we did.

I pulled out our other scale and we played with them for a bit and then got to work.

One of my many lovely oil stirring assitants

We did FOUR 5lb batches and a 2.5lb batch---72 bars total!! Hoping to go to town and get more lye to knock out another 20-30lbs.

Most of the stuff I made was very common to us (Sandalwood, Jasmine, Relaxing and Dragons Blood) but one (the 2.5lb batch) was an experiment. I had bought some shreaded loofah from Bramble Berry early this spring and after sorting out the supplies I decided I wanted to make an Energy with loofah bar. It looks and smelles amazing. I am anxiously waiting to cut into it and see the loofah pieces. From the top it looks like grated peels of lemon or orange. I will post back how it turns out when we use a bar in 4-6 weeks.

A presoak of the loofah in melted oils

See the flecks of Loofah it looks beautiful!!

On Saturday after Farmers Market we went back over there to cut and stack them all the bars and since we had time we made 15lbs more.

 We did the a Mocha blend using coffee as the base with some cocoa powder blended in (hense the Mocha name), some Chai Tea, and Cucumber Melon.

That will make a total of 120 bars ready for testing on July 23.

I plan on trying some new soap for my vegan customers that will use no milk or creams and all animal free oils. I am troubled as to what scent to make it though. If you want to help decide check out our website and see all the types I can make.

Here is the first 72 bars. Notice the top right one is gelling already :)