Weekend and Half off Discount

Thank you so much for all your comments and entries. I really did appreciate reading every one. For those of you interested in making home made lotions and salves and things, I just wanted to encourage you to give it a try. It’s so easy, it’s so much healthier for you and it can save you so much money. Plus it can be a fun and creative outlet. Today I’m going to make it cheaper to get started. Today when you buy Simple Hand Crafted Body Care and you’ll get it for half off! It’s only good for Friday. I was having problems with the discount, but I think I have it working now, so if you don’t see a discount of $3 off in place when you order, email me and I’ll reimburse you!

Last Saturday we had a family weeding day. We needed all 10 of our hands to make a dent in the enormous amount of weeds we have growing. Scott got to the far part of the garden and as he was pulling weeds he hollered, ‘hey did you know we have a whole row of iris’ over here?’ And so we do! Gardening as a family goes at a slow pace, but we all ended up in such a happy, exhausted mood at the end of the day.

The wee one and I made a lunchtime salad with our mustard, arugula, lettuce and calendula petals.

The apple trees are in bloom and I have to get the coddling moth traps out before it’s too late!

Our baby chicks have grown into chickens so fast! We’ve put them in with the rooster and existing hens and so far everything seems to be going rather peacefully.

What you lookin’ at?

A Five Year Giveaway: e-booklet & $50 Mountain Rose Herbs Gift Certificate

Thank you for all your entries, but this contest is now closed.
We try our best to keep things rather simple around here. If it’s one thing I’ve realized over the years is I have a rather low tolerance for busyness. Too many activities packed into one small time frame make me frazzled. Things can’t always be simple and this week feels like a culmination of extra busyness. I’m having a hard time keeping my head on straight. I’m sure you can relate! So I’m going to use this space to show some gratuitously calming photos and to focus us all on good things. Like a giveaway.

As I mentioned a post or two back, this month marks five years of blogging for me. Which is a long time! At least a milestone worth celebrating. So I’ve teamed up with Mountain Rose Herbs, my go to company for buying my oils, butters, herbs and spices, and we’re going to give one lucky winner a free copy of my e-booklet, Simple Hand Crafted Body Care along with a $50 gift certificate! Yippee!

While all this busyness has been swirling around I’ve started to make a mental note of a new box of items I want to order from MRH. We place one big order about three to four times a year. They have such great customer service and run their zero-waste company right in my alma mater town of Eugene, Oregon, which makes my faithfulness to them all the stronger. If you haven’t bought my booklet now, hopefully you will get the chance to win and if you don’t, we’ll continue to celebrate on Friday by having a 50% off sale. How does that sound?

(this a picture of the body butter from the booklet, we use this every single day!)
I’m thinking for my next Mountain Rose Herbs order I need to stock up on both cocoa butter and shea butter to make some more deodorant and I want to learn more about carrier oils. Typically I use olive oil, grapeseed oil or safflower oil for my lotions, but there are so many out there that I want to learn about. I’m thinking that might be interesting to you too, if I made up a bunch of lotions using different carrier oils to see how they felt. I also want to try some new essential oil combinations, so I’ll most certainly add a few to the order. And, if you know Scott, and have seen our entire cabinet devoted to herbs and spices, he’ll fill up our order full of culinary goodies.

So leave me a comment expressing your interest and I’ll call a winner Thursday evening around 9pm Pacific time. If you tweet or share on facebook or ‘pin’ the top image you can get the chance to enter again, just leave me a separate comment for each social media share you used. Much luck to you all!   Closed! Thank you for all your entries!

Promises of Spring

Despite the fact that a well used room in our house looks something like this as of lately and that it has been causing all of us undue stress…

when you walk through that plastic doorway to the kitchen, or rather when you go outside and walk around the outside of the house to the back kitchen door because you aren’t supposed to walk in this area yet, you’ll find…

…these very lovely promises of spring sprouting up more often on our kitchen counters. Oh fresh veggies, how our taste buds and bodies have missed you so!

Meanwhile Miscellany

Goodness, where have I been the past two weeks? Well, that is in part due to the dreaded stomach flu that my children had and in part due to the fact that my camera USB cord bit the dust. What’s a blog post without photographs? Not too interesting in my opinion, despite the fact that one of my favorite blogs has never posted a picture. However the new cable is here and my spring growth photos are ready for sharing!

: :  This week marks FIVE years of blogging for this Sonoma garden. Amazing that so much time has passed. I’m going to celebrate, so stay tuned!

: :  I cracked open the hives for the first time since late October and I had expected to find little honey and lots of brood in the top box. I was surprised to find full top boxes full of new honey! I didn’t feel it was warm enough to break apart the hive down to the brood boxes quite yet. So I took some frames of honey and moved them up into a new box on top to entice them up. Beekeeping is such a fascinating hobby, as you don’t just learn about bees, but so much more about the local ecology, such as what is blooming at the moment. Thank you eucalyptus, willow, bay, manzanita, mustard and wild radish for that new honey & pollen!

: :  We got brave and planted a whole slew of new seedlings about three weeks ago. Lettuce, radishes, chinese mustard, broccoli rabe, cabbage and the such. Last year when we did such a thing our seedlings got eaten to the ground. We suspected birds or maybe pill bugs. Maybe flea beetles, we didn’t know who was to blame. So this year we covered a section with row cover. They too got nibbled on. The culprits? Pill bugs! They got my pepper box poppy seedlings too, the buggers!

: : Have you seen Floret Flower Farm’s new blog project? She’s pairing with another flower farmer/florist on the opposite side of the country to post an arrangement each week. Sort of reminds me of the old 3191 Evening/Morning posts, remember those? Anyway, to die for creations! We have so many flowers growing here, but arranging is certainly not my gift, not like these ladies.

: : I have been scheming of how I can get myself to the Taproot Gathering next autumn in New Hampshire. One of my closest friends of 20 years just moved to New Hampshire. I have to make this happen, but how?

: : My friend and neighbor, just took a workshop from from Tumbleweed Tiny Houses and had me over for tea to talk about it and show me the books she got. And now I have tiny houses on the brain. Which is ridiculous because our family of five just moved out of a relatively tiny house and I’m quite enjoying stretching our legs out in this larger house. But wouldn’t they be fun to build? What a great little retreat or guest cabin. Then the idea of building led me back to Riana’s photostream, which I’ve been following for years. And now I have plastering and milk paint making on the brain. Which of course led me to straw bale building, which is what Scott and I really want to do some day. In the meanwhile, let’s all encourage Michelle to build a tiny house!