The Freckled Farm Soap Company

Author: Crystal

  • What’s up Wednesday – 4/23

    Another busy, productive week on the farm! This past weekend we finally found time to build the buck house. Bad weather and incredibly busy schedules had forced us to put off that project a lot longer than we had originally planned. It came together nicely and will make a good home for our boys. Now we just need to paint it, put up the boys’ bed, hang the hay feeder, and fence. We should be picking up our buck in the next few weeks, so hopefully it will come together before then.

    We had a pretty unpleasant experience this weekend… While doing farm chores on Saturday we found a snake in the hay. At this point we don’t know if it was a baby black snake or baby copperhead. Our instincts said copperhead so we killed it and threw it far away in the woods. I would have never killed a black snake, but any copperhead needs to be eliminated! The babies are especially scary. After the fact we were looking at pictures of both baby black snakes and baby copperheads and they look quite similar. Either way a snake is a sign of mice and you do NOT want mice in your hay. So our “we think we might need to get a barn cat soon” turned to “we need to get a barn cat now!” We went to our friend Donna’s farm (Money Pitt Acres) to pick out one of the cats she was trying to rehome. We brought him home, set him up in a kennel on the porch and fed him. We were instructed to leave him in a kennel for a few days so he was able to learn that this was his new home. Unfortunately, yesterday, when Kevin was cleaning out the kennel the cat got out and ran away and we haven’t seen him since. We are all very upset about it and have tuna sitting on the porch hoping he will come back… which I sure will attract more than just our cat, but it’s worth the risk.

    We are still working on the new scrubs and bath teas! We are hoping to debut them at the opening of My Manakin Market on May 3rd. We have gotten the thumbs up from our testers and now it just requires us to get labels together. We are so excited about offering these awesome new products! We are also only a week away from debuting our May goat milk soap! Check back to see what it is.

  • RVA Earth Day

    This weekend we will be selling our goat milk soaps at the RVA Earth Day Festival! This is a huge event and we are so excited to be a part of it.

    Earth Day

    April 26th, 2014

    11am – 7pm

    Manchester and Mayo Island

  • What’s up Wednesday – 4/9

    I’m sorry that I have been so bad with the farm updates lately. Things have been a little crazy around here. I am done edited in the pictures from Hillary’s labor, now comes the issue of finding time to write the blog post… But I promise it will be soon. The babies are doing wonderfully. They are about twice the size they were at birth. They are so much fun and the kids absolutely love spending time with them in the kid pasture. They all have such wonderful personalities and are going to make great additions to our herd.

    We are so behind in our gardening this year. Anything that needed to be started inside has been done, but anything that could have been planted outside already (peas, green onions, and such) have been put off. None of our new beds have even been filled with dirt yet… schedules and weather has delayed the delivery, but it is set to come tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully the yard will be dry enough for them to drive across it!

    The baby chicks are getting so big. One of the ones that we thought was a buff orpington, because it was identical to the other buff orpingtons the day they were delivered, turned out to be one of the easter eggers, and one of the ones that we thought was an easter egger we think might in fact be one of the marans. It does look like we may have gotten multiple maran roosters, but only time will tell on that one. It won’t be long and we will be moving the older chickens into the pasture so they can free range and the new chicks into the old coop. I can’t wait to see how the maran eggs turn out!

    Just when you think we have enough going on…. We have some exciting news! We will soon be adding salt scrubs, sugar scrubs, and bath teas to our line!! We are currently in the research and development phase, but I expect to debut them in the next month, just as soon as our testers give our recipes a thumbs up. So keep an eye out for those!

    The Wednesday market in Goochland Courthouse moved outside last week. It was so nice to be out in the sun and the children liked having the space to run, and playground to play on. We will be outside from now on so come and visit. We have some really great vendors! Today there should be a few veggies, eggs, sausage, brunswick stew, bread, goat cheese, mustard… and of course our soaps!

  • The Freckled Farm’s First Friday Book Club – The Dirty Life

    Better late than never I guess!! As many of you know the last few weeks have been a little crazy on The Freckled Farm. Between the babies being born, everyday farm chores, shows, farmer markets, the photography business, and raising two little ones of our own, our heads are spinning… and I’m not sure it’s going to slow down anytime soon (nor do I want it too). I’m now playing catch up and just getting around to writing this months book club post. I will also get back on track with our “What’s up Wednesday” post this week as well.

    Our April First Friday Book Club book is The Dirty Life: A memoir of Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball!

    The Dirty Life

    The Dirty Life is another one of those stories where a city girl drops everything to move to a farm and live off of the land. In this particular book Kristin comes to this life change after meeting her future husband, Mark, when she was sent to interview him about his farm and CSA. They quickly fall in love and begin a journey to live off the land and leave the smallest footprint possible. The book is honestly written, covering the hardships as well as the triumphs. It shows the affects of this transition on their relationship and mental state. It’s not an easy road, but one that is most definitely worth taking. It’s a truly inspiring novel.

    Have you read this book? Let me know what you think!

  • The Weekend of April 5th-6th

    We have a very busy weekend ahead of us! We will be in two different locations on Saturday. Kevin will be at Spring Bada Bing, while my buddy Lauren and I will be at the Fredericksburg Spring Arts and Craft Show. Kevin and I will be in Fredericksburg together on Sunday. Come out and see us and stock up on some goat milk soap!

    April 5th 2014 

    Spring Bada-Bing

    11am-5pm

    Hardywood Park Craft Brewery

     2408 Ownby Ln, Richmond, VA 23220

    April 5th and 6th, 2014

     Fredericksburg Spring Arts and Crafts Faire

    Sat 10-6 – Sun 11-4

    2371 Carl D. Silver Pkwy Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401

  • Spring Goat Milk Soap Giveaway

    Spring is finally here!! This winter was rough and it felt like it went on forever. I don’t think there has ever been a year where I was more excited for this season change, and to celebrate we have decided to do a giveaway with the newest addition to our goat milk so line – our Spring soap!

    Our Spring soap is the first soap in our “season” series. Each season this year we will debut a new soap to represent that season. It will only be available during that season, so if you are a fan you will need to stock up or wait for it to come around again next year.

    Our Spring soap is scented with the essential oil of calendula, also know as Pot Marigold. It has a deep floral scent and because of the essential oil is naturally yellow. It is topped with the wispy yellow petals of the calendula flower. This beautiful bar just screams SPRING!

    Spring Giveaway - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    Enter to win THREE goat milk soap bars from The Freckled Farm Soap Company… Two bars of our new Spring soap, and an additional bar of your choice.

    Our soaps are all natural made with natural oils, essential oils for fragrance, and of course raw goat milk.

    a Rafflecopter giveaway

    Giveaway blogWe will be verifying the winning entry. If you have not followed through with your entry, for example you did not actually “like” us on Facebook, or did not follow through with subscribing to the blog, your entry will be voided and you will not be eligible to win the prize. You must live in the US to enter this giveaway.

    If you have any questions regarding this giveaway or our soap in general please feel free to email me – crystal@thefreckledfarmsoapcompany.com

  • What’s up Wednesday – 3/19

    The post is coming a little late today. We had a crazy day to top off a very eventful week. Tina kidded early this morning. One kid was born before we got outside to her at 5am and the other came shortly after. The second kid came out in a bad position, making it a very complicated birth. I am extremely grateful that we got to her in time for that one. I will write a separate post where I go into more detail about her labor later. Tina was the last goat to kid. Hillary kidded Sunday, so all of our 2014 kids are here!

    While you wait for the post about Hillary and Tina’s kidding I thought I would go ahead and share a little sneak peek picture of all of the cuteness to come… This is Chelsea

    The Freckled Farm Soap Company - Chelsea

    Tomorrow is the first day of spring!! And to celebrate we are introducing our new “Spring” Goat Milk Soap and running a giveaway where one lucky winner will win two bars of our spring soap along with one additional bar of their choice. Check back tomorrow to enter the giveaway!!

  • What’s up Wednesday – 3/12

    The chicks came yesterday afternoon!! I don’t have any good pictures yet. Only a few taken with my phone and I’m not sure they are even in sharp focus. The chicks arrived happy and healthy! We did have one little problem… one of our chicks was wrong. We ordered 4 female easter eggers and 1 male and that is what we got (as far as we know… it is still possible the chicks were sexed wrong). We also ordered 3 male buff orpingtons as filler to make our order reach the required minimum. We received these chickens and they will be used as meat bird.  The issue came with our black copper marans. We ordered 7 females and 1 male and we only got 7 total marans. In it’s place was an additional buff orpington. We are hoping that the missing maran was not our rooster. If he is missing we will not be able to breed more pure bred marans as we had planned. We don’t plan to do it as a business, just for ourselves and friends who might show interest in this rare breed. So, it won’t be a huge hit if we don’t end up with a rooster, just a disappointment. I called the hatchery and they refunded me for the mistake and were very helpful.

    This doesn’t compare to the drama that was involved with our last chicken order almost two years ago. Breckin was two and a half and Bryce was about a month old. I went to pick them up from the post office and was told that there was problem with my birds… that the box really stunk. So I put the box in the back of the SUV, put the kids in their car seats, rolled all of the windows down, and drove home trying to figure out how to handle this situations. I knew I had at least one dead bird. The only thing that could account for that smell was death. When I got home I put the chick box on the porch, gave Breckin a snack and put him in front of the TV, and tried to get Bryce comfortable in her chair. I brought the box into the dinning room where I had the brooder set up and opened it up. At the bottom of the box was a poor dead chick that had been squished (I will spare you the details) and another that was injured. I started to pull the live birds out of the box, dipping their beaks in water to encourage them to drink, and then putting them into the brooder. That is when I encountered our next issue. I had made the brooder out of an old dog kennel. It seemed like a good size, would be easy to clean, and would protect the baby chicks… if it could keep them from escaping. Come to find out that the spaces between the bars were too wide. I would put the chicks in and they would just squeeze right out. So here I was with a dead chick, an injured chick, healthy chicks that I couldn’t leave in the box with the other two, a brooder that the chicks could easily escape, a 2.5 year old, and a one month old. What was I going to do? Well, I called my amazing friend Ginni who happened to be off that day and begged her to come help me. She was at the house within minutes. We wrapped the outside of the lower half of the kennel with chicken wire, got the healthy chicks comfortable, and then started to tend to the injured chick. It wouldn’t move it’s legs. Ginni wasn’t sure the chick was going to make it, but showed me what I could do to help her and answered dozens of questions over the next 24 hours as I tried to nurse it back to health. The injured chick past away after a day. Our other girls grew up to be healthy beautiful chickens, but it wasn’t the best way to start off. I will take getting a wrong chick over that mess any day!

    Hillary is now 6 days away from her due date and Tina is exactly a week. Hillary has been close to labor for days now. Her ligaments are almost gone and she has spent the last two days moaning none stop. She seems so incredibly uncomfortable. We put the intercom up in the barn so I could constantly monitor her. I think she will go into labor in the next few days!

    Hopefully next week’s “What’s up Wednesday” includes pictures and stories about our new goat kids! It’s all so exciting! I love this time of year!

  • Monday Makeover – Homemade Deodorant

    I’m terribly sorry that our Monday Makeover came a week late this month, but at least you had the bonus “all natural body care post” a few weeks ago when I wrote about using our goat milk soap as shampoo, which allowed me to take another chemical filled body care product off my list, so hopefully that made up for the delay. Anyways, this month I decided to tackle the recipe that I was most worried about, deodorant. It seemed like fate was forcing me to do it. No one wants to stink and we have all heard people making fun of those who use alternative deodorant options. I was not looking forward to becoming one of those people, but it had to be done.

    At the beginning of this month I lost my deodorant. I actually LOST my deodorant. It wasn’t like I was traveling and left it somewhere. I somehow managing to misplace it in my house, and while my house is sometimes the cluttered mess of a house that inhabits two small children it’s certainly not THAT messy. During that time I either didn’t wear any deodorant (if I was staying home.. something I would do even if I knew where my deodorant was) or I wore Kevin’s. I couldn’t bring myself to buy more. After looking everywhere I finally found it… it was in our room stuffed under a pile of paperwork. The kids must have stuffed it there. I used it for two days and it ran out. It was like I was being told that I needed to stop using it and make my own.

    Deodorant was the body product I was most worried about. I was worried about the chemicals and most importantly the aluminum. I knew this was a product that I had to tackle, but I was hesitant because, as I said before, I didn’t want to walk around smelling bad. I had been looking around for a recipe for a while when I ran across this one by A Blossoming Life. I liked the ingredients included in this recipe better than others I had seen, so I decided to give it a try.

    Homemade Deodorant  

    • 1/4 cup Baking Soda
    • 1/4 cup Corn Starch
    • 5 Tablespoons Coconut Oil
    • 5-20 Drops of Tea Tree

    Combine baking soda and corn starch and mix well. Melt the coconut oil for a few seconds in the microwave, then mix it into the baking soda and corn starch. Finally add the tea tree. Pour the mixture into an old deodorant stick or Tupperware and put it in the fridge to allow the mixture to harden. I didn’t want to take the time to clean out my old deodorant, so I put it in one of our glass containers. It doesn’t have to stay in the refrigerator. It’s only in there to set.

    The first few days of use the mixture was so hard that I had to use a spoon to scrape off the amount I wanted to use (maybe because it was colder in the house and coconut oil has a fairly low melting point, 76 degrees). After a few days the deodorant loosened up a bit to a more lotion like constancy and I was able to just scoop it out with my fingers, although I wish I had bothered to go to the extent of putting it in an old deodorant stick because it would have been much easier to apply and a lot lets messy.

    So, how well did it work? Maybe not as good as your average, chemical-filled deodorant, but it does the job. I’ve worn it for over a week now. I even gave it the true test in some “sweaty” situations like loading into our show this past weekend and working a craft show all day long, and for the most part it held up. While I didn’t feel like I smelled “pretty” I certainly didn’t feel like I stunk… which is all I am really aiming for. I plan to continue wearing it. I feel better knowing that I’m not putting chemicals on my skin and I trust that it is doing the job.

     

  • The Freckled Farm First Friday Book Club – Sheepish

    This month on The Freckled Farm First Friday Book Club I am recommending the wonderful book Sheepish by Catherine Friend

    Sheepish

    Just so you don’t think that I am completely bias towards goats I have decided to go ahead and throw in this delightful book that predominately features sheep! One of the things that I love about this book is that it talks about the “middle.” In fact, it is the theme of the book. There are a ton of farming memoirs out there that talk about the start of a farm. Most likely because it is the most interesting time for a farm and it’s farmers, but for once it would be nice to read about what comes next. What happens after the farm is established? Farms constantly change and grow, how do you keep going from year to year? How do you deal the heartache?

    In Sheepish Catherine is in that place in her farming career… the middle. Catherine struggles to find her true place on the farm. She feels like it comes so naturally to her partner Melissa, while she questions if this is what she really wants to be doing. She occasionally contemplates selling the farm and touring the country in an RV, but knows that this will destroy Melissa. The book follows her as she searches for, and discovers, a part of the farm that she feels like she can call her own, something she can be passionate about. Ms. Friend has a wonderful sense of humor and the book is beautifully written. By the end of the book you will be considering an all wool wardrobe… no kidding.

    Have you read Sheepish? Leave your thoughts in the comment section.