If you are a fan of Lavender then we’ve got you covered!
Who doesn’t like lavender? It’s one of our most popular scents and it pleases just about everyone. So for all of you lavender lovers out there we have four awesome Lavender products for you… Lavender Goat Milk Soap, Goat Milk Lotion, Goat Milk Laundry Soap, and our Lavender Beeswax Candle. Enjoy!
Our Goat Milk Soap Laundry Detergent is really special. Before we started making it we were always searching for a detergent that wouldn’t cause our daughter (who was a toddler at the time) to break out in hives. Her skin was incredibly sensitive and it seemed like any contact with clothing washed in detergent that wasn’t free and clear would make her skin develop these horrible red splotches. We decided we wanted to make something that would be sensitive enough of her to use and that wouldn’t put nasty chemicals into our water system.
So we developed this simple, yet incredibly powerful, detergent. It gets out the tough stains left behind from our farm, like red clay, without irritating our daughter’s sensitive skin, and is nearly suds-free, making it better for your machine and our water system. It’s made with our Castile Goat Milk Soap, borax, and washing soda. You only use a tablespoon… that’s right a tablespoon!
You can start by purchasing one of our adorable refillable glass jars ($20 each). Which comes with a cute wooden scoop (pictured above). Once you have used the detergent in the jar you can refill it with our laundry refills. The refills are only $8 each which means the loads only costs about 14 cents each!
Do you want to try out our laundry detergent? You can find it here!
We are shaking up the “Best Soap for” series today by writing about the best laundry soap for work out clothes! Workout clothes get extra funky and sometimes it takes a special detergent to get them really clean. So which of our four laundry detergent varieties should you be using?
Tea Tree Goat Milk Laundry Detergent
Workout clothes have a habit of developing a stale scent and many detergents have a hard time getting them totally clean. Our Tea Tree Goat Milk Laundry Detergent is a high powered deodorizer. It knocks out musky sweat smells and leaves your workout clothes smelling clean and fresh!
Find our Tea Tree Goat Milk Laundry Detergent Here
Have you had the opportunity to try our Goat Milk Soap Laundry Detergent yet?
Most people are very conscious of the products that they use on and put into their body. It’s time for us to think about the products we use on our clothing that sits against our skin all day. Our detergent is all natural. You simply use one tablespoon. That’s it! You don’t need any additional soaps or fabric softeners. It gets even the tough stains out and leaves your clothes feeling soft and smelling clean. Once you use it you will wonder why all laundry detergents aren’t this simple.
Our Goat Milk Soap Laundry Detergent is safe to be used in both top loader and high efficiency machines. Our recipe has minimal sudsing, which is much better for your machine and clothes, and the ingredients are gentler on your machine and the environment!
Find our Goat Milk Laundry Detergents Here
We put our Goat Milk Soap and other products through rigorous testing before we make it available to the public. We don’t want to release a product that isn’t of the highest quality, so we take our soap testers’ and customers’ feedback very seriously.
When it comes to our soap we spent around six months developing the perfect recipe and then another few months having our soap testers use the soap and give us feedback. They gave us feedback on how the soap made their skin feel, and how they felt about the quality of the lather. If they had skin conditions they informed us of how the soap affected it. After about a year from when we first started to develop our unique recipe we finally felt that it was ready to roll out to the public.
When it came to our laundry detergent we wanted to make sure we had testers with all kinds of machines; new, old, top loader, high efficiency. We had them share their experience with different types of stains and how the detergent affected different types of clothing. A great deal of research had gone into the recipe of our goat milk laundry detergent, but feedback from our testers means so much when it comes to the final product.
This year we have several new products debuting and you better believe that we are putting each one of those products through the paces! You can always be assured that we won’t release a product that we don’t feel is perfect.
It’s April!! Spring is really starting to settle in and temperatures are rising slowly. The trees around the farm are starting to bloom, the garden is coming together, and we have lots of babies running around. It’s a wonderful time to live on a farm!
Last Friday Hillary finally had her babies. She was actively in labor for well over 24 hours. All day Thursday she was panting heavily, and had several very strong contractions. We sat with her from 9pm-11pm because we were sure it was going to happen any second. She was up and down, and having contractions here and there. Finally after two hours without much progression we decided it would be a good idea to get some sleep… because as we all know a watched goat never kids. We had a restless night with all of the moaning and movement coming over the monitor, but nothing changed, and when morning farm chores came along she had not progressed at all.
Kevin went to check on Hillary around 8am and she had started to push. It wasn’t long before a little doe was born and a second kid was on the way. The second kid’s kidding wasn’t as easy. He was coming out head first, legs back, and he was huge… nearly as big as our 2 week olds. She pushed for quite a while and I had to aid a little, but he finally came out. Lastly, with very little effort, Hillary had another doe. Everyone is doing well! We are officially done with kidding until June, when Tina is due. 3 Kiddings, 8 Total Babies, 4 Bucks and 4 Does
Production has ramped up around here. We’ve been working hard to prepare for our busy season starting in less than two weeks. We are of course at South of the James every Saturday still. Next weekend we have Spring Bada-Bing, which is our biggest craft show of the spring. The following weekend we have RVA Earth day… and then after that market seasons start to kick off! It won’t be long and we will be in 5 markets a week! This means lots of soap and laundry detergent needs to be made. I really love this time of year!
It’s finally here: Our Goat Milk Laundry Soap!
We’ve been working on it for months and have put this laundry detergent through the paces! It has worked wonders on our red clay caked farm clothes and we have heard nothing but great things from our soap testers! It was able to get stains out of our clothes that have been there for a long time, and it works it’s magic with only a tablespoon of detergent. You get over 50 washes out of our 24 oz containers.
It is always exciting to release a product that you know your customers are going to love and we can’t wait for everyone to try it! Check out the detergents on our website…. and remember orders over $50 receive free shipping!
We are in the final stretch before the start of kidding season! Sonia only has a week and a half left. She has received all of her vaccinations (CDT and BoSe) and we continue to increase her feed to prepare her for milk production. She is a first freshener and they tend to bag up (their udders grow) over the course of the last week or two but hers hasn’t started to grow yet, however that is not an indication of how close she is as she could potentially bag up right before she kids. One indication of how close she is to kidding are her ligaments. They are about the size and thickness of a pencil and are on either side of the doe’s tail, as they get closer to their due date the ligaments soften until they eventually disappear, at which point labor is imminent. Sonia’s ligaments are quite soft! She is most definitely going to keep us on our toes! Ruth is a little over two weeks away and will be getting her BoSe shot this Friday. Her ligaments are also softening. Hillary has a little bit longer to go with a little over 4 weeks left. She is already huge though! I have a feeling she will go at least a little before her due date. Then of course there is Tina… who isn’t due until June. Between the 3 girls who are due in March we will likely get 5-6 kids. My current guess is we will get 3 does and 2-3 bucks. I hope I am right!! We will soon find out!
On Tuesday morning we put in the monitor in the barn. This monitor allows us to hear everything that is going on in there and helps us catch when the girls go into labor. It keeps us from having to constantly go out and check on them. It’s great during the day, and is helpful at night however it keeps me up most of the night since I am a really light sleeper.
Yesterday our packaging for the laundry detergent came in! Isn’t it cute! This jar is the largest size. There will also be a refill size and a sample size. It won’t be long until we are able to debut it!
In the last week we have continued to work on our goat milk soap laundry detergent. We have worked hard perfecting the amount of essential oil for each scent. I think we finally reached an amount that we are happy with. We are hoping to be able to start offering the detergent sometime in March.
In the past week we received our acceptance to the West End Farmers Market on Saturdays and the Mid-Week Farmers Market at Aw Shucks. Kevin will likely be the one manning the booth at both of these locations. Our spring and summer is starting to come together!
This weekend we worked on getting the soap room together. We have been building it for almost a year at this point and haven’t had a chance with our busy schedule to put any real time into it in the last 6 months or so. The soap company has lived in several rooms in our house. A large portion of our home has been cut off to our family for far too long! This weekend we got the room painted and within the next few days the floor is going in and cabinets are going up. It won’t be long until we will be moving in and we can have our house back!
The count down continues to the start of kidding season! Sonia now has a little over 3 weeks, Ruth has a little over 4, and Hillary has about 6 weeks. Tina is not due until June, so we are not considering her in this countdown. Hillary is already huge and is getting quite uncomfortable. I can’t wait to see how many she has!
The last two weeks since Kevin left his “day job” have been an adjustment. For the last two years we have lived in survival mode. Kevin was pulling in at least 60 hours a week at work and every other second of the day was stacked with things that needed to be done for the businesses and farm. Late nights and extremely early mornings were how we lived. Now that the 60 hours of work outside of our businesses are gone we are trying to figure out what our new schedule looks like. We no longer have to live with the mindset that if we have a second it needs to be filled with something because who knows how much time we are going to have later. We are working on balancing everything and actually giving ourselves time to just relax… what a concept. I have actually had to set myself a set of tasks that need to be completed that day, and once I am done I am allowed to relax. Otherwise I will just move on to one of other five hundred tasks on my to do list…
One of our big projects this week is working on our new goat milk soap laundry detergent. We are officially in the research and development phase! So far so good! We plan to sell them in three sizes; a nice large reusable glass container with a wooden scoop, refill bags, and finally a sample size for 2-4 washes. We are currently planning on 4 scents; Sunrise Citrus, Lavender, Tea Tree (for strong odors caused by bacteria – body odor and stinky socks), and Unscented. Look for these detergents to join our market booths and website in the late winter or early spring.
We do have a little bit of sad news from this week. We lost one of our free ranging chickens to a hawk. Her name was Sophia and she was one of our original chickens. In fact she gave us our very first egg! We retired to her to the pasture last spring where she, and several of her sisters, had the run of both pastures and the barn. We knew this was a possibility. Chickens are very vulnerable to predators, especially when they are free ranging, but that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens. I am extremely tender-hearted and we love our animals. In the meantime we have moved the few other free rangers into the big closed coop until we can figure out a safer option for them. Our fear is now that the hawk knows where the food is he will just keep coming back.
Check back next week for even more updates!! There is so much in the works!