At The Freckled Farm Soap Company we offer custom orders for our goat milk soap. This can be for wedding or party favors, or even a gift. This week we sent out a custom order for a Bed and Breakfast in NY! These half bars will be used as their guest soaps.
If you would like to learn more about our custom soap orders please visit our website.
For the longest time Bryce used our Castile Goat Milk Soap because she had incredibly sensitive skin. If her clothes or sheets were not washed in a free and clear detergent she would break out in a horrible rash. She was able to use our Castile without any issues, so for her first year and a half of life that is what she used. We started testing small areas of her skin at around eighteen months and she never had a reaction to our soaps, even though she was still reacting to things like laundry detergent. She was able to use our full line of soaps without a problem, so we started to allow her to pick out her own soaps from the reject drawer (the drawer of soaps that have flaws or didn’t make weight that we can’t sell). She loves smelling the soaps, so it is always a treat for her to pick out a new one. Her favorite soap to use is the Sunrise Citrus. She absolutely loves the scent!
If you are interested in trying our Sunrise Citrus Goat Milk Soap or our Castile you can find them here.
Breckin had a hard time picking a favorite soap. He kept saying he loves them all! However, when we put them all in front of him and asked him to pick one he picked Lemongrass Green Tea as his favorite. He likes the fact that it is green (naturally colored by the green tea) because it is his favorite color. He also loves the way that it smells. Although, he wants it stated that he really does love them all!
If you are interested in trying out our Lemongrass Green Tea Goat Milk Soap yourself you can find it here!
My absolute favorite soap is our Peppermint Eucalyptus. This was the second soap variety that we ever made (Castile was the first) and it was instantly my favorite. We have had dozens of new varieties come through the company and while many of them have come close none have been able to match the Peppermint Eucalyptus in my eyes.
The peppermint tingles and is incredibly refreshing. During the summer, when I am dealing with the super high temperatures, I always take a shower when I come in from farm chores with my Peppermint Eucalyptus because it feels like it is actually cooling me down! This little fact makes it sound like it wouldn’t be a great soap to use during the winter… but that is not the case. In the winter it is refreshing without being cold and you have the added benefit of the eucalyptus which has always been great in combination with the steam of the shower for my sinuses.
If you are interested in trying our Peppermint Eucalyptus Goat Milk Soap yourself you can find it here.
At The Freckled Farm Soap Company we do whatever we can to ensure that we are making products that are good for you. One of the ways we do that is to never use dyes or other colorants in our soap. Yet, our soaps have very different colors. So I thought it would be a good idea to go over what it is that gives our soaps their color.
Many of our soaps end up being a nice tan/cream color. This is primarily due to the color that the milk turns when heated by the lye. We make our soaps at room temperature all year long, so there is always a little bit of variation in the exact temperature of the soap when it is set aside to cool.
Aside from the ambient temperature there are a few other factors that influence color:
Essential Oils: Though many essential oils come out mostly clear, some can have some natural color to them. The most notable of these in my mind is Orange Essential Oil. This is what gives our Sunrise Citrus soap its orange color.
Other ingredients: Of course anything we add to the soap has the ability to change the color.
We use a green tea powder to make our Lemongrass Green Tea soap since we don’t want to add any unnecessary water. This gives that soap a nice green/brown color. One thing to note about this soap is that due to the tea this soap is prone to oxidation before it cures. This can result in different shades of green and brown from the same batch of soap.
Rosewood Salt is made with Himalayan Pink Salt, which naturally colors it.
Deep Sea, is made with Kelp and Spirulina powders. The Spirulina especially gives that soap a deep green color.
Honey Oatmeal is a warm honey color due to…. well, Honey!
In the end anything that colors our soap, as nice as some of them are, are there only for their intended topical or aromatic benefits. The colors that those ingredients produce are just a nice addition.
I’m sorry I missed last week’s What’s up Wednesday. The busy season for the soap business, photography business, farm, and garden are all in full gear… at the same time. We are so incredibly grateful to be this busy. I hope it stays like this!
So much has happened on the farm in the last two weeks. Four of the eight goat kids have gone to their new homes. They all went to good homes and we couldn’t be more thrilled. We still have 3 bucks that we are trying to sell. Selling bucks is no easy task. Farms only need one or two to breed to their entire goat herd and from what I am hearing from other farms there have been an unusually large number of bucks born this year. We were lucky to only have had fifty percent bucks… not many in this area have been so lucky. I am hoping these sweet boys at least go as pets to someone. They are all so gentle and have amazing personalities.
We moved the the bantam chicks outside into their new coop! They were getting tight in their brooder and we were getting tired of having the clean it twice a day… chicks create a lot of dust and dirt. We purchased a coop last year to use for our free range chickens to sleep and lay their eggs. It ended up being a really poor quality, even though we paid a pretty penny for it, so we decided to move the free rangers back into the sturdy coop where they were safe. The “free ranger” coop sat empty for a long time. We weren’t sure what to do with it. It would be a waste to just throw it out, but we were pretty sure it would just fall apart should a dog or other predictor decide to jump up against it. When our friend Rachel brought us the bantam chicks we knew we needed to find them a home once they were done with their brooder, so we decide to reinforce the coop and make it into a tractor, allowing the chickens to help us with pest control around the farm. We removed the entire bottom of the coop… meaning we pulled it away because it had basically wasted away and had already fallen through twice from the weight of the chickens (see… piece of junk). We sat the coop directly on the ground and used the run area the coop once sat on as a run for the front of the coop. It was just the right size considering they are only bantams and will be moved daily. We totally removed one set of nesting boxes because they too had fallen apart (we had half the number of chickens in this coop than it called for by the way). Kevin reenforced or replaced all the areas that were falling apart or felt weak. It has made a cute little chicken tractor! I am so glad we were able to use it and it won’t go to waste… I hate waste.
In soap news, our Summer Goat Milk Soap is on the curing racks! I am so ready for this soap to be done! It is so wonderful for summer skin. I used it all last summer and I’ve missed it so much. It’s made with green tea and aloe, so it’s soothing for skin that has had a lot of sun exposure. It will debut on the first day of summer later this month!
What a week it has been! We sold an outstanding amount of soap! There are a lot of mommas out there that received our goat milk soap for Mother’s Day. I hope they enjoy it!
As for me I had a wonderful Mother’s Day… It was also my birthday. The kids and Kevin spoiled me with great food and we got to spend the day with our friends at the GrowRVA Bunch Market. It was a great day!
At the end of this week the baby goats will be weened down to only one bottle a day, and then come next Friday May 22nd they will be ready to go to their new homes! The two farms who are purchasing four of our goats are going to give them wonderful homes. They are very lucky goats and I know they will be loved and spoiled. We still have three buck kids that need good homes. If you are interested in them visit the “Goats For Sale” section of our blog.
On side note… We will NOT be at the West End Market this Saturday and our friend, Lauren, will be manning our booth at South of the James (please stop by and say hi to her… this is her first time running the booth alone!). Kevin and I will be photographing a wedding together for our other company Neilson-Hall Photography. We will be back at our normal booths next week!
We have had a wonderful, busy week. We are settling into our Spring/Summer schedule and getting things done around the farm.
The garden expansion is starting to look more like a garden and less like a mess of dirt and weeds! It’s so much fun when projects start to look like the plan you have had in your head all along. The big change to the garden this week has been structural… We plan to “stake” our plants a little differently this year. Instead of caging or staking individual plants (since we will have hundreds of plants that need this) we are putting poles at the end of several of the beds and running fence down the center. We can use the fencing to tie up tomatoes and to allow climbing/vining plants to do their thing. We will have five beds that have this set up this year… Three tomato beds, one cucumber bed, and one bean bed. All of the beds will eventually have poles staked at the ends and the fencing will detach and move around year to year as we rotate our crops. Watching this process come together has made the garden expansion seem like it’s actually going somewhere. It’s strange what a few poles will do.
Don’t forget… Mother’s Day is Sunday and our goat milk soaps make a great gift! You have five opportunities to purchase our soaps at farmers’ markets… including one on Sunday if you are a serious procrastinator. Our soaps are also in quite a few stores around Virginia! You can find our schedule and stores that carry our soaps here.
People are always asking us how our Canine Shampoo works. It’s in bar form, like all of our soaps, and most people are used to working with liquid dog shampoo. Does it lather well? How is it applied? Does it rinse clean? Does it work on long haired dogs? So I wanted to do this post to show it in action…
Last week our two dogs, Frankie and Annabelle, got out and ran away. They were gone for two days and it was awful. When we finally got them home we noticed that they were completely covered in ticks. I spent time picking the ticks off, but when it came to Frankie getting the ticks out of his hair was nearly impossible. I removed any I could on his stomach, but we were going to have to find an alternative for the rest of his body… So we used our Goat Milk Soap Canine Shampoo on him. For the rest of the evening ticks were practically falling off of him…
Our Canine Shampoo lathers great, as you can see in the pictures below, and it rinses very easily and clean. It’s applied by rubbing the bar directly on the dog. This avoids waste. With those liquid soaps, at least in our experience, you end up using half the bottle in one wash. You pour the soap on their back and have to pull it all over their bodies. You end up using a lot more than you need. With our soap we have only used one bar on our dogs since we debuted the soap last summer. That would make for four or so washes with two dogs and the bar is still not gone. It leaves Frankie’s hair, who has a long wire hair, soft and clean!
We are gearing up to start our farmers market season. We’ve been making lots of soap, cleaning up and reconfiguring our display… and getting excited for a really busy market season! We have been at South of the James through the winter and will continue to be there every Saturday, but this weekend is also the start of the West End Market on Saturdays! Next week starts the Wednesday Aw Shucks market. Then the following week is the big kick off and all five of our 2015 markets will be open! We are so excited to see all of our regulars at the West End Market and bring our goat milk soap to a whole bunch of new people at all of the new markets that we will be vending at this year.
Tina, our doe who is due to kid in June, is starting to show. Normally she is quite slender but now she has a little stomach that pokes out. We didn’t ultrasound her for confirmation because if she didn’t get pregnant on the first try we weren’t going to breed her again this year. A June kidding is already going to be difficult (with the flies and everything) and I wasn’t willing to put her, or her kids, through a July kidding, so we figured that it would become obvious that she was pregnant and that would be confirmation enough for us. In the last week or so Tina has started to fill out, and considering she has never gone back into heat, we are positive at this point that she is pregnant.
The garden continues to grow at a rapid rate. We are barely keeping up and the garden doesn’t exactly look pretty at the moment, the pathways are over grown, and the weeds are catching up with us already, but beds are getting prepped and the plants are making it into the ground and are growing… so that is all that matters. I have been going out through out the day for 15 minutes increments to pull weeds, then we spend 3+ hours in the garden each afternoon. The cabbages are getting huge and the broccoli is chugging along. The potatoes are all over the place and the peas are getting quite tall. One of my big focuses recently has been working on building perennial beds throughout the garden to give the beneficial bugs a permanent home while giving us beds that will provide food year after year without us having to replant. Currently I have a bed (4×25 feet – 100 sq. ft.) half way filled with strawberry transfers from our other garden and from our friend Toni’s garden. We plan to put in a bed of artichokes in the next few weeks, and we will have many perennial flowers, like chamomile and echinacea, scattered everywhere. In the fall I hope to put in a bed of asparagus… my favorite vegetable.
Well, that’s all for this week! I hope to see all of you out at South of the James and West End Farmers Market this weekend!