The Freckled Farm Soap Company

Tag: The Freckled Farm Soap Company

  • Crystal’s Favorite Soap

    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.

  • Kevin’s Favorite Soap

    At markets and craft shows we often have customers ask us what our favorite soaps are. This gave us an idea! Over the next four weeks you will learn the favorite soaps of the four members of The Freckled Farm family.

    I, Kevin, will start. My favorite soap is /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\<— (drumroll)…….. Canine Shampoo.  Yes, that’s right. My favorite of all of our soaps is the one we made for dogs. I’ll give you a second to think of any appropriate jokes that apply.  .   .   .   . OK now that the initial shock has worn off let me explain. Canine Shampoo uses our standard oil blend of the base. Then we add ground oatmeal, lavender, tea tree, and rosemary essential oils. To me it is the perfect blend. It has a little exfoliant in the ground oatmeal. It’s earthy and smells great. I first started using it just as a shampoo bar, but quickly realized that there was no need to switch to another bar after washing my hair. So now this has become my whole body bar. It’s also really good for me because I have very oily skin and the mixture of lavender and tea tree work really well together.

    If you haven’t already you can subscribe to our blog to learn about the whole family’s favorite soaps as well as all sorts of fun facts and happenings around the farm.

  • What’s up Wednesday – June 3rd

    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.

    Chicken Tractor - The Freckled Farm - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    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!

  • April’s “Other” Pictures

    So, I am getting these posted a little late this month. What can I say… It’s the start of the busy season. Here are the “other” pictures (the photographs that weren’t the “picture of the day” from our 365 project, but were still posted to our Instagram during the month of April). To follow the images from the farm in real time follow us on Instagram @Thefreckledfarm

    April Other pictures - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

  • What’s Up Wednesday – May 5th

    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.

     

  • Using our Goat Milk Soap Canine Shampoo

    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!

    Goat Milk Soap Canine Shampoo from The Freckled Farm Soap Company

  • RVA Earth Day Festival

    We will be vendors at the RVA Earth Day Festival put on my Style Weekly again this year! This is such a fun event with amazing vendors, great food, awesome kid activities, and lots of other Earth Day activities. It’s fun for the whole family!

    RVA Earth Day Festival

    April 18th

    12pm – 7pm

    320 Hull St, Richmond, VA 23224 (This is a centralized address. The festival takes place South of the 14th Street bridge on Hull St between 1st-4th Street)

  • Bits N’ Pieces

    Every once in a while we will have a bar of soap that isn’t up to our very strict standards. Maybe it was cut a little too small, so it doesn’t make the weight we state on our label, or maybe it has a dent or air bubble. Maybe it’s a scent that we no longer offer. Then there are those “end pieces” left over after we cut the soap loafs. We also have those beautiful molded soaps that sell great for custom orders, but were hard to display at the markets, leaving us with an abundance of shaped soaps. So what are we supposed to do with all of these leftover soaps? They are perfectly good and end up sitting in boxes… Well now you can buy them at a discounted price!

    Bits N Pieces from The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    With our new Bits N’ Pieces bags you will get at least 1 pound of assorted soaps for only $10! If you are buying our full sized bars a pound of soap would be between 3-5 bars (some soaps weigh more than others), so this is a significant savings!

    All the soaps within the bags are perfectly good soaps. For example, our Rosewood Salt Goat Milk Soap, one of our most popular varieties, has a very small window in which the loafs can be cut. If they are cut too soon they are easily dented and messed up because they are too soft. If they are cut too late they are too hard to cut and parts can break off. In the past we have had whole loafs where chunks break off the bar during the cutting process… they are still great bars of soap but are not perfect enough to sell individually. Then there are those molded soaps (you can see them here). We have a bin of these awesome soaps and nothing to do with them and they are just too pretty to waste!

    These bags are stuffed full of great goat milk soaps that we can’t sell individually! You will not be disappointed in our Bits N’ Pieces bag! They are now available on our website and will be at our farmer’s market booths!

  • 2015 Spring Goat Milk Soap

    It’s SPRING!! Oh my goodness I am not sure I have ever been so happy for winter to end. Yesterday was the first day of Spring, which means it is time for our Spring Goat Milk Soap to come out!

    Spring Goat Milk Soap from The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    The plan was to have a set scent to represent each season that would return each year. This worked out for all of our seasonal soaps, except for Spring… which we learned soon after making the first batch that Kevin and I were allergic to the main essential oil used. It was awful! Every time we had to work with it we would both get terrible sinus headaches. So, while it was a pretty bar of soap, that many people enjoyed, we had to change it up this year. The other seasonal varieties were wildly popular (especially Winter which sold out in just two weeks!) and will remain the same. So what did we pick for this year’s spring soap?!…. A wonderful floral blend!

    For the 2015 Spring Goat Milk Soap we used the essential oils of Jasmine (one of my favorite scents), Rose, and Lavender. This bright, cheery soap has a light floral scent. It’s a beautiful blend and I am extremely happy with it! This will be a returning soap for sure!

    Our Spring Goat Milk Soap will be available on our website and at our farmers market and craft show booths through the Spring!

  • What’s up Wednesday – February 25th

    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!

    Laundry Packaging - The Freckled Farm Soap Company