Make Your Own: Toothpaste
For the past couple years Mr Chiots and I have been trying to get rid of any products that contain harmful chemicals especially when it comes to personal care products. We were using some all natural toothpaste for a while, but it still contained fluoride. I won’t go into the details of why we try to avoid fluoride and sodium laurel sulfate here today, you can google it and find all kinds of information. The toothpaste brand we were buying was also bought out by a large corporation so that helped prompt our decision to make some toothpaste at home. Making toothpaste is quite easy, you can make it in powder form with things you probably already have at home. If you want it to have a sweeter taste and paste like texture like store bought then you’ll have to buy some vegetable glycerin.
I used a recipe that I found over at Mountain Rose Herbs which is where I bought the vegetable glycerin that I used for the batch I made. They have a bunch of recipes on their website. This is the one I used:
Citrus Mint Toothpaste
¼ cup baking soda
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons vegetable glycerin
10 drops peppermint essential oil
10 drops orange essential oil (I used lemon)
5 drops eucalyptus essential oil
Mix all ingredients together thoroughly in a small bowl. Store in a small, tightly covered container. To use, scoop a small amount out onto your toothpaste and brush. Beware, you’ll think you add to add more glycerin when you first mix this up, but resist the urge. If you do it will be too runny after it sits.
We actually were very impressed with this toothpaste and we really like it, we’ve been using it for about a month and a half now. It leaves your teeth felling fresh and clean, much cleaner than with regular toothpaste. The flavor and consistency are not like store bought toothpaste and it doesn’t foam since there are no added foaming agents (which is what we were trying to avoid). I think I’m going to try to make some tooth powder with myrrh next. We’ll be making homemade toothpaste from now on since we like it and it’s very inexpensive, this batch above cost me only about .50 to make, which is a great price for fluoride SLS free toothpaste!
Have you ever made your own toothpaste?
If you’re going to buy a few ingredients at Mountain Rose Herbs I’d appreciate a click through the link to the right as they give me a small portion of what you buy.
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Make Your Own: Infused Oils
Along with using plantain as a quick treatment for bug bites and other wounds, I’m also trying to make some plantain essential oil so I can make a beeswax salve to carry with me. Then when I’m out and about I can still have access to it’s therapeutic benefits. I decided I would try to make some plantain essential oil here at home instead of purchasing it, so I read a few articles on making essential oils at home. These are different than distilled oils that you buy which are much more concentrated. Since I don’t have a home still, so I’ll be making oils that are infused with herbs not the distilled essential oils.
I read a few articles and each had different methods of making essential oils, different amounts of herbs were used in each recipe. I made mine by using a combination of all the recipes I read. I didn’t want to make a whole cup of oil as I thought I wouldn’t be able to use it up quickly, so I made a half cup. I simply chopped up 3 Tablespoons of fresh plantain and put them in a small jar and topped it with 1/2 cup of good organic olive oil (you can use other types of oil if you’d like, I happen to always have olive oil on hand).
Some recipes called for the heating of the oil and herbs, some simply called for steeping for a few days in a warm spot then removing the spent herbs and adding fresh herbs every couple days. I’m opting for this non-heating method. I’ve been steeping the herbs on my kitchen windowsill and will be refreshing the herbs a few times until the oil smells strongly of plantain. If the weather gets too cold, I may warm the oil occasionally is a pan of water, but only until slightly warm, not too much heat as I’m thinking this may damage some of the benefits of the herbs.
When it’s finished I plan on putting it in an amber bottle with an eye dropper. This winter I’ll experiment in making salves with beeswax that I’ll be able to carry around in a little tin, I’ll be sure to blog about it when I do. I’m also looking forward to making more essential oils, I bought a tea tree plant this spring and I’m hoping to make tea tree oil next, as we use a lot of tea tree oil here at Chiot’s Run.
Have you ever made essential oils at home? Do you use essential oils often?
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Freshly Ground Flour
I’ve been grinding my own flour for several years now. Up until last week I was using a hand-me-down KitchenAid Grain Mill Attachment. It’s a oldie, and has been passed around through many hands. My dad’s cousin bought it back a long time ago and after she quit using it she gave it to my mom who used it for a while. My sister borrowed it and used it until she bought a NutriMill Grain Mill. Back to my mom it went. She used it for grinding up lentils and other grains to make her own dog food, but never used it for homemade flour. When I bought some grain with my sister, I borrowed it from my mom and started using it to make flour for baking. I had an old Kitchenaid that I attached it to and that one finally died, so it was time to upgrade to a real mill.
After doing a lot of research, I decided to purchase a Komo Grain mill, or a Tribest Grain Mill. I chose this one because of it’s quality, it’s made in Germany, has a powerful motor and ceramic grinding stones. It’s housed in a beautiful beech wood case, not plastic like most grain mills. It’s powerful, quiet and very quick.
After making a few loaves of bread, a few batch of pancakes and a few batches of scones, I must say I’m very impressed with the quality of flour this mill creates. It’s very fine and very evenly ground, unlike the Kitchenaid grinder which produced a very uneven grind that contained fine flour with lots of large flakes of bran in it. My scones are so delicious, you can’t even tell they’re made with 100% whole grain flour. Grinding the flour fresh means that there’s no bitterness with the whole grain as there often is with preground whole grains.
I’m quite excited, especially since I also just received my copy of Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor. I made the basic bread yesterday and was very impressed with the texture and flavor of the bread. I have never been able to get the right level of gluten development with my 100% whole grain bread to get the kind of crumb I wanted. Yesterday my dough passed the windowpane test perfectly and it baked up into the most beautiful loaf of 100% whole grain sourdough sandwich bread!
I’ve been using three different kinds of wheat for my baked goods, soft white, hard red winter, and white winter wheat. I’m looking forward to experimenting with other kinds of grains as well, like barley, spelt, buckwheat, millet and more. I found a local farm that grows wheat and a few other grains, hopefully it’s good for bread. I’m looking forward to making my diet a little more local and healthy with my new grain mill!
Are you a whole grain bread person, or do you prefer white?
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Making Organic Bone Meal at Home
I blogged about this over at Not Dabbling earlier this week and figured any of you who don’t read that blog as well would appreciate the info as well. I’m always trying to find ways to make things instead of purchasing them. I sometimes buy bone meal for the garden. I like to use it when I plant garlic, onions and other bulbing plants. I don’t like to buy the stuff at the store, because I know it comes from animals that have lived in CAFO’s and have been fed antibiotics and hormones. Since I buy my chickens at the local farm, they’re pastured and happy and healthy as can be. I try to make the best use of them when I buy them, they are expensive and I don’t like to waste anything. When we get done eating a chicken, this is what we have left.
Usually I bury these bones somewhere in the garden, or put them in the compost pile (even though they tell you not to). They do take a while to break down, so I thought I could make my own bone meal instead. I dried the bones on the counter for a few days and whenever I baked something I’d throw them in after I turned off the oven. Then I put the bones in a blender and pulsed 10-15 times and I had bone meal. Not quite as fine as the stuff you buy, but much healthier for my garden. I do have a heavy duty blender (the older version of this).
I feel good knowing that nothing is going to waste and the bone meal I’m using in my garden is the best quality.
What do you do with your chicken bones? Have you ever made your own bone meal?
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Building Hoop Houses out of Electrical Conduit
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about our hoop houses that we have over our raised beds here at Chiot’s Run. They show up in a lot of photos. They sure come in handy for covering with frost blankets, netting to keep insects/birds out, supporting peas, as well as for winter garden protection. The first year I overwintered some spinach I didn’t have these hoops over the garden. I simply bent some bamboo poles and floated a row cover over them. This did a fabulous job protecting my spinach crop throughout the winter (we live in a zone 5).
The next spring we decided to build more permanent and sturdier structures for overwintering crops. We didn’t have enough space for a big greenhouse or a big hoop house, so the next best thing was to make small hoop houses over each raised bed. I researched a little and found that a lot of people use irrigation tubing or PVC, which is plastic and pliable. You drive some stakes or rods into the soil leaving 8-12 inches sticking out of the soil or make a base with holes in it to insert the tubing into. I found these photos on Flicker to give you an idea of other options (thanks to oceandesetoiles for these two images)
We decided we’d rather use electrical conduit because of it’s rigidity, we get a lot of heavy wet snows here and didn’t think the tubing would hold up as well. This conduit is very inexpensive as well and we figured it would outlast the irrigation tubing as well. The conduit was $2.19 each length of pipe and we used 4 per raised bed (our beds are 4×10).
Now I’ll have to warn you that pipe bending is not the easiest thing in the world. Mr Chiots and I worked together and our hoops are fairly nice. Not perfect, but not too bad either. I’d recommend buying an extra piece of conduit for a practice piece. The first thing we did to help with even bending was to mark the conduit 21 inches in from each end and then in 2 inch increments in between these two marks.
We used a hand pipe bender and practiced on one or two pieces to learn how much force was needed for a small bend each 2 inch increment along the length of the pipe. We over bent the pipes a bit, so they did not look like a hoop when we were finished. Ours looked more like teardrops since we left the ends straight, then we stretched them back out a bit to put them over the beds.
I will once again warn that this isn’t the easiest thing to do to get these things nicely rounded (read through the comments on this post I wrote about it last year). Mr Chiots and I are adventurous and willing to try to do anything ourselves though, so we were not daunted by the task. We were also OK with less than perfect hoops. We joke that ours have character since they were made by local artisans.
You can now buy a special tool just for bending garden hoop houses from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. They came out with it the year after we made ours. It’s a little pricey at $69, but if you want to make a lot of hoops or have someone to share the cost with it would be a worthwhile investment.
We attached the hoops to the raised beds with two pipe clamps, one up top and one at the bottom. They’re very sturdy and will last a long time. I do love these because they come in handy for so many things. We use them to hold up netting over the strawberries to keep the birds out. We throw row covers over them to keep the deer out of the peas. We also throw blankets over them to protect from late spring frosts.
I ordered some greenhouse plastic this week and I’m hoping to use them as mini greenhouses this winter. I’ll be using a floating row cover on short wickets inside these hoops (you can be sure I’ll blog about it this fall). They also have come in handy to steady myself if I lose my balance or when I’m reaching in to the middle of the bed.
What measures do you use in the garden for extending the season and protecting crops?
