after-sun spray

It’s summer. You’re in the garden, you’re at the beach, you’re on the soccer field, you’re sipping wine on a patio. Wherever you are, you’re likely soaking up the sun.

So, with that in mind, I’m here’s a quick DIY to help your skin recover just in case you’ve maybe stayed out a bit too long. ;)

This After Sun Spray is my favorite! It’s easy to make, cool and refreshing for your skin, and healing as well. It’s made with just four simple ingredients - witch hazel, aloe, spearmint essential oil, and lavender essential oil. While all of these ingredients can be easy to find, I encourage you to read the labels carefully. I’ve seen many brands of witch hazel that include other ingredients such as stabilizers and fragrances. The same is true of aloe. Your aloe should not be green. It comes out of the aloe plant as a clear gel, so if your aloe gel from the store is green, coloring has been added. Fragrance is often added to aloe as well. I like using T.N Dickinson’s witch hazel because it’s 100% witch hazel extract in alcohol, it’s affordable, and easy to find. (I usually buy mine at Target.) For aloe, I love this brand of Aloe Gelly and I like to buy it from Azure. For essential oils, I use doTERRA because I love the quality and purity of their oils and feel comfortable using them on my face and on my kids.

After-Sun Spray

Pour the witch hazel and aloe into the glass bottle. Add the essential oils. Shake well before use and spray directly on face and skin to cool and moisturize skin that has been overheated or over exposed to the sun.

in the garden :: spring 2024

The spring has come to a close, and it has been my favorite spring on this property so far. This was just our third spring here, but it was the first time that we’ve had capacity to do some of the extra things simply for the sake of beauty and pleasure, rather than focusing solely on utilitarian needs. The kitchen garden feels established now. I know my soil and how it varies from one corner of the garden to another. I know what grows well here and what grows well there. I know what some of my pests are and I know what thrives. And while the kitchen garden still consumed much of my spring, it wasn’t as all encompassing as it was the past two years and that has felt great. Having a one-year old baby rather than a newborn has contributed to this as well. He LOVES the garden.

It’s been a VERY rainy spring, which has been refreshing for the land as we come out of a drought, but also challenging as a gardener to get things planted and keep them weeded. I’ll take the rain over a drought anytime, though! The children have also thoroughly enjoyed the mud!

The garden is much the same as last year. I rotated a few things, but others I left right in their same places with hopes of adding more compost as the season progresses. Last fall I planted a larger garlic patch than I have before, with hopes of having enough garlic to get us through until next year’s harvest! We made it to April this year on last years’ bounty, so I’m hopeful this year will get us into the summer. I planted 20 tomatoes again, but went with more paste tomatoes and fewer slicers. We made it through the cold months with canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, pasta sauce, and salsa, but I’d like more tomato sauce and definitely more ketchup this year! Who knew that homemade ketchup was ABSOLUTELY worth the effort?! It is. My family agrees.

The biggest change for this year was that my sister-in-law and I started all of our plants ourselves! I’ve always purchased plant starts for the hot weather crops such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and basil, but this year we started these under grow lights in our basements. I wish I could say it was a raging success, but alas, I learned an important lesson that not all potting soil is created equal as I happened to buy the crappy stuff with no nutrients in it. This meant that my plants started off great - everything sprouted quickly and was thriving, but then they just stopped growing and started looking sad. Thankfully, I ran out of that soil and what we bought after was much better, so a few things I started did very well. The plants that I started in the poor soil are still working to catch up. My peppers have hardly grown, even though they’ve been in the ground for a month! Oh well. Hopefully they still produce a decent harvest and now I know better for the future.

Another change to the garden this year is that we added two raised beds along our chicken yard fence. The soil and drainage were very poor in that section of the garden and because of that it’s been unusable space. The raised beds not only remedied that, but they also provided me with space to grow annual herbs like cilantro and dill where I can let them reseed and come back year after year and also where I can grow a few cool weather crops like beets, carrots, radishes, and lettuce mid-season in the shade that the beans will provide.

The last change for this year is that I added a cut flower bed along the outside garden fence. While the cut flowers will be a lovely addition, the bed will also provide a barrier for the vegetables that I grow up the fence. You see, the geese and chickens LOVE to come along and snip the peas, cucumbers, and squash vines that I grow up the fence and the cut flower bed will hopefully help prevent that. They may still snip a few cut flowers, but I’d rather lose those than a whole cucumber vine! For cut flowers, I planted hollyhocks, zinnias, cosmos, poppies, and calendula. I got them in a couple weeks later than I would have liked, but I think they’ll still have enough time to shine in late summer.

I hope your gardens are planted and thriving whether they are in pots on a patio or in an acre in the ground. Cheers!

in the garden :: april, may, and june 2023

Wow! It’s been over a year since I posted here! Turns out creating a bunch of draft post ideas doesn’t count as posting. Ha. If you follow me over on Instagram, you may have noticed that we’ve been up to a lot! We had a huge garden last year during our first summer in our new house. It was a dream, but also a lot of work, especially when it came time to preserve, store, and use it all. We also raised a flock of geese, which was incredibly fun and a good learning experience. We butchered most of them in the fall and kept a male and female for breeding. Our female, Emelia, sat on a clutch of eggs this spring, but must not have sat consistently enough because she then abandoned them after about 30 days, which is about how long it takes for goslings to hatch. So, we now have two pet geese for another year and we’re all a little unsure about that. They can be so fun, but also so loud, obnoxious, and rather intimidating for the kids. We’ll see how long they are allowed to be apart of our homestead.

Our biggest news is that we had a baby in April! Ash Adrien was born at home, in the water, surrounded by his daddy and brothers on April 23rd. He’s happy and healthy and just starting to coo and giggle. We’re all enamored. I’m excited to write his birth story here in the coming weeks.

This year’s garden is up and running! It is not an easy feat, though, prepping and planting a garden in the same season as giving birth to a new baby. Dan has been a huge help to me this year, though. We use a broadfork to prep our garden beds and he did all of that work for me so that I could focus on planting. We had a long winter with many inches of snow remaining into the first week or so of April. But a sudden hot streak in the 80’s quickly melted what remained and dried up the ground enough for me to get most of my cool weather seeds into the ground before Ash was born. Cool weather the end of April and beginning of May also bought me time before I needed to start planting the rest, so I was able to enjoy a few weeks of slow postpartum days without feeling too much of the itch to get down to the garden.

As last year was my first year planting here, I worked with whatever soil I had. This meant that my garden actually had about 4 different types of soil in the different sections from sand loam, to forest loam, to forest clay, to thick red clay. I was so happy this spring when I found all of my soil improved and I hadn’t done much to it other than plant in it last year, add leaves and chicken bedding in the fall, and then let our chickens use the space over the winter. This year I rotated my crops a bit to work the soil in different ways and hopefully prevent tomato blight from occurring again. It was pretty bad last year.

The garden is now giving back to us with radishes, peas, green onions, strawberries, and an array of greens coming into the kitchen weekly. It has been very hard to keep up with the weeding and succession planting of radishes, herbs, and greens. Ash has had a few naps in the garden while I’ve worked and I take any little opportunity I get to pull weeds - whether its during a nap, when Dan is home, or when I’m down at the barn feeding chickens and geese. I’m not getting the hours in the garden that I love and it’s not the prettiest place right now (as my pictures humbly show), but we are growing food and working the soil and that’s what matters most.

in the garden :: april 2022

Garden season is upon us and I am so excited! If you’ve been around this space for the past several years, you know that I love gardening and that I made the most of our little urban lot in Minneapolis, but this year is different. Our new garden space is 1,600 sqft!!! That’s larger than the finished square footage of our old house! Ha! This garden is large and I’ve filled it full - at least on my garden plan. This year I am planning to grow a lot of things I’ve grown in the past like tomatoes, peppers, herbs, peas, summer squash, green beans, lettuce, potatoes, beets, strawberries, and herbs. But I’m also trying my hand a quite a few new things like winter squash, cabbage, melons, kale, and spinach.

The garden area is next to the old goat barn that we are using as a chicken coop and garden shed. We had the chickens work the ground for us in a portion of the garden over the winter and recently we moved their fenced in yard to the other side of the barn and prepared the garden area for a bigger fence that will hopefully deter the deer. (We may need to add some electric fencing to keep them out, though.) When we bought the house last fall, there were remnants of a burn pile in the clearing next to the goat barn. It was quite the burn pile and the clean up was long and laborious. I think I filled 3 5-gallon buckets with nails, hinges, door handles, and other random metal remains. I’m a little concerned about the toxicity of what was burned on this soil, but as we live in a rather dense forest, this is the best location for the garden, so I’ll work to restore the soil over the next several years.

Speaking of the soil…there are several variations of clay throughout my garden plot and it has been interesting planning what to grow and where in relation to that. I could have brought in fresh top soil, compost, or more organic matter, but it wasn’t in the budget this year and so we are making due with the bit of compost our chickens turned for us this winter and some somewhat rotted goat manure from the neighbor. The ashes from the burn pile have helped make the soil in that section of the garden a bit more loamy, so that is one plus to the potentially toxic burn pile.

We were able to use two garden gates from the original homestead, which I love! Our house was built in the 1970’s and the original homestead was a total of 20 acres. After the owners past away, the land was subdivided into two 10 acre lots. Our neighbors who own the other 10 had two old metal gates on their property - one from the original owners’ garden and one from an old animal fence. We have this gate pictured below and will have the other one opening into the chicken yard by the chickens’ automatic coop door.

So far we have some cabbages planted, peas, beets, spinach, kale, and lettuce. The boys each got to plant their own row of peas, which they were very happy about. Next week we’ll hopefully get some onion sets in the ground, along with early potatoes and some calendula and zinnias. We’ll also be adding our wedding arbor next to the gate and hopefully cleaning up some of the burn pile remnants that are now just outside of the garden fence. This property has so much clean up to do, but little by little we will get there!