I have been working on  a new venture, it’s very exciting to write about it and I suppose now I really need to.  My plans is to make beauty creams, from mostly locally produced organic ingredients.  Such as lovely olive, almond, rosehip and macadamia nut oil, plant and bees waxes, and beautiful essential oils like lemon and lavender.  I will have to source some really special ingredients like Shea butter and couple of other products that just don’t grow here, as well as organic coconut oil.

For the last year or two I have been making and perfecting my balms and creams, I love making them and it so good to work with such superior ingredients.  What’s also exciting, and partly why I’ll be writing more about it and sharing photos of my work and probably giving out samples (yes!  Lucky YOU!) I’m planning on applying for the AMP do you thing scholarship, it would make a huge difference if I could get a little extra cash to get it all off the ground, wheels move somewhat slowly for me these days with the kiddies an’ all.

Here are some jars I’m going to fill, I’m starting out with small jars so people can test them out, 15ml and 30ml, they are very small when it comes to labeling – but I have to start somewhere!

They will look good.

This years garlic harvest was a bumper crop, we had made a few minor changes based  on last year.  We spaced the cloves out a little more – at least 15cms, and we actually did not feed the bed as much as the earlier plantings, and the cloves were already sprouting when we planted them.

Before braiding them this year, I also gave them longer to dry, a little too long as the leaves were quite crisp and brittle while I finished plaiting, but the garlic is just delicious.  We harvested them on the Summer Solstice, and although the heads were complete, they were rather small, I think if we left them a little longer in the ground, maybe another couple of weeks, or a month, they would have been much bigger. 

Such a lovely and satisfying way to celebrate the solstices.  This is the second attempt at garlic growing for us, and this is by far more successful than the first.  I so recommend growing your own!

The photo above was taken in August and shows the first strong shoots pushing up through the mulch and good worm cast compost…  only four months later and we have these!

I found some lovely large organic garlic cloves at my local organics shop, much of which was already sprouting and was much better than the seed garlic I bought from the plant shop the previous year.  We used the same bed in the garden, and for the six months it was between crops we added several layers of compost as garlic apparently uses a lot of nitrogen.  After planting the cloves we covered the bed in a thick mulch of leaves.

It was really very easy to grow, we have a worm farm which provides a good liquid fertilizer, that I applied fairly regularly, we had plenty of rain and so I did not need to water very often until late November.  We also tended to avoid many other plants growing in the same bed as garlic is one of those plants that does not make a good companion, ours shared the bed with some self-seeding Kale and Calendulas and that was about it.

It took a morning to brush off the dried dirt and braid up, about 50 cloves, six of which stayed smallish cloves and a couple that were spiked by the fork, so plenty for us and some to share around.  It’s good to let it air dry, we kept it mostly shaded for a few days until it was ready for braiding.  The flavour seems to develop nicely as the cloves dry, but you can still cook with them fresh.

Soon we will be planting out our annual garlic patch, in the meantime the vege garden beds are a bit over grown, but the herbs are doing well.

Calendulas are popping up everywhere, and the rhubarb and comfrey is springing back to life.

The red kale is looking lovely, so good for a salad!

The front herb garden is looking quiet, with the purple sage, angelica and occasional pansies doing well in spite of the chilly and more shady winter months.