Frigid weather here in Maine has made baking and cooking the ideal activity so what better time to start a new sourdough friend~ This attempt is going to involve an piece of my old dry starter, tap water and flour.
New Sourdough Process~
1: take small bit of dry sourdough and add to a glass jar or dedicated sourdough container. fill with enough water to cover the piece and leave overnight or a few hours on the counter.
2: slosh your jar around or use a spoon to further dissolve your starter piece.
3: with a ratio of 50% water and 50% flour, add 50g of flour and 50g of room temp water to the dissolved sourdough. Mix thoroughly until fully combined, cover and set somewhere warm-ish for a day.
4: next day, remove half of the jars contents and feed it with the 50/50 ratio above.
5: continue the feeding and discard process for a week until your mixture smells sour and looks bubbly. And you’re done, your starter is alive and ready to be used!
Notes: keep your sourdough jar in the fridge if you’re not going to be baking soon or need to slow down the fermentation process. I used bread flour for it’s first feeding and as a result, my starter is very elastic and similar to mozzarella cheese. I’ve since moved to all-purpose flour and it’s become less elastic so keep this in mind when you’re deciding on a flour to use for feeding. It shouldn’t affect the taste, just the way the dough behaves and it seems to be adjustable with further feedings.
If you’re like me and trying to live in accordance with the seasons of the year, the beginning of January means doing all the habit tracking and journaling your heart desires. One of my intentions for the year is to invest more time and effort into natural skin care. With how bitterly cold the start of this new year has been, retreating into herbalism books and crafts for the farmers market has been a great use of time.
Getting started with natural skin care and overall self-care lead me to to Gua Sha, a traditional practice in Chinese medicine. Searching Gua Sha in your favorite search engine will lead you to viral videos and products on Tik Tok, WebMD overviews, and useless AI generated talking points. 5 minutes of research shows it’s probably pseudoscience with some serious complications, if you’re not careful. โจAll of this to say, I’m using it as a relaxation technique and to reinforce moisturizing my face before bed, as well as learning new face and skin care recipes~
Expanding my herbal knowledge into skin, hair and body care feels like a natural progression~ If you’re conscious about what you’re putting into your body, taking care of your biggest outside organ should also be on your radar.
With the constant influx of stories about microplastics and lead in common and possibly unavoidable products (looking at you, all brands of tampons and pads ๐), it’s no wonder natural skin and body care is becoming more popular. With all that in mind, I started looking into skin formulations I could make that I’d feel good about using and that would have some nice benefits~
๐บHerbal Oils~
With a bottle of high quality olive oil, most dried herbs and flowers can be made into a potent herbal oil for most skin applications. The following are some that I’ve made and used~
๐ผCalendula Oil
Calendula is the powerhouse of the skin cells! It’s sunny blossoms could melt any frozen heart, especially so when soaked in oil and left to infuse for a few weeks in a sunny spot. Calendula provides benefits including: – anti-inflammatory – helps heal and treat wounds, burns and bruises – repairs skin and speeds healing time – nourishes and soothes unhappy skin
๐ฟComfrey Oil
Comfrey is everyone’s favorite go-to for anything skin trauma related. It’s big and broad leaves while spiny, have so much to offer when it comes to skin health. My only qualm with it is that unless you dry the leaves before an infusion, you’re going to end up with a very green but very unpleasant and spoiled oil. Comfrey provides benefits including: – anti-inflammatory – heals wounds, sores, burns and fractures (from the outside, ingesting comfrey in any form is not recommended) – speeds healing time and promotes the growth of new cells
๐Plantain Oil
Another herbal companion is Plantain, a previously overlooked weed by myself and others. Uses include a field snack of the seeds and greens, as well as a poultice for bug, spider and even snake bites. For my own uses, adding plantain to a salve is how I will probably use it the most. Plantain provides benefits including: – reduces swelling and inflammation – soothes skin irritations and inflammation conditions (eczema and minor allergic reactions)
๐ฅฌ๏ธRosemary Oil
A big favorite in cooking and baking, rosemary also provides benefits in the skin and hair care department. Known widely for it’s uses in hair care when moisturizing or encouraging growth, whether in a tincture or hair mask form. Rosemary also provides additional benefits: – improves dry, chapped skin – anti-inflammatory + pain reliever
โ๏ธSt John’s Wort Oil
This sunny delicate flower is one of my new favorites. The tinctures and oils I’ve made with them have turned into beautiful deep red products, thanks to the blood-colored oil the flower produces. This is a good sign of high quality flowers and means you’re getting as much of the plants goodness in your infusion as possible. St John’s Wort provides additional benefits: – anti-bacterial (minor cuts, scrapes and wounds) – pain relieving – light sunscreen (internal use of SJW can make some more sensitive to the sun) – soothes sore muscles
This list of herbal oils is far from exhaustive and this year I’ll be doing more experiments with new and native herbs as well as less common oils to put them in. Let 2025 be the year you embrace natural skin care!
Being deep in fall and with winter on the way, I’ve been collecting wild seeds from the surrounding yards for seed swapping and next year sowing. While my gardens aren’t producing an abundance at the moment, I’m rich with goldenrods, New England asters, evening primrose and morning glories.
During a warm-ish late afternoon, I paced around my garden with pruners and paper collection bags, snipping off whole stems of fluffy goldenrod flowers. My collecting isn’t perfect and many of the fluffiest seeds, goldenrod and asters especially, were blown into surrounding garden beds and paths. This imperfect harvesting will become obvious next season as new islands of wild flowers begin to immerge.
Along with asters, goldenrods and some upright lobelia inflata, things I planted like mullein, evening primrose and morning glory also gave up some seeds. These were in much smaller quantities but are more than enough for seed swapping among friends~
With the gardens now put to bed and waiting for whatever climate changed winter we’re going to get, I’ve gone deep into attracting birds to the property~ I had great success over the summer with hummingbirds and their insatiable lust for sugar water, and now being knee deep in suet feeders, my back garden is in a constant flurry of birds. 4 suet feeders, plus 1 loose seed feeder has been an immediate success and it’s been downright heavenly watching little finches and wood peckers mingle in the barren yard. I’m hoping I can keep up with their taste for lard and seed until spring as the more diversity I’m able to nurture, the healthier and more productive my gardens will be.
I’m also in the process of attracting crows to the homestead but that’s not been as easy or straight forward as setting out feeders, so more experimenting will need to be done~
