Homemade deodorant

Yesterday I made some deodorant.  I used some empty weleda glass spray bottles and some bits that we had at home.  I found a vague recipe for a lavender deodorant using vodka, cooled boiled water and lavender essential oil.  I decided to use clary sage instead of lavender as we like the smell of weleda sage deodorant and it is sort of the same! So it was pretty simple and much like the vague recipe I followed which said ten mils of vodka, ten drops of essential oil and fill the rest with cooled boiled water or distilled water....but it did not say how big the bottle was.  I just poured and guessed and it smells good.  While on the subject of bo basher....I bought a rock crystal deodorant at Glastonbury festival in 2007 and still have lots left, that works really well too...and it is nice and smooth(beware of ones that are not!).  So that is it inexpensive and no plastic to throw away.

The ingredients

The finished spray

Rock crystal lasted longer than my festival wristband....which only fell off my wrist June this year!

Spring water

Today we collected our spring water.  We are lucky enough to live within walking distance of two springs in Glastonbury.  We have four really big Kleen canteen steel water bottles which we use.  Some people collect their water in Demi johns, but as we walk to the spring we need something which is not so heavy and not likely to break.  

Elmo and our bottles

Filling up at the red spring

Love one another

Filling up at the white spring

All filled up and ready to go home.  We fill up half with red spring water which is high in iron and comes from chalice well and half of each bottle is filled with white spring water which is rich in calcium and comes from under the Tor.  We use this as our cold drinking water, it would be lovely to use it for cooking too but we cannot collect enough at the moment.  I think it is really important to thank the water before and as we are collecting and drinking it.  It flows within us and becomes part of us to love and thank it helps bring positive energy into us in a really simple way.  We have steel drinks bottles that we use whenever we go out for the day, so we don't have to buy plastic throw away bottles.

Findus and Pettson

I thought I would tell you about some of our favourite books.  We love Findus and Pettson books and we have four of them. 

They are great for all ages, and are books we all sit down and enjoy together.  It is great to find books which make everyone laugh and as a mama books I don't mind reading over and over again!  After five years owning Pancakes for Findus I still want to read it!   Pancakes for Findus is about Findus' birthday, so would make a great birthday present for someone. 

The stories are about a man and his cat, they live a very simple make do and mend lifestyle in the countryside.  The pictures are very detailed and the more you look at them the more you see.  I LOVE them.....can you tell! 

Our poly tunnel

Earlier this year we invested in a poly tunnel.  We spent ages pulling up grass and digging holes and Jeremy did the frame work and then we did the plastic covering.  We then planted LOTS of seeds and managed to fill the poly tunnel up....not always in straight rows (my fault).  Jeremy built some staging which we are growing cut and come again lettuce on, basil, rocket, chamomile, coriander, the most successful has been the salad.  I planted lots of little gem seeds too and moved them into the ground as they grew, it worked well and I have been living off them for a few weeks now.  We cut our first courgette this week, very exciting!  We have green tomatoes too, so cannot wait for them to turn red.  We made our own nettle feed for the tomatoes by putting some nettles in a lidded plastic crate chopping them with shears, adding water and letting it stew.  It stinks! But hopefully it will work. There are a few cucumber plants in the poly tunnel too, some strawberry plants which we have been enjoying berries.  There are also a few potato plants which came from last years crops.  

Sour dough bread

We have been baking our own bread for a while now.  Shop brought bread never tastes as good now. We had been baking spelt loaves with shop bought packet yeast but I recently had another go at sourdough.  We buy lots of things in bulk from essential food coop, big bags of flour being one.  We thought we would try rye sourdough next as the flour costs less.  But I think it is an epic fail. Our loaves of sourdough tend to rise beautifully especially in the heat wave we are having at the moment.  But today is the first loaf of a hefty 25kg bag of rye flour and it is looking flat and pathetic...what will the children say! They have only just got half used to the acquired taste of sourdough! And are once again eating some lunch! Poor bunnies, how do they put up with their experimental mother...I think the recipe for rye sourdough must be different from my spelt one.  Ooops!

Where are we?

This has been a gradual journey, where little by little we have been trying to do our best to reduce the impact of our living on the environment and trying to live as close to nature as possible.   This is a little bit about where we are right now......I am sure I will come back to some of these things in detail at a later date.....this is just as they came to me.....

• We no longer drink tea or coffee and instead drink herbal tea from metal tea balls rather than buying boxes of tea.  I would like to one day grow our own herbs and dry them instead of buying them in.  We drink fresh nettle tea everyday, from a crop of nettles which are in our garden, we pick the little tops off and put them in our teapot in the morning and the nettle tops regrow giving us an endless supply.
• We try to buy organic food.  This is for the benefit of the soil and creatures who live inside her as well as for ourselves, for the people who will walk upon this earth long after us and use her to grow their food.
• We have recently bought a polytunnel after much consideration.  I don't like using plastic and worry about the impact of buying and using a polytunnel, but cost wise and safety wise the polytunnel seemed the best option to be able to grow a good crop of vegetables and salad for our family.  We are also using some of the soil in our garden which is not covered over to grow raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb, we have several apple trees which were here when we moved in, we also have herbs....i love herbs too :), potatoes, 
• I had a mad moment of removing all the electrical devices from our bedroom, we no longer have a cd player, or bedside lamps.....I would love to read by beeswax candles at night....but have not worked out how to make the light strong enough in winter...so this is work in progress.
• I have also replaced all of our plastic stuffed duvets with cotton sheets and some natural quilts which i made in a rustic homemade patchworky way.
• I have removed carpets from our house so i can feel the wood beneath my feet and so that we can simply sweep them clean.
• We have managed without a freezer for a while, but it is still switched on.  Peggy's placenta was in there until the 8th July 2013 when she turned one and it was given back to the earth to celebrate her birthday.

Who are we?

We are a family of 7. Alison, Jeremy, Amber (12), Dylan (10), Elmo (4) and Peggy (1) and Bramble the golden retriever (9).  We are on a beautiful journey to be as self sufficient as possible.  We live in a 3 bedroom semi detached house in Glastonbury, Somerset, Uk.  At present we home educate. I care deeply about the planet and would like to do my best to help future generations to enjoy this beautiful world.  We parent as naturally as possible.  I am hoping to document our journey to be as self sufficient as possible.