Angel Arias Silk Tree Farm Reflection 3/26/13
Today was my first day back from the weekend.
Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal; nothing too special.
But hold on just a moment, something had changed; an event had unfolded in my absence. Two does had delivered in my absence, and I hadn’t really seen the babies yet. Of course besides that it would be a normal day, just, with awesome baby goats. I think when I first got there, that was one of the first things we did, see the babies. But, unknown to me, one of the goats had a bad kidding, and two of her children passed in the process of her birthing, which is really a bummer. Though she did pass three children, so one of them was fine, which, while it is still a shame that the other two were less fortunate, a good thing that she had survived. The other goat, who had additionally begot, had a good birthing and produced three offspring. They were pretty adorable, kind of with that reckless daintiness that small four-legged animals usually have, except even more adorable, because they were goats. But for the day, we were going to be making some soap (I’d never done that before), planting some seeds (Lettuce), and soaking some seeds for sprouting. First up on that previously mentioned list: soap.
When making soap, the first thing you do is probably the most important step in the entire process. It can be very difficult depending of course of multiple variables, but the instructions for the first step are pretty straightforward either way, no matter kind you are making. That first step is: Making sure that you have all the necessary materials to create soap. Of course making it is a whole different story; the first step in making the soap is to bring coconut oil and another oil to minimal heat inside something; we used a Crockpot. Additionally, you can’t forget to measure each of the oils to make sure you have the right amount, and at this stage you’d want to be as accurate as possible. We then used some volatile, voraciously-hot, jumpy and reactive mineral, I think it was called sodium nitrate, or something similar involving the word sodium – but what I could tell you with certainty is that it is a mineral used in Drain Cleaner, and as we all know, Drain Cleaner is really too safe for anything except cleaning drains. I can also tell you that Cathy did you rubber gloves and advised the use of goggles, because that stuff will burn and irritate your skin if it gets in contact with it, and if it does that to skin – you’d want that stuff as far away from your eyeballs as possible. So we added that to a measuring cup for accuracy, and when that was done, we went back inside the kitchen, where Cathy explained to me that the stuff would burn through ice cubes, and would actually burn cold milk. Since neither cold milk nor ice cubes were an option, we used milk ice cubes. Placed them in a green, cylindrical container and added to mineral, which took a longer time to render the ice cubes to liquid than I expected. We check back on the oils, before Cathy realized she hadn’t sliced the soap remaining inside the molds, and steady got to working on that while I tried to keep an eye on the other things, and started to un-screw the holding on the plastic molds that contained the soap that Cathy was cutting. Pretty simple, and before too long we were done with that and onto the next things, which, namely, adding the milk-mineral solution to the now-emulsified oils, and then Cathy started wrapping soaps, while I tried to keep an eye on the forming soap, which you check by moving it, and checking for darker spots near the bottom, which show that it is melting and forming up well, then you mix it together mercilessly with a puree device. Took a while for the soap to come together, and we also had all the soap wrapped, and had washed the molds while waiting for that, since we had the time and had to have the molds ready to go and be used when the time comes. I also had to put back together the molds, align them and screw them together tightly, so the soap does not seep out while the soap is forming in the mold. Cathy also added some honey and essential essence (Sandlewood) to the mixture, to give it some scent. After that, it wasn’t really too long until the soap was actually starting to brown up at the bottom, so we mixed it (Which was in itself a pretty draining and tedious experience), then into the covered molds, and, well that was, thankfully, that. Then, lunch break. After that, we planted some lettuce, same process as before more or less, except we didn’t really have to make indentations since lettuce grows pretty easily. The seeds were pretty small too, so I filled the tray, we used markers to discern which lettuce was which, and then we watered all the plants that needed to be watered, including of course the ones that we had just planted. We would have soaked some seeds to sprout them – but we were coming up short on time so instead we just went into the kitchen, did some research and stuff, I got ready to leave, and we did that for a bit until it was time to go. Overall, today was a very interesting day on the farm, I learned a lot, and took away something very valuable: soap is not easy to make and is not to be trifled with. In all seriousness, though, there was a lot of variation in the day and I did take away a lot from the experience of making soap for the first time.
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