Planting Potatoes in Central Texas

Yellow wax, french fingerling, purple Peruvian, and red potatoes

We have two great challenges to growing potatoes in central Texas.  First, potatoes like deep, rich, loose, slightly acid soil and ours tends to be shallow, poor, highly alkaline, and sticky.  Potatoes also give small yields if exposed to high temperatures or really wet conditions too early.  And we have short, wet (if we're lucky) winters and springs.  So many gardeners in this area grow potatoes in chicken wire towers or boxes from pallets.

My dad and the old German farmer down the road from us grew potatoes old school, straight in the ground, and had a good amount of success, so I tend to do the same thing.  Dad and our neighbor both had the strange good fortune to possess some small pockets of deep, black soil among the rocky hills that make up most of this area. Plus, they were both incredibly stubborn.

We too have a pocket of fairly good soil, although it's a little heavy and sticky.  Still, with lots of organic amendment, I can grow potatoes right in the ground with reasonable success. And I even take a few liberties with conventional wisdom about growing potatoes.


Here's what I know of conventional wisdom and where I've diverged:


Using grocery store potatoes versus seed potatoes
The word is, you should never plant grocery store potatoes because they may have been treated with a growth inhibitor.  I guess that may be true since everyone says it, but it's an hour drive to the nearest place that sells seed potatoes and I've yet to try and save my own seed.  So I've planted grocery store potatoes from time to time. They do sprout quite readily.  Hasn't everyone accidentally sprouted potatoes in their kitchen?


Pre-sprouting versus not prespouting
I think the idea behind pre-sprouting is that it shaves a week or so off time between planting and maturity.  It also easily lets you see where to cut the potatoes so that you have at least one growing eye in each piece. 


Our neighbor never presprouted.  He had a huge field he planted every year, and he said he had to move too fast to worry about knocking off the fragile sprout tips.  He grew more potatoes than anyone I've ever known.  My dad always pre-sprouted so I always did too, until this year when my mother-in-law gave me a bunch of very tiny seed potatoes from her nursery.  They were small enough that I knew I couldn't cut them and also, for some reason, they never sprouted above ground.  So I planted them anyway and have had a pretty good harvest. It's hard to tell if it took a lot longer for the potatoes planted without pre-sprouting to mature because we had a crazy early heat spell that caused the plants to jump ahead by about a month.  So we harvested in early May.


How to Pre-sprout (also called chitting)
 Lay potatoes in a single layer on a shallow box or tray. Do not let them touch. If your potatoes are small enough, an egg carton is a great way to keep them sorted properly. They should ideally remain at around 60-70 degrees.  But that's a temperature range that's hard to come by around here.  Outside, in the house, on the porch, in the garage, it's usually either hotter or colder than that.  I think as long as it's well above freezing and below wiltingly hot, those potatoes will sprout. Also, try to keep them dry.  Try to plant before the sprouts get too long or they will tend to break as you drop them in the ground.

Cutting potatoes versus planting whole
A large sprouted potato can often be cut into three or four pieces, so cutting is definitely the frugal choice. If you do cut, no peice should be smaller than a golf ball.  


Curing seed potatoes with sulfur versus wood ash versus nothing 
The purpose of curing cut potatoes with sulfur is to prevent rotting in the ground.  My dad always used wood ash instead of sulfur and he had enormous yields.  I confess that I have several times skipped this step entirely and have yet to suffer adversely.   I wonder if it is in wetter climates that curing really matters?

How to cure seed potatoes with sulfur or wood ash
After cutting potatoes, let them dry until a skin forms on cut surfaces.  Dust with sulfur or wood ash and let potatoes dry another day before planting.

How to plant potatoes
Dig a furrow 6-8 inches wide and 6-8 inches deep.  Most sources say to space seeds about 10” apart, but if there's room, space even more widely.  I like about 14 inched so they have plenty of room to spread their toes.  I also think it keeps disease down. Cover potatoes with soil. After plants are about  3-4” tall, add more soil.


When to harvest potatoes
Once the plants are flowering, wait a week or so, then carefully dig around the plants for new potatoes.  Between  90 – 120 days, the plants suddenly turn yellow and start looking like they're dying. Now it's time for the big harvest.  This year, the potato gods went crazy and I started havested in about 70 or 80 days.  This means I'll have a smaller crop, but it's still a good one. I think it got hot so early it sent the potatoes into hyperdrive.  


What varieties grow best in Texas?  Well, I've tried a number of red, white, yellow, and purple.  Sadly, so far I've had very limited success with purple.  I say sadly because those are my favorites and they are also the most nutricious.  Here in our alkaline soils, it seems the yellow, waxy varieties grow best. 


For red potato, Red La Soda and  Pontiac are proven favorites;  for white, Kennebec or Irish Cobbler varieties are the choices. Russets do not grow well in our area.

Making Sauce From Frozen Tomatoes

Last summer I just plain could not keep up with the tomato canning and ended up doing something that frankly, made me shudder. I froze some tomatoes. I'd read that a lot of people do that when they run out of time. I never really trusted that frozen tomatoes would be any good, and so ended up buying some store bought tomatoes when my own canned ran out two months ago. Of course store bought tomatoes in winter are pretty sad things as well.

So here I am in February, finally using those frozen tomatoes. It turns out they're just fine. They work almost as well as home canned and are about a thousand times better than anything that can be bought out of season. I did fire roast about half of the tomatoes before I froze them and those are actually quite excellent. The other were frozen whole or quartered, without roasting or even blanching. Now I'm glad I didn't bother with blanching. Freezing serves the same purpose, which is to allow the skins to slip off.

I did remove the skins for the first few batches of sauce. Then I thought, why be so picky? You ate store bought tomatoes and didn't die. Surely you can eat the skins from your own homegrown, albeit previously frozen tomatoes. A Vitamix, or some other high speed blender, is key, I suspect, to the success of this venture. You can even blend the tomatoes without defrosting them first. You'll end up with a thick, chilly, bright pink tomato puree that can be cooked into any sauce at all, and those skins don't have to end up in the compost pile. Plus, you save the entire five seconds it would have taken to remove the skins from the tomatoes.

Toad For Breakfast

Here's a happy collection: A few slices of leftover no-knead homemade bread; some fresh eggs from a friend's backyard chickens; butter I made several months ago, from local raw cream, and that had been hiding in a corner of the freezer. Quite naturally on a Sunday morning, my thoughts turned to toad-in-a-hole. Making it is simple. Use a biscuit or cookie cutter to make a hole in the middle of a piece of bread. Melt butter in a frying pan. Add eggs, cook, flip, cook some more. The best part is the little rim where the eggs meet the bread. And in my neck of the woods we eat this homemade salsa.

The Jig's Up, Spaghetti Squash

I first encountered spaghetti squash when a friend of mine was doing Weight Watchers, in the 90's, when the low fat craze was in full swing. She cut the poor squash in half, microwaved it, shredded its innards with a fork, and then served it with fat free marinara sauce from a jar. Is it any wonder I've had a hard time loving spaghetti squash?

But it turns out there is much to love about this squash. It's easy to grow, drought and insect tolerant, and most of all, stores forever on a counter top. Last summer I planted a single hill from some seeds I'd saved from a supermarket squash. Then I forgot all about that hill, moved some of my beds around, and rearranged my watering system. Somehow the spaghetti squash got left out in the cold, metaphorically. More literally, it got left in a spot that I completely forgot to water and often tromped across, dragged a hose over, and snapped of bits of vine.

Still, I ended up with dozens of squash. Dozens and dozens. I gave some away. We ate a few. And I filled a huge basket with about twenty of them back in July. We're down to four, after eating two of them last night as a main course, with garlic, butter, and parmesan. Which brings me to what I consider the primary virtue of spaghetti squash. Because they store forever, without canning or freezing, you can have fresh summer squash in February. That's right -- fresh, not frozen or canned, summer squash. Not winter squash.

It wasn't until I realized this that I started to really, really love spaghetti squash. You see, this squash had been sold to me under false pretenses. It was supposed to be like spaghetti. In fact, except that you can shred it with a fork and make something vaguely spaghetti shaped, there is no similarity.

Which is why I am announcing to all spaghetti squash everywhere that the jig is up. You are not spaghetti. You are squash. Stop pretending. Be proud of your vegetable nature. You are delicious, just like you are.

Black Bean Chocolate Cake, Part II: A Warning

I've been making this cake for a good while now. I've made it for Widget Man and for company. I've taken it for a pot luck. I served it at a writing workshop once and people who had just met were licking their plates. In front of each other.

You'd think I'd have the recipe pretty much down by now.

You'd think.

But here's what happened. My eighty year old dad has been living with us for a little bit and he needs a fair amount of care. And I've been a fair amount of tired. But I wanted some cake! I mentioned making a cake to Widget Man and he wanted some too. So in a fit of greed and laziness, I used canned beans to make the cake. This was not my first fit of greed or laziness, and not the first time I've used canned beans for this cake either.

But this time, something went very, very wrong. So wrong that Widget Man took one bite of the cake, put his fork down, and looked at me with a very carefully neutral expression on his face. Then I took one bite and gagged. Then he felt free to make really loud gagging noises and bulge his eyes in a dramatic fashion. And I thought that was quite enough, thank you very much. No need to be rude.

The cake tasted, not to put too fine a point on it, like a big plate of crazy. I mean, not just bad, but crazy. Crazy because it was a moist, rich, chocolate cake, with icing and pecans, infused with the most intense flavor of bacon. Wait, not bacon: overwhelmingly powerful, fake bacon flavoring.

So I blame the canned beans, although the only thing on the label that looked suspicious was the word "spices." And let me reiterate that I've used canned beans before and the cake came out fine. Delicious, even.

And just in you want to use canned beans in your cake, I should tell you I've used Progresso brand beans with complete success in the past. I hate to name names but I will, for the sake of those who might want to avoid the shrieks of grief that accompany throwing an entire chocolate cake in the compost bin.

Fire Roasted Tomatoes

My San Antonio grandmother used to make a fresh batch of salsa for each meal. She'd stab a tomato onto a fork and hold it over the flames of her gas stove until the skin began blackening and curling away from the fruit. Then she mashed it in a mocajete, also called a mortar and pestle, with salt, spices, and chiles, and that would be a meal's worth of salsa.

I don't know anyone anymore who makes fresh salsa for each meal, although I'm sure there are still some who do (note to those who do: when's dinner?). But a quick roast on the grill or under the broiler adds an amazing flavor boost to canned tomatoes, sauces, and salsas.

Here's how:

First wash and remove stems. Then pop tomatoes on the grill or under a very hot broiler. After the tops turn crisp and brown (about 5 or six minutes), turn over and brown the other sides.

Let cool, then remove cores and most of the skin, leaving behind a bit of the browned skin. Now continue with canning or salsa/sauce making.

This batch is going into some canned salsa.

How to Weather a Storm Sustainably

We really don't live that far from civilization, but sometimes it feels like we do. We're only 3o minutes from Austin, and 10 minutes from a small lakeside town. When we first moved here, I didn't quite realize that because of the way the highways are built, the geography of our immediate area, and the way services are clustered around urban and suburban populations, we would have to learn how to be independent at times.

Our main route to civilization is a small county road that crosses several creeks which tend to flood during storms. So we can be cut off pretty easily, once for almost two weeks. And we tend to be last on our power utility's list to restore services when storms take out transformers.

Last night we had tornadoes in the area as well as hail. The big stuff missed us, but we were without power for about twelve hours. Normally, twelve hours is not a big deal at all, but my eighty year old dad was visiting, who has some mobility difficulties and I didn't want him tripping in the dark, or becoming disoriented in the middle of the night.

Of course we have flashlights and candles, but even better, we have a set of outdoor solar path lights, the kind you stab in the ground. We gathered them up and placed each one in a quart mason jar for stability. We spent a pleasant evening talking and watching the storm roll in and out, with the house lit by a soft solar powered glow. When we were ready for bed, we left a few of them around the house to help orient my dad.

Unlike candles, they pose no fire hazard and unlike flashlights, their batteries weren't going to run out. In the morning we awoke to find our electricity working again. We returned the solar lights to the path outside, to recharge and light our way wherever they are needed, inside the house or out.

Hot Pink Salad

For some reason, no one I knew ate beets when I was growing up. I think the first time I saw a beet was a pickled version at a Wendy's salad bar during the happily short-lived salad bar craze of the 80's. (Mmm...wilted lettuce and mayonnaise salad.)

I don't know why we didn't eat beets, especially since it turns out they're so easy to grow here. And beautiful. And delicious.

One of our favorite ways to eat them is a variation of a salad I make with potatoes, which is itself a variation of a dish we tried in Paris.

Ingredients for 2 very generous, main course portions
For the vinaigrette:
Whisk about 3 parts good olive oil to 1 part vinegar, 1 part water, and 1 part Dijon mustard
Add sea salt and fresh pepper to taste

For the salad:
Clean and chop or tear into small pieces about 2 dinner plates worth of mixed greens, some sharp and some sweet or whatever is in the garden at the moment. Basil makes a nice addition too.

For the beets:
Puncture 3-4 large beets and microwave until soft but not mushy. While they're still pretty warm, cut into thick slices and place in a bowl. Add about a tablespoon of flour (I like semolina, which gives a nice nuttiness), plus salt and pepper to taste. Quickly sear in a hot pan with a little olive oil, just until a nice, light crust is formed.

For the finished dish:
Quickly, before the beets get cold, toss lettuce, beets, and vinaigrette. Serve right away.

There's something about the contrast of the warm beets and the cold greens, the sweetness of the beets and the tang of the vinaigrette, that is just right for a summer supper.

And by the way, you may notice that the photo above is of sliced, raw beets, and in this recipe, I cook the beets whole, then slice, then sear. Well, I guess a confession is in order. I made the dish, and we ate it before I remembered to take pictures. The photo above is from several nights ago, when I was slicing beets to add to a mixed veggie roast. So now you know. We were too greedy to wait.

Also posted on Real Food Wednesday.

Recipe for a Garden Surpise

I've been boo-hoo-ing all summer because I can't seem to locate seeds for my favorite squash. When I was growing up we called it calabacita, which means "little squash." It's also called tatume, in grocery stores and on seed packs.

Let me sing its praises:

1) It's delicious -- sweet, tender, and meaty. And it won't go bitter in hot weather like zucchini can.

2) It's extremely drought tolerant. Last summer an unplananed event kept us away from home for 3 weeks. When we came back everything was dead except the peppers and calabacita. They were a bit shriveled, but still had fruit, and as soon as I gave them a drink of water they sprang right back, like nothing had ever happened.

3) It's extremely pest and disease resistant. In our area, the squash vine borer is endemic. Almost everyone gets hit by this creature sooner or later and once you've got it, forget about growing yellow squash. I had it in my garden in Austin and would get maybe two squash before the borer appeared. It attacks the vine at its base (by laying eggs that become huge slug-looking things) and kills the whole thing seemingly overnight. I keep hearing rumors of cures but I've never known anyone to be successful. And calabacita? The squash vine borer doesn't seem to like it.

So like I said, lots of moping around here when I couldn't fine any calabacita seed this year. Then, this volunteer appeared in the spot where I had last years compost pile. I ignored it, dragged hoses across it while I was watering other plants, stepped on it occaisonally rather than walk around it, but it persisted in living. Now I see this fruit which looks exactly like a calabacita. I don't know that it actually is my favorite squash; the vine looks different than the one I'm familiar with. But I live in hope.

Meanwhile, if you have access to calabacita seed, especially if you live in a hot, dry climate, you won't be sorry f you plant it. If you have access to the fruit itself, you won't be sorry if you eat it now.

So here's my favorite way to fix it. It's an old San Antonio, home-style, Mexican dish -- easy, quick, fresh, and comforting:

1) Take several bone-in pork chops and cut them into stir-fry size pieces. Leave the bone attached to one of the pieces.
2) Cut calabacita into inch-thick half rounds.
3) Remove corn from cob.
4)Cook pork in a large heavy skillet (a wok is great), at a very high temp (think stir fry temps).
5) When pork is cooked all the way through, add calabacita. Cook until tender. Don't stir too much. You want the outside of the squash to carmelize.
6) When the squash is cooked, add corn. Just cook it long enough to heat it. The corn should remain crisp.
7) Remove from pan, add a little water to the pan to deglaze juices, pour juices over pork, squash, and corn.

The idea is very much like a stir-fry -- food is cooked quickly at high temps and the veggies get a dark, carmelized glaze. The corn adds a sweetness and the squash should be slightly crisp and carmelized on the outside, creamy and soft on the inside. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Some people add comino but I like the pure flavors of the foods themselves.

Easy Roasted Veggies

Now that lettuces are slowing down and getting bitter, salads are no longer the main event at our house. Instead it's vegetables, cooked a thousand ways. Easiest of all is drizzling with a little olive oil, some sea salt, and chopped rosemary. Bake at around 350 until tender.

Here's the catch, though. The oven heats up the house -- precisely what we don't want to do when it's high nineties outside and humid as the tropics.

Fortunately, I have an electric roaster/steamer, bought many years ago when I was under some delusion that I'd be able to make tamales all on my own, like my mom did from time to time. One attempt at lone tamale making was all it took for me to recall that Christmas tamale making always required an army of aunts and cousins as well as my mom and grandmother. How my mom managed to whip up a batch on her own I don't know.

So I'm glad to have a use for the electric roaster, which I put out on the deck while the veggies are roasting. It's already as about as hot as the surface of the sun out there anyway.

Clean and Fresh Mosquito Repellant

Mosquito season is upon us! Not high mosquito season, no. That will come later, and we'll need a proper arsenal of citronella oil, long sleeves, and darting inside quickly at dawn and dusk.. For this light part of the season, it's been enough to put an enormous citronella plant on the back deck, and when the devil-insects start swarming, rub a leaf between hands, on faces, necks, ankles, and over hair.

By the way, I should say this plant used to be enormous. It's been plucked back, leaf by leaf, every evening, right at dusk.

Line Drying Clothes

It ought to be harder and more time consuming to line dry clothes compared to machine drying. If I told my friends it was actually easier, they wouldn't believe me. They'd think I was trying to be brave in the face of difficulties. Or trying to lure them into my insane peak oil fantasies.

But seriously, I think it's easier, most of the time. And I've always considered laundry to be the most tedious of household work. Here's my previous routine:

1. Put a load of laundry in the washer.
2. Switch the load to the dryer, add another load to the washer, go do something else, oops, got distracted and now the clothes in the dryer are wrinkled.
3. Add another load to the washer. Pile wrinkled clothes on the bed, planning to figure out what to do with them later.
4. Come back in a few hours later and discover dogs have decided to nest in clean, wrinkled laundry.
5. Start over at step 1.

The problem is there are so many things to do in a single day that I can't seem to stay close enough to the washer and dryer to make the process efficient. At least one out of two loads of laundry ends up sitting in the bottom of the dryer, wrinkled as a Shar Pei.

But with line drying, here's how it goes.
1. Put a load of laundry in the washer.
2. Hang out laundry.
3. Sometime during the day, remember to pull fresh, unwrinkled laundry from the line, fold right laundry into baskets.

Of course, the other benefits to line drying are pretty obvious. It saves energy, doesn't heat up the house, clothes smell wonderful and are naturally disinfected by sunshine. Additionally, the dryer is pretty hard on fabric. All that lint you take out of the lint trap? That's your clothes, disintegrating.

We don't have an ideal set up for a clothes line. The house is situated on a steep hill, with lots of trees. If I put up a clothes line anywhere around the house, I'd have to tramp down about 100 hillside stairs every single time I wanted to use it. Or, I could hang it near the garden, which is about 200 yards from the house. Instead, Widget Man installed a retractable line on our deck, which get lots of sun and is conveniently located adjacent to our actual house. It looks kind of crazy, I guess, when I've got undies and socks drying on the back deck. But we've gotten used to looking crazy.

Grapes on the Back Deck -- A Central Texas Tradition

When I was growing up in central Texas, all the old German houses and businesses had some kind of grape arbor. The fair grounds had a beer garden, of course, with a huge cedar arbor, big enough for dozens of picnic tables underneath. We had an actual German oompah band in our town, which used to play in the beer garden. Our neighbor, a genuine old German farmer, with the demeanor of a friendly elf, used to play the tuba in the band. The arbor was a shady, cool place to hang out in the summer and the bright green leaves created a beautiful, glowing light.
In the winter the leaves dropped and the gnarled vines took on a sculptural quality.

We don't have a beer garden but we do have a west-facing deck that gets incredibly hot in the summer. A few years ago we planted some grape vines on the hillside beneath the deck and added some fencing for them to climb. The grapes have finally climbed the twelve feet or so from the ground below and are reaching the deck. Besides the delight of having grapes grow right on our deck, we hope to follow the example of those early Texas settlers and take advantage of the leafy green shade in the summer, once the vines complete their journey up the cedar posts of our deck.

In the winter, when the leaves drop, we'll be happy for the extra warmth and sunshine of our west-facing deck. The gnarly vines will add a little character to an otherwise ordinary-looking deck and remind me of a sweet little old German farmer who played the tuba in an oompah band.

Toasting Chili Powder

We know that roasting veggies intensifies their flavors, mellows bitterness, and carmelizes the sugars. This is especially true for hot peppers. But what if you're not using whole peppers? What if all you have on hand for a recipe are dried, commercial chili powders?

Well, you can get much of the benefit of roasting by a quick toast in a dry, hot pan. What I've got going here, which I'll add to a pot of beans, is a mixture of ancho and cascabel powders. Even a commercial chili con carne chili mix is improved by a quick toast in a pan.

Just start with a heavy, dry pan. When the pan is hot, add the chili powders and stir. Keep the chilis moving so they don't burn. They're ready when they've darkened nicely.

That's it!

Favorite Pickling Blend

Favorite Pickling Blend

5-10 peppercorns

10-15 coriander seeds

1 Myrtlewood leaf

A goodly sized sprig of dill

1. Drop spices and herbs in the bottom of each jar.

2.  Use a proportionately upsized amount of herb and spice blend in the cooked pickling liquid + salt and dash of sugar to taste.

I normally use this blend for jalepenos, but this time I was making watermelon pickles.  

About that mytlewood leaf:  Of course you could use basil, but I discovered this leaf on a trip to Oregon and love the flavor.  I used up the supply I bought in Oregon and ordered more online -- I think it was a couple of dollars for a large package.

Green Smoothies

What's a gardener to do with an overabundance of garden greens?  Use them in salads, frittatas, omlettes, stews, and soups.  Make veggie enchiladas, tacos, and lasagnas.  

But the best, easy, fast, filling no-cook meal is a green smoothie.  This one is made with about 2 cups of cilantro, a banana, water, and ice.  Spinach makes a fantastic smoothie too.  It might look like pesto but the taste is lightly sweet and creamy.  So delicious that on weekends, when Widget Man is home in the mornings, I usually make 2 blendersful -- one for our breakfast and one that I transfer to mason jars and refrigerate for lunch or an afternoon snack.

Don't be skeptical.  I was at first and so was Widget Man.  But they taste delicious and power us through long hot days of gardening and working in the hot Texas sun.  Plus, very little clean up and no cooking to heat up the house.

You can make them sweeter by adding more fruit, if you like.  I especially like bananas and pears, because they add a creaminess.  Yogurt's good too.  And with bitter greens, a bit of lemon or anything acidic (like pineapple) cuts the sharp flavor.

Permaculture Bed

Cilantro is a pretty plant any time -- bright green, delicate, excessively fragrant. But when it's in bloom, and luring bees and butterflies to the garden, it's a showstopper. I mean, I can't stay away. I just stand there and smile. So that alone would be worth letting a plant that takes up about a third of a raised bed take its sweet time going to seed.

But I'm hoping for more. This is in my permaculture bed, where I let about ten percent of everything go to seed or otherwise run its natural life cycle. I started planting it two seasons ago, and now I'm getting all sorts of happy volunteers -- kale, dozens of kinds of lettuces and greens, beets, and basil so far. I've also got some leeks in there that I'm letting go to seed, and redivide. This season I added chard, spinach, and tucked in some peppers, tomatillos and tomatoes. One nice result of this mixed bed is that pests never get a real foothold, as they might in a monoculture garden.

Cheaper, Better, AND Faster: Homemade Deodorant

My sister, who used to be a marketing exec, told me that in product marketing they say there are three basic attributes you can use to sell something -- cheaper, better, and faster. But you can only pick two. The idea is that nothing can be cheaper, better, AND faster.

I don't think this is true. In fact, when I play around with making things from scratch I insist that it be all three things. Here's the recipe:

Homemade Deodorant
1 part baking soda
1 part unrefined coconut oil
10 drops tea tree oil

Mix. Use.

I've seen some variations of this recipe all over the internet. Many call for more precise measures; some call for an addition of cornstarch, which is supposed to help absorb moisture. I doubt if this would help much for profuse sweating and when I used this version, it left white streaks on my black sweater. With just the baking soda, no streaks at all!

After this jar runs out, I may try this without the baking soda. This is because I think the coconut and tea tree oils are the key ingredients. Coconut oil is a gentle antibacterial (and antiviral!), will keep skin soft, and acts as a carrier for the tea tree oil. Tea tree oil is a more potent, though still gentle, antibacterial. And it's bacteria that make for smelliness, not sweat.

I think the reason that people are adding baking soda and cornstarch, besides the idea that they may ever so slightly inhibit the appearance of sweat, is that they want to mimic the appearance of a solid roll-on deodorant. I suppose this has the advantage of allowing people to reuse old solid deodorant plastic containers for storage. An easier solution is to reuse a small jar.

I was skeptical about this recipe, believe me. I'm as uptight as it comes about body odor -- not even remotely sophisticated or crunchy on this issue. But it has worked for over two months now, perfectly, 100% of the time -- in hot steamy weather, after hours in the garden, in stressful situations. And, because of my super-sensitive, cry-baby skin, I'd been looking for something that doesn't leave my skin all sensitive and bumpy, which all commercial formulations, even the so-called natural ones, do. This does the trick.

By the way, tea tree oil has a kind of medicinal, camphor-like smell, but it dissipates in just a few minutes. A possible alternative to this might be lavender, which is also anti-bacterial, though I haven't tried it yet.

Homemade Product Evangelizing

I am having an imaginary conversation in my head with a good friend of mine. I had just given her a jar of my homemade laundry soap and was telling her how to make more, if she likes it.

She said, "Grating that bar of soap sounds like a lot of work."

We couldn't finish our conversation because her kids were climbing on our heads, so I'll finish it now.

It takes about thirty seconds to grate a bar of soap. Compare that to hauling a huge box of laundry soap home at least once a month. What if you could buy a few simple, basic, safe, inexpensive ingredients once a year and have everything you need to clean your house?

Compare a few minutes of grating or mixing to hauling boxes of laundry soap, softener, dishwashing detergent, counter spray, oven cleaner, bathroom cleaner, floor cleaner, shampoo, conditioner, bath soap, and deodorant?

What if you didn't have to haul all that stuff around in a grocery cart, wait in line to pay for it, load it in the car, haul it into the house and then find room to store it at your house? What if you didn't have to haul the empty boxes and bottles to the trash?

I know you're busy, my good friend, with kids and all. But this is easier, not harder. When have you ever known me not to take the easy way out when it comes to housework?

I'm just saying.

Best Homemade Shampoo and Conditioner

There are all sorts of recipes out there for all- natural, homemade shampoos and conditioners. I'd say, off-hand there are about eleventy million of them. I would hazard to say I've tried them all. Why, when so many commercial versions are available, in all price-points, from super-industrial better-living-through-chemistry types, to supposedly all-natural, are so many people interested in making their own? Before I hazard a guess, let me list the versions I've tried:

1. Skipping shampoo, also known as no-poo. Ha ha. Slightly funny name. Allegedly, after anywhere from six weeks to six months, hair and scalp readjust and find their natural equilibrium. Maybe that does happen. I don't know since I start looking more than a bit feral after about a week. And that's as long as I've made it. A less radical version is to use only conditioner. This makes sense because commercial conditioners contain a small amount of surfactant which allows them to rinse out. So using conditioner only is like using just a tiny bit of shampoo. Of course, whatever it is that people are trying to avoid in shampoo is still present in conditioner plus some other stuff we might want to avoid.

2. Wheatgrass juice -- Hair smells lovely and fairly clean, skin feels great. But a big pain to make a fresh batch each day (it doesn't store more than a day or so in the fridge), and unless you grow your own wheatgrass, it costs about $4/day. And how do you wash your hair when you travel?

3. Various fruit juices, like orange or grapefruit -- smells nice, but that's about it.

4. Soapwort -- I grew my own for awhile and it did make a nice shampoo but then a freeze killed it all off and it didn't come back. Plus, same problems as with all fresh concoctions. You must make a fresh batch every day and then what do you do when you travel?

5. Honey -- a terrible choice, that some people are curiously in love with. It does smell nice and feel nice. It rinses out fairly easily, but never seems to get my hair very clean. And honey is a humectant. It draws water to it. That's why it's a common ingredient in homemade skin products. The last thing we want is to for our hair to be waterlogged. That's called frizzy hair.

So why the search for homemade, natural shampoos? Because virtually all commercial shampoos contain skin irritants. Seriously. Even the so called natural ones. Even if they claim to be all vegetable derived. And because they really do strip hair of natural oils, so we have to replace them with bizarre lab-produced oils, including the most common and favored conditioning ingredient, silicone and silicone derivatives. Which are seriously hard to wash out of hair. So we use harsh shampoos. Which strips our hair. And so on.

I have two other reasons to want a homemade shampoo. I have the most sensitive scalp on earth. So does Widget Man and so does Widget Man's mom. Anything with sodium laurel sulfate or its vicious relatives immediately makes our scalps break out. Even the most "natural" shampoos eventually get us.

Reason number two is I hate throwing away shampoo bottles. What good is clean hair if I also create a filthy earth?

So here's the recipe. It's so simple I'm embarrassed it took me so long to try it. I've been testing it for a month because I didn't believe anything so simple (and inexpensive) could really work.

In a bottle, mix about 1 part baking soda to 5 parts water. You want a thin slurry.

In another bottle, mix about 1 part vinegar to 1 part water.

In the shower, shake baking soda and water to remix. Squirt a generous amount onto scalp. Wait a bit, then rinse.

Now squirt vinegar over scalp and through hair. Rinse. That's it.

The baking soda removes dirt and excess oil, without stripping. And the vinegar restores the hair's acid balance. You may want a little coconut oil on the ends of hair if you have long or dry hair.

Some recipes call for a thick paste of baking soda and scrubbing it into the scalp. Personally, I think that's too abrasive and not necessary.