Olive Love

So what's the big deal? Why do we persist in using organic olive oil for our soap when it is the most expensive of our base ingredients and soap can be made without it? In a word - Quality.
Historically the finest soaps were olive oil, or 'castille' soaps, mild and nourishing to the skin. In our own 28 years of soapmaking experience we have made soap from a variety of recipes, and those including olive oil were consistently the best quality, more gentle and less drying.

Olives: a gift from the Gods

The ancient Greeks made a wager with their Gods, pledging to name their capital city after the deity who gave them the most valuable tribute. Poseidon, God of the Sea, caused a fountain to spring from the earth flowing water to the city. Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, presented an olive tree. This tree's fruit could feed the masses, light up the night, bring good health, and anoint the heroes. The capital was declared 'Athens' (besides, a salt water spring is almost a nuisance!).
The value of the olive has not been forgotten over time. As a fruit, people usually love it or hate it, but only about 1% to 2% or the world's crop is eaten as fruit. It's the oil that is the delight of the gourmet, the choice of the health-conscious, and the anointment of the discerning.
The olive tree, an evergreen native to Asia Minor, spread to the rest of the Mediterranean Basin and has been cultivated there for over 6000 years. This ancient fruit is still one of the main oil crops in cultivation there and is now widely grown in warm climates around the world.
Olives are one of the few oil crops where the source of the oil is in the pulp, rather than the seed. In the latter case, the purpose of the oil is to provide condensed energy for the emerging seedling. In the case of the olive, any animal which eats the fruit receives the benefits.

Olive Oil for a Healthy Diet

Oils are an important dietary component. They provide essential fatty acids needed for hormone production and the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, & K. They also add an appetizing flavor, aroma, and texture to food.
Fats & oils actually activate the pleasure sensors in our brain, an addicting connection that stems from the needs of early humans and can cause health problems today. However, as we now know, using unsaturated vegetable oils helps avoid these problems. Olive oil has even been shown to help reverse them.

Olive Oil for Healthy Skin

For healthy body care, olive oil is rich in proteins, minerals, and vitamins. It is used as a base in high-quality soaps and cosmetics due to its excellence as a moisturizer and high availability. A natural humectant, olive oil attracts and holds moisture close to the skin and forms a breathable film that helps prevent the loss of internal moisture. Unlike many substances used for this purpose, olive oil does not block the natural functions of the skin and it absorbs readily, carrying the benefits of its nourishing components. Jojoba oil, shea butter, kukui nut oil and a few others are also good, but are far less plentiful than olive.
All in all, the olive fruit nourishes the body within and without, benefiting humankind for thousands of years - - truly a gift from the Gods.

• Simmons special Soaps •

Quality without Compromise since 1982
Get fine castille soaps made with organic olive oil from Simmons Natural Bodycare

SOURCES:
Naturally Healthy Skin, S. Tourles,1999
The Natural Soap Book, S. Miller Cavitch, 1995
Food That Harm, Foods That Heal, Reader's Digest, 1997
Economic Botany: Plants in our World. 2nd Ed. S. Weiss (Ed.)
Creating your own Cosmetics, Naturally, N.J. Smeh, M.S.,1995
Natural Body Care Products, Glossary of Terms & Ingredients 1995

Gophers - not for the faint of heart...

Gophers (@$%#!@#)!
The bane of the vegetable garden. Not to be confused with moles (see below) who eat earthworms, leave mounds of dirt in the lawn, but do not harm your plants, gophers kill vegetables and fruit trees, rose bushes and other landscaping by eating their roots. 
I have played tug of war in the garden with these voracious rodents and they are high on the list of foes to any dedicated vegetable gardener. Nothing is more aggravating than to go out and find a previously vigorous plant suddenly short and wilted, slumped into the hole where its roots used to be.

Gopher damage and prevention depends on the numbers you are dealing with. These little critters propagate like the prey animal that they are, are not deterred by noisemakers or most repellents, and send in new troops to replace the fallen. Thus our most effective method here is trapping and good cats. A friend also had success with a good dog (rat terrier) but the holes he left were larger than the gophers made. If you poison them and a cat or dog gets them afterwards, they can be affected by the poison as well, so we don't recommend that.

If you are not keen on actually killing them off, there are some moderately effective repellents, such as Castor bean/oil – but the truth is barricading them from the plants or reducing their numbers is the only real method if you have a lot of them. In a really wet winter some of them seem to drown (ditto yellowjackets). Simple cages around the roots of plants rarely work. Even raised beds are ineffective unless they are both tall enough gophers cannot climb over the top and have a gopher proof barrier underneath. We know folks who put a 2 inch deep layer of broken glass under a bed and the gophers came through, and they easily scaled the 10 inch sides of our strawberry bed.



We are about to add some new raised beds to our garden. More than 16 inches tall and lined with 1/2 inch hardware cloth they will be a safe haven for gopher delectables such as potatoes, onions, carrots and garlic, cole crops and parsley. Sometimes peppers. And peas. Sigh.
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Gopher story: I had heard several times that gophers would eat Juicyfruit gum and it would clog up their insides & kill them. Many years back I saw this mentioned yet another time in Herb Caen’s column in the SF Chronicle (long time back ) and that pushed me to try it. In certain times of the year they leave their tunnels open to the surface. During that time I placed an unwrapped stick of gum in the holes. Several hours later I would check and Lo! The gum was gone.

I repeated the procedure... A case of Juicyfruit later they were happily consuming all the gum I could give them with no end in sight. I had no idea if constipated gophers were piling up underground or if it just wasn’t working. So we decided to put the gum in the tunnel behind a standard Macabee Gopher Trap. A nasty piece of work that pierces the rodent to death, these traps can be very effective if you find their main tunnel, up to 15 inches deep, and place 2 of these traps, one going each direction. Cover the hole with sod or a board and some dirt to keep the light out, etc.. But for the gum experiment that wasn’t an option, there is really no way to “bait” these traps. So we set them in the feeder surface tunnels near where we placed the gum, but the gophers generally just set off the traps by pushing dirt into them, took the gum and left.

So I had the idea of getting a couple of rat traps (gophers are considerably larger than mice), as they can be effectively baited. Bait in place, I set the traps on the surface of the ground outside the open tunnel. This is 100% opposite everything you have ever heard about dealing with gophers, but I couldn’t figure a way to get the broad traps into the tunnel without the whole thing collapsing as I dug it out to make it fit.

It worked! Against all odds the gophers were coming out of the ground in broad daylight and throwing themselves into the rat traps to get at the gum!!! In 2 weeks we caught 13 gophers. One day we caught 2 gophers in the same trap in about 1 hour. I saw there was a gopher in one of the rat traps and asked my husband to remove it. He went to the store and when he came back I had noticed there was still a gopher in the trap and asked him why he had left it there, but he had already removed one and this was a new gopher!


We must have made a dent in the population, as we saw only a few new tunnels after that. The technique was also limited by the short time in spring during which the tunnels are open. Since then our cats have been able to keep them from getting quite as out of hand as they were that year.
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Resources:
We have friends who swear by "Black Hole" and "Black Box" gopher traps as well. Here is information on a variety of Gopher traps and how to choose. 
For beautiful, durable and easy to assemble raised bed kits,(illustrated above) see: naturalyards.com
For natural outdoor yard and garden pests: Bird&Home.com
Natural Home and garden pest solutions: www.NaturalPestProductsStore.com
Source for traps for Gophers, moles and voles is www.traplineproducts.com. They also have instructional videos.

Seasonal Renewal of the Floral Sort...

We've been discussing the arrival of spring and how it has such a different schedule at different locations in our county (see our March 2009 post: Time Travel into Spring ). It's hard not to be jealous of those with a longer season, but I can't say I don't appreciate the longer rest before all the garden work begins in earnest. Sort of like sleeping in on a Saturday morning!

At any rate, it got me looking for those first floral indicators of the season's change and, it seemed, overnight they were everywhere.
I had just commented that our first daffodils, against a south facing wall with it's sheltered advantage, had just bloomed and then, in the next few days, I started to see wildflowers everywhere.

First I noticed the little pink flowers that are often, with dandelions, the earliest wildflower here. I have always called them Spring Beauty, but cannot find them in any book, by that name or any other. In the family Onagraceae (as far as I can tell), they closest resemble some of the smaller Clarkia. But they bloom a month or so too soon! Do any of you know what this charming, little pink flower might be?

Looking around I realized that Dandelions had also been blooming a while. I could tell because some had already gone to seed puffs. Globes of wish-fairies waiting to be blown into the air.
The common Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, spread throughout the world from Eurasia to become one of the most familiar wildflowers studding lawns throughout North America. Despite being generally considered a weed, Young Dandelion greens are nutritious and delicious in salads or soups, the roots have been used as a coffee substitute, and wine is made from the flowers. A versatile weed, indeed!

Along with the dandelions were one of our favorites, Bell's, or English, Daisy (Bellis perennis ). Close to the ground in a rosette of leaves, these little daisies have aster-like flowers often tinged with pink. These are the flowers with which our daughters and granddaughters make daisy chains to adorn their hair. Another immigrant, it originally came from Europe.

Other extremely early wildflowers here include the tiny, blue Veronica arvensis, also known as Common Speedwell, and pagoda-like Red Deadnettle (Lamium purpureum ). Both tend to appear in areas where the soil has been disturbed, which is why they blanket our vegetable garden now, before we have begun to work the soil. They cover any area the cover crops we plant have missed. Both of these also traveled to the America's from their native Europe and Asia.
The Deadnettle, despite it's name and appearance, is not related to other nettles and does not sting. It does provide a nectar source for bees before other flowers have opened.

Interestingly, of the flowers now blooming, only the one we are not sure of may be a native to our Northern California mountains - maybe. I am always amazed how many common wild plants here are non-natives. Especially as no one built or lived on this acreage before we moved here and began to build up our farm and business back in the 1970's.
Other than these, I see no flowering plants just yet, but it is soon to be. Shoots and stems are popping up all over meadow and forest.

While it is too wet and muddy to work our vegetable garden just yet, that doesn't mean things are entirely in hibernation.There is overwintered parsley, kale, chard, and carrots. Our very late planted cabbage are ready to pick and the "All-the-year-round" cauliflower is just starting to make heads. We even still get a few side shoots from our late broccoli now and then.

And, looking ahead, in snug little trays the seeds for this years cole crops, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and such, are sprouting and getting ready for this 2010 garden.

Only 2 weeks before the Equinox and Spring's official beginning - We can't wait!