FIRST FRIDAY - JULY
Happy First Friday on a Thursday! My post where I share what we have been up to here at Honey Locust Home for the past month. The cocktail we are enjoying this month is one of my favorite summer cocktails, a Salty Dog. You can make it with Gin or Vodka, perfect in our house because Josh prefers it with Vodka and me with Gin.
The Salty Dog the delicious blend of grapefruit juice and vodka/gin. I added a little Elderberry Liquor adding a lovely floral accent flavor. I mixed 1 part vodka/gin with a splash of Elderberry liquor into two parts grapefruit juice served in a salted rim glass over ice.
New this month I made a First Friday Soap to go with our drink, So head over the shop and pick up some Salty Dog Soap. Full of skin-loving oils and beautifully scented with the zesty fruitiness of grapefruit and coolness of mint. It is the perfect soap for these summer days.
In my last post, I talked about how I was getting excited to plant in the gardens this summer. I have to tell you that quickly from excitement to extremely overwhelmed. Here is the current sad state of our perennial garden.
Not so impressive!! With all the rain we had in the spring the garden quickly became overrun with weeds. I know I say weeds, they aren't really weeds, they are a bunch of plants out of place. Much of what is growing is probably useful and medicinal, but I just want pretty flowers. I will spend this month trying to clean everything up by cutting down anything large and then will go after anything small with a horseshoe hoe. Once the bed is cleaned up I will plant new plants and lay down a good layer of mulch. I think it is going to take a couple of years to get it to where I want it to be and is going to be a labor of love, but so worth it in the end.
In the house, I did make a little headway with the desk area in the living room. It is a work in progress and I am loving having the desk in the living room. I could not imagine being separated in a little office somewhere in the house away from my family to work. I am pretty happy working in the center of the home.
In the shop, you can find many of our favorite soaps including Salty Dog soap! I have also added Pit Pate deodorant. I used many natural deodorants, all containing baking soda which I found extremely irritating on my skin. So I decided to make my own baking soda free deodorant. I chose the paste form and am pretty happy with how it turned out. It is made with coconut oil, cocoa butter, jojoba butter, beeswax, arrowroot powder, and bentonite clay. There are a few in the shop. Go check them out!!
Back in March Josh shared how he was preparing to add bees to our little homestead, you can read about it here. We welcomed the nuc of bees at the beginning of June. So far all is good. Many people ask what our goal is with having the bees the honey or the wax? Right now the goal is making sure the bees do not leave the hive.
Other than that we were pretty busy wrapping up the end of the school year with the end of the year activities. Between the girl's activities, both of us working full-time, I am pretty happy with what all we are getting done. We are always ambitious with our goals and projects we want to complete. We think we can get way more done in the little amount of time we have, than we actually can. We are learning to slow down and introducing too many projects at one time is not fun. It is better to go slower and only bring on what we can handle based on our time and money. Sometimes I feel so behind, compared to what I don't know? So here is to slower days, completing projects, and enjoying the moments!Happy July!!
xoxo - Mindy