Help Bird and Insect Populations with your Yard or Garden

Florida Native Wildflower Monarda punctata (spotted Horsemint)

According to scientists who published in the journal Science this month the number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion over the past 50 years. That is nearly 30 percent of bird populations, and not just rare or endangered bird species but also common birds. Birds particularly impacted are those which feed on insects.  This downward trend runs parallel to a downward global trend in insect populations. A few of the suggested causes for the insect decline include habitat destruction caused by urbanisation, pesticides, climate change, and artificial lighting.

 There are two easy ways that you can help make a difference in healthy insect and bird populations. First, eliminate pesticides from your yard, and second grow a garden. Any size garden is helpful, even potted patio plants. Native plants for the yard are low maintenance and act as host plants for insects and pollinators. Another good place to start is with an Organic soil mix and seeds of native wildflowers. Look for native wildflowers and plants at your local farmer's markets.

Florida Wildflower Tropical Sage,  photo by Carl E Lewis (CC BY 2.0)

Aquarian Bath is doing our part to improve habitat for birds and insects! We were recently featured in the Daytona Beach News Journal for creating a certified wildlife habitat though the National Wildlife Federation and the Florida Wildlife Federation.

Clip of News Journal Article "Local business makes a difference to protect wildlife" Sept 2019

Flourless Carrot Cake Recipe: Made WIth Juiced Carrot Pulp

Do you like juicing carrots? Have you ever wondered if there was something you could do with the leftover carrot pulp to keep it zero waste? I have a good solution for you, a tasty flourless carrot cake. Our carrot shampoo bars are made with freshly juiced Organic carrots. I end up with a lot of carrot pulp from making our Carrot Shampoo bars and freeze the pulp for baking with later.

Flourless Carrot Cake by Aquarian Bath

2 cups cooked garbonzo beans

3 cups carrot pulp

5 eggs (try "flax egg" to make it vegan)

1 T molasses

3/4 c sugar

1/4 cup Organic Extra Virgin Olive oil

2/3 t pink salt

2 t Organic ginger powder

4 t Organic cinnamon powder

2 t baking soda

1 t Organic Stevia powder (green)

First mix the garbanzo beans in a food processor with olive oil until smooth.  Mix together with carrot pulp, eggs, sugar and molasses followed by the additional ingredients.  Bake in an oiled pan at 350 degrees F until the top becomes firm.  Test the inside of the cake with a tooth pick  or knife before pulling out of the oven. 

You can find Organic spice ingredients for this recipe at Mountain Rose Herbs. 

Carrot Shampoo bar with Lemon, Bay Rum and Cedarwood essential oils.

Post-holiday Inventory Update

Happy New Year!  Hope you had a wonderful 2014, and best wishes for 2015. Thanks for buying us out of so many products for Hanukkah, and Christmas 2014. Dead Sea Mud Shampoo bars, Lavender Deodorants, Skin Regeneration Balm, Spearmint Deodorants and Aloe Rosemary Mint Shampoos are back in stock. Rose shampoo bars and Citrus Bay Rum patchouli shampoo bars will be ready January 21st. We are almost out of Neem shampoo bars, Patchouli soaps, Sesame Aloe shampoo bars, and Neem olive oil soaps. More neem shampoo and Patchouli soap will be ready January 28th after we sell out of the last couple that are currently available. We will be making more of the following sold out bars next week and the following week: Gardener's Soaps, Lavender Oatmeal soaps, Neem Olive oils soaps, Sesame aloe shampoo bars, and Lavender Vanilla Shampoo bars. These will be ready in early to mid February. Thanks for your patience!

The Best Shampoo Bars to use with Hard Water

Our Key Lime Eucalyptus shampoo bar worked well in hard water conditions.

Thanks so one of our awesome Aquarian Bath customers, I am happy to share our top shampoo bars to use with hard water. Kimberly had initially used one of our shampoo bars (Rose hemp) while on vacation in Florida with great results. Her hair type is long with natural henna-dyed hair. When she returned home and used the same bar, she experienced a build up in her hair. Apparently her city water was exceptionally hard, so much so that the water had a dirty smell. Even some laundry wasn't coming 100% clean, and had the same dirty smell. Hard water is water that has a high mineral content, and some minerals can give an off smell. Kimberly ordered different sample shampoo bars to try out, and I also threw in a 2 or 3 additional sample bars for her to try. I'm thrilled she tested all of the ones she received and provided great feedback for me to share with everyone.

Here are is Kimberly's detailed feedback and special tips for shampooing with hard water:

With hard water you have to use more soap then you would have to with soft or normal water. So two things I started doing are using more shampoo. This seemed to really help and also I started combing my hair as I rinse the shampoo out, in hope that no minerals would get stuck in the tangles. I tried each bar at least once with combing when I rinse and once without combing, and I found the combing did make some difference. What I think worked best for my hair would be Aloe Lavender Rosemary Mint and the Key Lime Eucalyptus. They made my hair very shiny and lay very smooth. The Neem and Vanilla Lavender both worked on my hair but gave me more volume and less shine.

Lavender Rosemary Mint Aloe shampoo bar was the other top pick.

Best results with Hard water:

Key Lime Eucalyptus Shampoo Bar

Lavender Rosemary Mint Aloe shampoo bar  (also available in Lemon Vanilla)

Lavender Vanilla Shampoo Bar

Neem Oil shampoo bar

update 11/7/14 reformulated Tea Tree Eucalytpus shampoo has same formula as Key Lime/Euc

Update 3/15 Carrot Top Shampoo formula now same as Key Lime/Euc

Worst results with Hard Water:

Rose Hemp Shampoo Bars

Orange Lavender Shampoo Bar

update 11/7/14 other hemp shampoo bars

I think that these results may have something to do with the concentration of Jojoba oil which is used in our formulas, though not all of our bars were tested. The bars that had the best results had no Jojoba, with the exception of Neem, which has only 1 percent Jojoba. The two other bars that gave poor results have a higher concentration of this liquid wax. This was a bit of surprise, because Jojoba is generally considered a luxury oil for hair care. The Rose Hemp bars also are scented with a Bulgarian rose wax, which leaves no residue in normal water.

Do you have experience with hard water and using any of our shampoo bar formulas? We would love to hear your feedback, because as you may have noticed not every bar was tested.  I will post any more relevant feedback about hard water and our other shampoo bar formulas to this blog post.  

Scented Geraniums in the Garden and Kitchen

A Rose-scented Geranium cultivar in our Garden

Geranium

Pelargonium graveolens of the plant family Geraniaceae is a spreading aromatic shrub which grows 2-3 feet, and is used frequently in Aromatherapy, skin care, and perfumery. This plant originated in South Africa, and now grows worldwide. One of the main areas of cultivation is Egypt. We use this herb or its essential oil in many of our Aquarian Bath products, and now you can discover more about this remarkable herb.
 

From Garden to Kitchen

There are many cultivars of Pelargonium with different scents. In our garden we have Rose Scented Geraniums and Lemon Scented Geraniums. I have found these geraniums are exceptionally easy to cultivate from cuttings, with nearly a 100% success rate. All that is required is a little pot of garden soil. Put the fresh cut stem into the soil and add water every 2-3 days. Mountain Valley Growers boasts 24 varieties of scented Pelargonium. A few of those include Apricot, Cinnamon, Lime, and Ginger.  

Lemon scented Geranium has a Citronella type scent.

What can you do with fresh Geranium leaves? Fresh geranium leaves can be included when making fruit jams or jellies. Linda Reed has a dedicated pinterest board for geraniums and geranium recipes. The list goes on and on, starting with lemonade, mojito, cakes, and cookies. 

 
Our lemon scented Geranium cultivar at high magnification.

Geranium Lemonade or Limeade Concentrate Recipe adapted from cook.com 

Ingredients:
1 cup water
1 cup sugar* (not GMO beet sugar)
10 rose-scented geranium leaves
1 cup fresh Organic lemon or lime juice
ice water, to serve

Directions:

In a small pot boil water with sugar. Remove from heat, add leaves and let infuse 4-10 hours. Squeeze out the leaves well. Add lemon or lime juice. Pour the solution into a bottle and refrigerate. To serve, add 1 T of this concentrate to 1 cup of chilled water and mix well. Serve over ice in a glass garnished with a small scented geranium leaf of rose petals. The concentrate can be stored in the refrigerator for two weeks. 

*You can use honey instead of sugar if you add the honey to the cooled boiled herbal infusion. Boiling honey is not required or recommended.

Another fun thing to do with geranium leaves is to make an herbal vinegar. You can use the vinegar in salad dressings, or for making a diluted vinegar hair rinse, which can be helpful for people make the transition to shampoo bars. With a little creativity, there is basically no limit to what you can create in your kitchen with this remarkable herb.

Geranium essential oil, together with Bulgarian Rose wax, Lavender and Cedarwood scent Aquarian Bath’s popular Rose oil shampoo bar for normal to dry hair types.

Why Child Labor, Exploited Workers, and "Sustainable" Palm Oil Don't Belong in Your Soap

"Sustainable" Palm oil is in the news again this week in Indonesia. Palm oil plantation workers demanded that the RSPO stop certifying Palm plantations as 'sustainable' when they are exploiting workers. This occurred outside the 11th annual RSP0 meeting. Workers Give Message to RSPO: Don’t Certify Abuse! - Labor is Not a Commodity. RSPO stands for Roundtable on Sustainable Palm oil. It is a creation of the Palm oil industry, and primarily includes major players in the industry. There is no outside overseer who monitors the sustainable certification. In July Bloomberg exposed child labor and forced labor on RSPO certified "sustainable" palm oil plantations. Palm oil is not just in many handmade soaps and shampoo bars, but also food products such as most cookie packages at the grocery store.

Palm oil is used in many soaps because it makes a hard long lasting soap with a mild gentle lather. It can basically be substituted 1 to 1 for lard in old fashioned soap recipes. The vegetarian palm oil may seem more ecofriendly than lard, especially with the vegan labeling, but pristine rain forest habitat is destroyed in the process, endangering Orangutans and human jungle habitat as well as eliminating some of the highest areas of biodiversity on the planet.

Aquarian Bath is able to make high quality handmade soaps without palm oil, because we instead formulate our soap and shampoo bar products with a balanced blend of Shea butter or Organic Cocoa butter together with Extra Virgin Olive oil and Coconut oil. Our soaps require a larger concentration of more expensive Shea Butter or Organic Cocoa butter compared to 'sustainable' palm oil which is much cheaper. The majority of our soaps are vegetarian, and we are happy to report that as we expanded our business in 2013 with the help of increase in sales we converted 4 of our non vegetarian formulas to vegetarian in 2013. We will be converting our last non vegetarian bar to vegan in Winter 2014.

Thank you to our customers for paying a little extra to purchase our palm free soaps and shampoo bars. We are always looking for ways to lessen our ecological impact.  Look for more announcements on that topic in the near future regarding our new solar e-commerce initiative and a move towards certified Organic fabric with our Organic Flaxseed and Organic herbal neck pillows.

New Hemp Soap & Shampoo Bar Gift Sets from Aquarian Bath and Giveaway

These are our new Hemp Soap and Shampoo Gift sets.  Each gift set comes with one of our Peppermint, Lavender, Patchouli body soaps, 2 cedar soap decks, and your choice from one of our 4 hemp oil shampoo bars.   We have Citrus Bay Rum Patchouli (above) with red Moroccan Clay.

We have our original Patchouli hemp shampoo bar with French green clay.

We have a new Lavender- Patchouli Hemp shampoo bar with Rhassoul Clay.

We also have the very popular Rose Hemp Shampoo bar.

You could win one of these gift sets at Beth Terry's Plastic Free Life blog.  She is taking entries through the end of the week.  Tell her we sent you!  She has a great blog which is very informative regarding reducing plastic in your life. 

Aquarian Bath Welcomes Bitcoin

Aquarian Bath has recently added bitcoin as payment method in our main online store at AquarianBath.com. All product prices are now listed in USD and Bitcoin.  

Shop now for for ecofriendly handmade bath and body products.  We ship internationally within 1-4 business days, but usually next day.  Our products have been featured in the book Plastic Free by Beth Terry and British Vogue.

If you haven't heard of bitcoin, check out this trailer for the new film The Rise of Bitcoin.  And here is a little introduction from Wikipedia:

"Bitcoin (BTC) is a digital currency first described in a 2008 paper by pseudonymousdeveloper Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it a peer-to-peer, electronic cash system.   Bitcoin creation and transfer is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority. Each bitcoin is subdivided down to eight decimal places, forming 100 million smaller units called satoshis.  Bitcoins can be transferred through a computer or smartphone without an intermediate financial institution."

Voyage - A Nautical Etsy Front Page Collection

My Dead Sea Mud Shampoo bar is currently on the front page of Etsy in Europe in this beautiful nautical and beachy collection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

'Voyage' by barbaraszepesiszucs

Vintage Wooden Row ... rouilly $200.00	Swallow Envelope Ne... SilentRoses $24.00	Kiss Me Sailor Boy ... maclancy $6.50	Dead Sea Mud Shampo... AquarianBath $6.50
Anchor necklace - b... missbabacilu $28.00	SALE 15% Black Coll... LikeFreja $28.00	Vintage navy blue t... TheRetroBotteg... $45.00	Sea side photograph... OverTheRainbow... $30.00
Pin Up Nautical Pol... iconoclasp $36.00	CIJ 20% OFF Butterf... LaurasJeweller... $6.00	Crochet Peter Pan C... polixeni19 $14.00	CIJ 10% Off OOAK Na... Ollegoria $115.00
Vintage Sailboat An... idiopix $13.95	Navy Blue and White... ProjectCottage $145.00	Creamy White Coral ... paperwords11 $10.00	Sea House - 8x10 Fi... sintwister $25.00

Treasury tool supported by the dog house

I love this Aquarius painting by the curator of the treasury also. Be sure to check out all the great maternity and bird art in her shop. There are many colorful paintings to admire.