Getting Started with Esential Oils

I've been using essential oils for about a year now. I eased into it one oil at a time at the beginning.

I started with Melaluca for cuts and scratches.

I added Oregano about 4 months later when our daughter got an ear ache. A drop on a cotton ball placed over her ear and a swipe down the side of her neck with it and she was better within an hour.

Then Peppermint because I heard that it was a good bug repellent. I had started running and couldn't handle the bugs around my face in the summertime heat. I put a couple of drops in the palm of my hand with a light carrier oil and put it on the back of my neck, across my temples, and on my shoulders. Bonus: the cooling effect of peppermint in the wind! I would also drop a couple of drops in my sweet tea in the summer for a change of pace.

All of these were of the generic variety. Then a friend of mine introduced me to doTerra oils. At that point, I jumped in with both feet.

I use the Lavender to help me sleep each night and use it an effective but bite and burn soother.
I drink the Lemon oil or the Grapefruit oil in my water everyday. I put the Citrus Bliss on my wrists and the back of my neck as a little pick-me-up in the middle of the afternoon.

But my all-time favorite, hands down, is the OnGuard. I use that in so many things. When I had my four wisdom teeth extracted, I swished with OnGuard in my water. I put it in a spray bottle with Shaklee's Basic H to clean my kitchen. When I feel a cold coming on, I put three drops of it along with Oregano and Lemon in a capsule and knock that junk out. But my absolute favorite way to use it? In my tea. I make a cup of tea and put one drop of OnGuard in it. The clove, orange, and cinnamon flavors are the perfect addition to the hot tea. It's simply delicious. It's the perfect wintertime treat. It's also delicious in a blueberry smoothie with spinach, yogurt, a frozen banana, and raw honey.

Get creative with oils. You will be pleasantly surprised with what they can do.

If I had to live with only 5 oils for the rest of my life it would be Lemon, Lavender, Peppermint, OnGuard, and Oregano. 

I can't imagine my life without them.

The ways that I can use them, both separately and in combination with each other, can help just about any common issue my family has.

What about you? Have you ever tried them?  What are your favorite oils?

Simple Granola

I'm getting ready to take a trip and am putting together my list of "car snacks."

It's funny how the snacks I think of for traveling aren't even close to the snacks I think of when staying home. On my list: Money Munch, granola, apples, vanilla wafers, gummi anythings...

Three of those five items haven't been purchased by me since the last trip I went on! But for some reason, they show up on the list during the planning stage.

Weird. 

I love making granola. But it never turns out the same way twice. If you stick around this blog long enough,  you'll discover that I tend to think of recipes as guidelines rather than rules. This granola recipe fits into that mindset perfectly.

It's basically a ratio mixture:

5 cups of oats or bulk (rice crisp cereal, rolled spelt or rye...)
1/4 cup of oil (coconut, sunflower...whatever you have on hand)
1/4 cup of sweetener (honey, pure maple syrup, brown sugar, sucanat, agave, mixture of any or all)
pinch of sea salt
1 t seasonings (cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice, apple pie spice...)
handful of nuts (sliced almonds, pumpkin seeds, hemp, chia...)
handful of dried fruit- if desired (dried cranberries, dried apple slices, dates, apricots...)

As you can tell, there is a very good reason why my granola never tastes the same twice. TOO.MANY.OPTIONS.

This time, I used Wheat Montana's 7 Grain Cereal as the biggest part of my oats/bulk mixture with the minority being plain rolled oats.  I used organic, lightly filtered coconut oil, sucanat, and pumpkin pie spice. Instead of nuts, I used hemp seeds and no dried fruit.

I absolutely LOVE Wheat Montana's products. I will go out of my way to purchase their products if I need grain and I will make special purchases if I come across their products outside of my regular routine. I purchased their whole wheat berries to grind in my own grinder and it made the absolute best bread ever. *This might sound like a sponsored post, but I assure you-they have no clue who I am* 

If you get adventuresome and are into essential oils (like I am), you can add in a couple of drops of doTerra's OnGuard, cinnamon, wild orange, or ginger into the wet mixture. It adds a wonderful kick to the flavor!

I mix the oil, sweetener, salt, and seasonings together and pour over the oats/bulk.

 Spread onto a foil lined cookie sheet and cook in a 300* oven for about 20 minutes. 

 Stir it every 8-10 minutes. (If you want clumps of granola, DO NOT stir it)

 

Cool and store. 

I use these gallon size glass jars with metal lids for all my bulk foods.

Even with the Wheat Montana grain, this still only cost about $3 to make 6 cups of granola. I don't think that's bad at all. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that you know each and every ingredient you put in there and can pronounce it. Expect for sucanat. I'm still working on that one rolling off my tongue. 

I don't think I need to tell you how to eat this stuff. It's good on yogurt, as a cold cereal, over fruit...the options are endless. Personally, my favorite way is over fruit with a drizzle of our own raw, unfiltered honey.

A side note- I have become addicted to a teaspoon of coconut oil in my coffee. I can't seem to get enough of it. It's heavenly.

Herbal Horse Healing

Living on a small farm means being ready for just about anything. 

Reader discretion is advised.



A few weeks ago, one of my rescue horses got a huge wound on his right rear quarter. The wound was about 7" in diameter and about 2" deep. There was nothing to stitch together. (We're still not sure how he managed it).  I am not a vet tech nor am I really good around ouchies, but he needed tending and it's what one does when one lives on a farm- no matter what the size of the spread.

I was able to clean it out and get all the foreign material out of it- dirt, hair, whatever else a horse gets in a rear end wound- with warm water, paper towel, and persistence so that I could expose some raw edges. Healing has to start from the inside and not cover over dirt and yuck. <-- Life lesson #1 of this situation.

Thanks to the willingness of my good friend, Char, from LiveLifeLoveOils, she was able to hold his head and scratch him behind the ears at the north end while I worked on the south end. The deeper I got into this wound, the more I knew that this was going to be a beast to heal. <-- Um, yeah, we'll call that Life Lesson #2.  Great. I didn't want to stall him because I wanted him to walk on it and keep blood flowing and his joints from getting stiff. I needed to keep him healthy, which is tough with an older rescue horse in the easiest of times. Add to this the combination of record-breaking cold, dangerously low windchills, snow that kept coming, and this wound, and I knew I was in for a doozy of a battle.

We're not a big bunch of panickers around our house. We have been using essential oils for almost a year now and have never looked back. I love the doTerra brand due to the fact that they can be used internally, but there are a few oils that I will buy from other sources. One such oil is Lemongrass.  Knowing that it can speed healing and is a powerful pain reliever, I added it to a bottle of Herbal Solution sample that I had picked up from my local granary. The ingredients followed along our 'first try nature and God's offerings' mentality <-- #3: aloe, myrrh, comfrey, goldenseal, cayenne, and elder, in an isopropyl base, and decided this would be a good option to start with. After I got it all cleaned out, which took a very.long.time, I applied this mixture to him.

Pardon the quality of the iPhone pic.
It was so cold my hand was shaking.

Twice a day, I would head out there to do a wound check. It was so cold that the seepage from the wound was freezing before it could get out of the wound completely. So, I had to continuously pull off the frozen seepage. Multiple times a day. And apply the solution. Multiple times a day. And pray. It seemed as though he was getting worse for about the first week. I had to increase his feed, add in about 8 cups of rehydrated beet pulp, and about a cup of corn oil just to keep him going. His body was using so much energy to heal and keep warm that I was afraid that it wasn't going to be able to do both sufficiently.

After about 10 days, the healing started to occur. The seepage eased, his energy came back up, and the wound started showing signs of health. I wish I had a photo of him today, but he went to his forever home about 3 weeks ago.

I will have this Herbal Solution in my barn forever now. It's worth it's weight in gold. Or vet bills.

Live.Simple.

Rerunning an oldie but a goodie from earlier this year. But with Christmas season coming up, I thought it might be a good idea to refresh everyone's memories!

 Live.Simple.

My new motto. My new viewpoint. My new everything.

It's also the name of a new adventure I'm taking: homemade soap making. The idea behind it is quite, ahem, simple. Simple ingredients. Simple scents. Simple clean. Simple to use. Simple to love.

My friend, Char of LiveLifeLoveOils, and I went to The Prairie Peddler last year to walk around in the bright October sun and take in the sights, sounds, and smells of autumn. While there, we  discovered that we shared the same desire to learn to make soap. REAL soap. LYE soap. Saponified soap. SOAP soap. Your grandmother's soap. HER grandmother's soap. The soap of generations and generations before us. I think you get the idea. 

For those of you who have never been to The Prairie Peddler, it is a festival held in a grouping of permanent, rustic structures built into the woods of the area near Mohican State Park in Ohio. The atmosphere with the brilliance of autumn's color plus the smell of woodsmoke from the vendors cooking fruit cobblers in Dutch ovens over campfires plus the dirt paths and stick built wooden cabins is truly absorbing. It almost feels as though you are walking through an 1800's village. Almost.

Our interest was piqued at a particular cabin. In this cabin, we learned that the owner of the company offered soap making classes. So, we each took a flyer with us. The seed had been planted. The following Tuesday, I called and signed us up. 7 classes. One night a week. 40 miles one way. It.was.awesome.

By the time we finished with our classes, we were certified as Apprentice Soap Makers in the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild. We each only need a few more hours of training before we are certified as Master Soap Makers! <--that is so cool to me!

We not only learned how to make soap, but how to make soap. The chemistry behind it. The method to the madness shall we say. We were each instructed to create our own recipe. What did we want our soap to do? Oddly enough, it doesn't simply clean. I learned that true soap has characteristics: lather, scent, feel, bubbles, moisture on the skin. Beyond that, there is always the next level of clearing up skin issues such as psoriasis, eczema, acne. We're not at that level yet. But we'll get there.

Once you decide what you want your soap to do and how you want it to act, you create the recipe based on your knowledge of the ingredients. Let me tell you, there was tension that night at class: Would it work? Would it not work? Would we blow the place up? I'm kidding. Our teacher was confident it would work.

We learned that good quality ingredients produce good quality products. We learned that mistakes can be fun. We learned that we wanted to learn more. But what we really learned was that we loved doing it, our skin had never, ever felt better, and that we were extremely happy to share with our family and friends a non-toxic, natural, healthier way to clean the largest organ of your body. 

So, it is my pleasure, honor, and joy to introduce to you Live.Simple.

I've finally created an Etsy Shop from which I can sell it- take a look!

I hope you will learn to love Live.Simple. as much as I do.