Author: archiesacres@gmail.com

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Awesome Beeswax Lip Balm Recipe

Honey Bees are Awesome!!

Most people think of only honey when they think of bees (obviously), but our honey bees provide us with another excellent product, beeswax!

Collecting honey from our bee hive.

Obviously we love that our bees give us honey.  We plan to keep expanding  and adding more bee colonies every year, and this means we’ll get to do even more fun things with the honey (think Bourbon Infused Honey). In addition to being yummy, the honey is also great in soaps, shampoos, moisturizers, natural cough syrups and lip balm. Plus it’s antibacterial properties make it great for cuts and burns.

Archie’s Acres honey.

But the other excellent thing our bees give us is beeswax! Beeswax is often forgotten about or it’s thought of as just a byproduct of getting that tasty honey. But we have really been embracing it. You can make so many things with beeswax. Like candles, cuticle creams and lip balm! If you want to make your own lip balm, check out the instructions below. We’ve included our special lip balm recipe.

Our current Lip Blam flavors!

But for anyone who doesn’t want to make their own or doesn’t have the supplies, you can always purchase some from Our Etsy Store. If you don’t see the flavor you want, just message us, we can whip up a custom order for you in no time.

For holding the tubes we use this handy pouring tray. You don’t need the tray though if you have great aim. Either way, I would recommend putting some waxed/parchment paper under the tubes to keep any spills off your counter top.

 

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Awesome Beeswax Lip Balm

Course Personal Care
Cook Time 15 minutes
Total Time 15 minutes
Servings 13 .15 ounce tubes

Ingredients

  • 4 tbsp Beeswax
  • 2 tbsp Shea Butter
  • 1.5 tbsp Coconut Oil
  • ~30 drops Essential Oil/Flavor extract of choice

Instructions

  1. Using a double boiler, melt the Beeswax, Shea Butter and Coconut Oil.
  2. Remove mixture from heat and add Essential Oils and/or flavoring of your choice. Add small amounts at a time until you achieve the desired potency.
  3. Check consistency (optional); adjust as needed
  4. Pour into lip balm tubes
  5. Allow to cool completely before capping

Recipe Notes

If you're not sure the consistency is what you're looking for or want to check the scent/flavor, pour a small amount of the mixture onto a piece of waxed paper and put it in the fridge and put the pot with the rest of the mixture back into the double boiler to keep it warm. After a few minutes, take the sample out of the fridge and test it out. If it's good to go, simply pour the rest of the mixture into the waiting tubes.

If you need to adjust, do so in small amounts and check again until you find the perfect blend.

 

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Bourbon Apple Cider Cocktail

Let’s Get Cozy

It’s that time of year again – when the perfect way to spend an evening is cuddled up by the fire with a good book and a great beverage. Oh yeah, it’s also (all things) pumpkin spice season too! If you’re anything like us, that beverage often contains bourbon. We’re always trying to come up with new and tasty combinations. We really think this bourbon apple cider cocktail is perfect for the fall, plus it is incredibly easy and quick to whip up. The recipe below is for one cocktail but it can easily be expanded to as many beverages as you need. (Think a pitcher full for you and your friends on football Sunday).

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Bourbon Apple Cider Cocktail

We hope you enjoy this recipe as much as we do!
Course Beverages
Cuisine Cocktails
Prep Time 5 minutes
Total Time 5 minutes
Servings 1 person

Ingredients

  • 2 ounces Bourbon
  • 1/4 cup Apple Cider
  • 1/4 cup Ginger Beer
  • 1/4 cup Soda Water
  • 1 dash Bitters
  • 1 dash Pumpkin Spice
  • 1 stick Cinnamon

Instructions

  1. In a rocks glass, combine bourbon, apple cider, ginger beer and soda water. Add a dash of bitters and a dash of pumpkin spice. Top glass with ice and stir. Garnish with a cinnamon stick.

Recipe Notes

If you don't have any pumpkin spice, then nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger or allspice will work as a substitute.

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Exciting News!!

Archie’s Acres is on Etsy!

We’re super excited to announce that Archie’s Acres LLC has finally opened a store on the online craft market, Etsy! (The link to our store is shared at the end of this post)

As our last blog post mentioned, the process for selling canned salsa, giardineria, bourbon pears etc online will take a bit, but in the meantime we have a variety of bath/shower products, dried herbs, honey and crafts for sale! You know, in case you’re looking for Christmas gifts…

bath, salts, lavender, rose, oatmeal
Our Oatmeal, Milk, Lavender, Rose Bath Salts
sinus, relief, shower
Our Sinus Relief Shower Melts.

We will be adding new products regularly. We have 3 new products waiting in the wings as I type this that will be added this week! (They just need to be tested (by us) then proven to be excellent (also, by us).

CLICK HERE! To visit our Etsy store!

Also, don’t forget to follow us on Instagram!  CLICK HERE!

Thanks for following our adventures!

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Yes, we CANned!

Maybe you’ve wondered why we don’t have an online store yet. And why we aren’t selling our awesome canned products yet. Well it’s not because we don’t want to, it’s because we can’t. Yet.

If you follow our Instagram feed, you’ve probably noticed that we love to can our produce and have really gotten adventurous with our recipes. It’s funny how so much changes in a year. A year ago I found the idea of canning to be terrifying. Terrifying for it’s tediousness, it’s time-consuming steps and, oh yeah, that whole botulism food poisoning thing. It took some internal cheerleading but we took the initial plunge into the world of canning and it turned out to be a ton of fun! We’ve more than got the hang of it and we love it! We’re always on a search for new and fun canning ideas, we’ll can pretty much anything at this point.

Guinness Stout Jelly.

Many of our friends and customers ask about purchasing our canned goods. And after some quick research we learned that we had a ton of paperwork to do before we could even think about selling our products online. (Well, that’s not true, we think about selling our products all the time. Ha)

Our dried red pepper flakes.

Rules, Rules, Rules!

The Illinois Cottage Food law allows us to sell some canned goods directly to customers at farmer’s markets, but that is it. Online sales or sales to retailers are strictly prohibited. So our friends and family have been really benefiting from all these rules. Haha.

Our peach habanero hot sauce.
Our vanilla bourbon pears.
Homemade Chicago style giardiniera.

Next up, hot sauces, giardaneria, Bloody Mary mix, bourbon pears, salsa verde etc…has to go through and pass a rigorous process before it’s ever sold.

All our recipes must be be pH tested by an accredited lab and then submitted to a “process authority” with the pH test results. This person reviews the recipe, test results and steps we detail for producing the canned good and sends back to us an “official” process. We then register that process with the FDA. Each product and each variation of that product (change in container size, container closure, recipe adjustment, change in commercial kitchen location, etc.) MUST go through all these steps.

Safety is important to us

The process is very involved. But it makes sense, farms and businesses need to be required to prove that they’re doing things the healthy and clean way. People can become very sick or even die. So we get it. And appreciate the process. We just want it to move a little quicker so we can share our delicious goodies! We’re shooting for early January. Obviously, the timeline isn’t completely up to us. We will create an Etsy store and also list our products in the Shop page of our website. Stay tuned!

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Winter Preparation Chaos!!

winter is coming

Hello from Archie’s Acres. We know it’s been a while since we’ve posted but we’ve been busy preparing the garden and our critters for winter!

The first order of business was to remove all remaining produce from all plants before the first frost, which was about 3 weeks ago. We still had a surprising amount of peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, zucchini and cucumbers which was a pleasant surprise!

A portion of our last harvest for the season

The produce that didn’t make the cut for humans were given to the chickens and the goats, so everybody on the farm won. Especially the chickens.

Then we had to remove all remnants of the tomato and pepper plants. Leaving them around would invite disease to the soil that would effect our productivity next year. It’s a tedious job, but the reward is being able to have a big bonfire with all the dried plants. So that’s fun!

In the next week or so, we will then spread compost and chicken manure onto the garden before the first snow to help rejuvenate the soil. Our current chicken coop setup is basically that of a giant litter box. We filled the entire interior of our coop with sand and ag-lime (aka crushed limestone). This allowed us to scoop out chicken droppings with a manure form (think giant cat litter scoop) to collect for fertilizer. It’s working wonderfully.

As for the critters, we moved and re-positioned the goats’ and Tilly’s

Un-helpful winter goats
The goats were not very helpful while we were trying to move their shelter

shelter to face the south east in order to protect them from the harsh winter winds from the west and the north. And we covered their favorite hangout area with pine chips to create a barrier between the cold ground and their feet and we put a fancy new coat on Tilly!

Sheep in winter coat
Tilly looks fabulous in her new coat
Winter Coop Preparations

We’ve been collecting all fallen leaves and shuttling them into the coop. We’ll also add grass clippings, pine savings and shredded paper. We’re aiming to get about 3-4 inches of material covering the entire coop floor. It’s called the “deep litter method” and worked well for us last year. Basically, the deep layer of organic material absorbs the chicken dropping and slowly composts throughout the winter. The material on the floor provides some insulation from the cold ground, and as it breaks down (composts) it releases some heat into the coop. Added bonus – in the spring, we have great fertilizer waiting for us when we clean out the coop. So far we only have about an inch deep layer throughout; a few of our large maple trees are stubbornly holding onto their leaves. We’re really hoping they drop them before the first snow or we may have some damaged trees!

So as you can see, we’ve been busy! As this season winds down, I promise to post more. I mean, what else am I going to do with all the free time we have? 😉

 

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Farmer’s Market Season is quickly coming to an end.

End of Season One as Market Gardeners

Fall seems to finally be here and we’re happy to have it! Tomorrow will be our last farmer’s market of the year, which is just in time since the cool evening temps and dwindling day light have our garden winding down for the year. Stop by and see us at Rockford City Market tomorrow evening.

It really is hard to believe the season is over already, and what a great season it’s been! The relaxed pace of the Rockford market allowed us to work out display, setup and marketing kinks that we wouldn’t have had time to learn in a Chicago market. And we met some great local farmers who had booths near us who shared some great growing and selling advice. All in all, the Rockford City Market was the perfect 1st time market for us.

Great Lessons for the Road Ahead

We both agree that our first year of farmer’s market participation has been a great success. We learned so much from the farmers/vendors we met, and the customers taught us through their purchases what we should be growing more of. Plus, the garden itself taught us endless lessons about farming. We figured out what produce to focus most of our attention on in the future (people LOVE beets!). Some plants didn’t make the cut for next year, like broccoli and cauliflower; they take up too much space and extremely hot weather sends them to seed if you don’t happen to be standing next to them to cut them at that exact moment. Designer heirloom tomatoes – 25% are all color and no taste, so we’ve kicked out the ones that are strictly pretty. We want color AND taste! And people love snap peas and colorful carrots! I’ve heard that every farmer says this but, we mean it, we can’t wait to plant our garden next year! It’s going to be awesome!!!

Other highlights from this past summer is that we’ve mastered the art of packing up our car in less than 5 minutes at the end of the market. We have figured out a market display that gets a lot of attention from customers. (Mainly because we have pictures of the chickens, goats, Tilly and Archie all over the place.) And most importantly, we had fun! We make the Rockford City Market a “date night” where we just have fun and enjoy the live music while hanging in our booth.

Thank you to all our customers, friends and family who came to visit our booth this summer! We’ll see you again next year!

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Hops Harvest Time!

We told you last week about all the creative ways we used the pears and apples coming out of our orchard. But now we’re focusing on our ripening hops. We have Chinook, Cascade and Centennial varieties reaching maturity.

We grew hops – now what?

The first step is to cut down the bines. They climb 14+ feet up ropes that we  attached to our garage. Then we take each hop cone off the bine and lay it out on a screen to dry for 3 days. A few times a day, we fluff and move the hops on the screen to make sure they dry evenly. Bonus – our hands smell like hops!

You don’t want to let them dry for longer than that because the longer they are out, the more they oxidize (and lose their hoppy goodness).

We’ve been weighing out the hops and packing them into vacuum-sealed bags to freeze for use in future batches of home-brewed beer. But we’ve also been grinding them up and using them to scent our homemade candles! We have a cascade hop scented candle that is out of this world! If you love the smell of fresh hops, you’ll love it! In the next few weeks, we plan to have some of our candles available on our Shop page. They’d make great Christmas gifts for any beer lover!

Our plan is to add a few plants every year until we have enough for ourselves and to share with other beer brewing nerds. Eventually maybe we’ll even sell to some of the great craft breweries in the area.

 

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September is Pear & Apple Harvest Time!

So much deliciousness, so little time

It is harvest time here at Archie’s Acres since our pears and apples are all ready this week. And like most plants on this farm, when they’re ready we have to be ready to pick them. This farm is filled with hungry opportunists looking for a quick meal. And our orchard is DELICIOUS!!

This orchard came with the farm so we’re not entirely sure what kind of pears and apples we have. Our guess, based on their soft, sweetness is that they are Bartlett pears. Since they all went ripe on Saturday we’ve been frantically trying to eat, use or preserve them.

We made a cider.

And Pear Apple Sauce!

And the chickens get the mushy ones! 

It’s a win win win!

We’ve identified 2 varieties of trees in our orchard as Golden Delicious and Jonathan apples. The Golden Delicious apples are great for snacking. While the Jonathan apples are perfect for pies since they’re quite tart. We have 2 other varieties of apples that we’re still not 100% sure about. We’re using them for apple sauce, pies and the pear apple hard cider that we made yesterday!!

Hard cider
Hard cider ready for fermentation

This is our first go at hard cider and we can’t wait to try it!! If it works, we’ll be sure to share the recipe with everyone.

We’ll be at the Rockford City Market today. Please note the hours have changed and the market closes at 7:30 now; it’s too dark for it to stay open until 8:30.

Also, if you’re interested in participating in our CSA next year (farm fresh goodies delivered 1 or 2x/month), please complete the short form on our Shop page so we can tailor next year’s seed order.

 

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Meet Von Cheep Cheep!

She’s a small bearded lady!

Von Cheep Cheep a small Easter Egger hen packed with attitude. We named her Von Cheep Cheep because she had an almost cartoonish mischievous little face when she was a baby. We also knew that she was plotting to take over the world.

Baby Von Cheep Cheep

I mean, just look at that face!! She should be wearing a tiny little lab coat while she paces back and forth brainstorming in her tiny evil lair. She looked like this for her first 2 months.

And now she’s a full-fledged bearded lady!

Clearly, she now looks far less serious. And the chickens were smart enough to assign her to be one of the top chicken-to-human reps in the coop, she’s one of the first chickens to run out with demands. She will also fly up and sit on your shoulder if you’re taking too long feeding the chickens in the morning.

Von Cheep Cheep the bearded lady.

And best of all…

…she’s a blue egg layer!!

She started laying last week, just a few weeks shy of turning 6 months old. (Birthday was Feb 28) She lays the brightest blue eggs. Small eggs from a small bearded chicken.

Blue eggs
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Exciting Times at Archie’s Acres

Life has been great lately at Archie’s Acres and we have some fun updates from the farm.

Weather is slightly more cooperative

We’re happy to report that the rains have finally given us some time to dry out. That said, we still get a little rain almost daily, but the 1-4 inch torrential rainstorms have slowed and the plants are finally looking and feeling healthy. Aaaaaand because of that it’s been a real tomato and pepper party over here!

We love having so many different varieties!

Which leads me to happily announce that we have begun selling produce to The Log Cabin Restaurant in Galena, IL! How exciting is that?! It’s such an honor! We’re over the moon about it!

 

Farmer’s markets are fun!

Farmers market life has been great. We’re enjoying our time at the Rockford City Market every 2nd and 4th Friday and we’re loving our guest vendor spots at the Glenwood Sunday Market in Chicago! The next time we’ll be at the Glenwood Sunday Market is September 24th. We meet so many amazing people at these events and we love being able to learn from the vendors and local farmers around us.

It’s great when friends stop by to see us at the market! Bernie and Nancy it was so good to see you!

Exciting development for next year

We’ve also decided to begin a CSA program starting next Spring! For anyone unfamiliar, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  Members sign up to receive a box containing fresh, organic, seasonal goodies from our farm. Once or twice a month (depending on your preference), we will deliver it to a convenient pick-up location.

We’ve created a form in the “Shop” section of our website where you can add your information and we’ll email you when we finalize plans. In the meantime, we’d still like to share our chicken and quail eggs with people after the Farmers Market season is over. But that’s all a work-in-progress.

Critters everywhere

Tilly thinks the bed is meant for her

Our farm pets are doing well. Moose is growing by the literal second! He’s as big as Archie right now and he’s not even 4 months old! He’s fitting in with the goats and Tilly very well.

On that note, Tilly is a diva. She demands treats and pets and she regularly steals Moose’s dog bed. She shouts at us from the pasture every time she sees us. It’s hard to believe that she’s only 4 months old (born April 21st) because she’s such a presence on the farm already that we can’t imagine life without her!

Another hen has hatched a couple of babies in the last week. She has 2 beautiful little chicks and she’s momming like a champ! Just today I watched her teach her babies about the automatic waterer that we have setup in front of their coop. It was really sweet to watch.

Nelly teaching her baby how to be a chicken

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well that’s it for now! Keep following us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/archiesacres/

 

 

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