soapnut shampoo

Is it just me or did it ever bother you that the actresses on The Walking Dead and Lost always looked so... clean?  No products, rationed showers, and yet... In an attempt to recreate this look authentically, I've scaled back a lot of high maintenance habits one picks up as a teenager (ironically, the demographic least likely to need any sort of beauty boost).  The latest experiment involves soapnut shampoo and in most circumstances can be parallel processed with weekend cooking adventures.  I read a derivative of this in the book "Making it" but didn't have any of the ingredients at the time.  A year or so into this DIY thing, I'm way better provisioned.

Inputs

• (Homegrown acorn squash and wide mouthed canning jars entirely optional.)
• Soapnuts (calls for 5 nuts, but I threw in 10 because I was using "brut" bottles) - these are laundry soap alternatives available on Amazon and with the greywater cistern experiment, I had about 5 lbs of them lying around.
• Water- I used a pint glass to fill 2 bottles.  This is as much as mini crock could handle and since this stuff is fresh, you probably don't want to make oodles of it at once anyway.
• Mini-crockpot or standard issue pot + burner- MaEpic sent me her spare which has been perfect for these sorts of Jungle Jane adventures.  Pot works fine, but takes more supervision and occupies a burner which you might need for your split pea soup project.
• Cheese cloth or other filtering implement (possibly clothes pins/rubberbands/etc. for ease of use).
• Funnel (possibly widemouthed container with spout for liquid transfer)
• Cool small bottles - these are single serving champagne bottles purchased after reading "Sparkle" a self-indulgent chick lifecoaching book which advocates a "champagne diet" and comes with requisite pink and rhinestone cover (all of this thankfully masked by buying the kindle edition and reading on my iPhone).  TIL you can get lifecoaching credentials through online programs for less than 40 hours of work!  Would suggest the darker J Roget brand if confronted with a selection in BevMo.  It tasted better and was fizzier than its clear wide-mouthed Karma cousin.  Big mouths --> this runny shampoo will slosh all over the shower before a small share of it will make its way to your hair.   Bonus points for spray bottles for applicators.  You may have misgivings about choosing glass if you are inclined to drop stuff in the shower or balance things on precariously thin/crowded ledges. 
• *optional and awesome: 10 drops of essential oils or sprig or two of fresh herbs.  Rosemary is rad any time.  Lavender has calming effects if you tend to shower to unwind at the end of the day (or want to encourage hair growth).  Peppermint has some pickup if morning is more your style.  

Assembly:

1. Simmer your pint of water and soapnuts for a while-- say 20 mins stovetop.  Or just forget about them until they've turned the water in the crockpot a steamy golden brown.  
2. Add essential oil or herbal amendments if using and allow to cool.
3. Move out of pot and into wide-mouthed pour-friendly container (if available)
4. Line your funnel with filtration medium and pour liquid into bottles.  (soapnuts can be transferred into a pouch for a second life on laundry duty)
5. Refrigerate if not planning to use in the next week or so as this is a fresh product-- goes double for folks taking the herbal vs. essential oil route.  Mentally note that while it may be chilling in the fridge, this is no longer a champagne product

Notes on use:  this stuff won't lather the way a conventional shampoo does, or make your hair "squeaky" clean.  Think of it more as a rinse.  It is soapy-- shake the bottle and admire the foam.  It won't strip your hair of natural oils and cause it to dry out, thin at the ends, or create a heavy duty conditioner dependency.  Plus you get to choose what your hair smells like.  I'm trying this to extend the life of a flagging supermarket shampoo bottle.  If it does the trick, I've got 5 lbs of soapnuts to experiment with.  If it doesn't work out, there's a bunch of interesting shampoo bars on Etsy to investigate.

Villa D'Este

Why is Villa D'Este not all over Pinterest?

At a girlfriend's wedding in Sorrento, another guest suggested a day trip from Rome to check out this awesome water garden in Tivoli.  For the gardening/engineering inclined, this place easily trumps the heavily touristed attractions within the city limits.  Normally, I abstain from photos, but this time I couldn't resist.

tl;dr a Cardinal in the running for Papacy decided to drown his loss by decking out his hillside govenor's mansion with some serious hydroponics (1550-72).

I had to walk to the other end of the property to capture this one in its full glory (better pro pictures here).  It is the culmination of 3 terraces and 2 fountain installations.  Having just come from St Peter's in the Vatican the day before, the top fountain (Fontane Dell'Organo) struck me as run of the mill ornate.  However, in its heyday, it was a water-powered organ, thus elevating its status to Epic.

Behind the falls, there is a second terrace you can cross.  There are 3 grottos behind the falls, each with their own fountain.  This made for some rad mid-day A/C, but was a bit too loud to carry on a conversation.  All the same, it was amusing to picture fussy Shakespearean era ladies cruising around the gardens in fashionable, if not entirely functional attire.

I also managed to capture an awesome triple rainbow from one of the two turrets on that second tier (the middle of the Fontane di Nettuno), despite my suboptimal 3 megapixel vintage iPhone camera.

At the bottom level is a series of pools (peschiera) with some heavy duty carp.  These guys are arm-length+.  Inside the Villa, the exhibits were focused on food during Rinascimento.  From what little I could understand of the Italian program, the kitchen of this property could put together a pretty serious spread, so I wonder if they actually fished these guys up and cooked them.  After reading about the chicken's Southeast Asian roots in my "On Food and Cooking" book last night, it was also pretty neat to see medieval sketches of the typical poultry of the region (with a quail-like crest) and something exotic called Indian gallus, which looked suspiciously like our modern chicken.  Despite the well-stocked fish pond, I still managed to get a couple mosquito bites in my reverie.  I guess this is to be expected with so many water features for expectant mosquito mothers to choose from.

This massive ferny trough was also pretty impressive.  Le Cento Fontane (100 fountains).  While I was thinking that if a setup like this didn't get too hot, it might make an excellent tank for trout, MacGyver was noticing that the ones on one end of the causeway seemed to have more water pressure.  Could have been attributable to the gaping 101st "fountain" which we found midway.  Tivoli is a giant hill and Cardinal Ippolito was savvy to realize that this landscape held great hydroponic promise.  Even so, the amount of planning that had to go into getting a works like this into equilibrium without the help of pumps and what not is pretty astonishing.  

We'd been brainstorming ways to feed a more modest (affordable) system with greywater, rain water, and the like.  My concern was that all the lint and debris coming out of the wash would gum up the system, but a banister like this might provide some basic filtration and complete the look of our cement back steps....




If swimming pools could look like this, I would understand why people take the trouble.  Not sure if the sanitary effects of chlorine fully offset the awesomeness of having mossy ferny walls for landscaping.  Perhaps a modern rendering wouldn't turn out quite as awesome because a lot of the sculptures and raised beds were cut out of corral which is a bit of a faux pas to harvest these days.  Judging by its depth, people probably didn't actually swim in Fontana dell'Ovato, but how rad would it be to have a second story semicircular catwalk you could dive off of or lounge in the shady arcade behind the falls on the ground level?

Shades of greywater

What's wrong with this picture?

With the help of our awesome friends, Jen & Nina, the FrankenFruit (left) and Christmas Lamb Haas Avocado (right) made their way to the southern end of our lot for optimal sun.  Sadly, our 50' hoses did not stretch the length of the lot and watering was a hit or miss process involving the "jet" setting.  So when the pumpkin seeds from a failed solar baking experiment germinated in the compost mulch, I let them go, thinking the ground cover might provide a microclimate that prevented water evaporation...  I cringe to admit that I might have even planted zucchini down there...  But even with limited watering, things got huge, with stalks overtaking the lower branches of the trees.  I also learned that these gourd things are heavy feeders, apt to compete with the trees for water and other resources.  Our haphazard watering process had also unleashed a crop of spikey weeds which climbed to heights of 4' before we could don gloves to cut them down.  Zombie Rose Hedge re-emerged in all of its extra thorny heirloom glory, further dissuading us from taking care of the trees.

The idea of using the less-toxic water we create in the house was appealing; if it went into sewers, it would probably end up in the ocean and need to be desalinated before it would be potable again.  Stuff like the water MacGyver uses to speed cool homebrew had no solvents in it all all.  Why not keep it closer to home?  That said, we have a tendency to over-engineer things (see: shower curtain experiments).  We'd put this project off, thinking we'd need to wait for the bathroom and laundry plumbing renovations to go in with diverters, giving us plenty of time to plan elaborate greywater bogs and aqueducts, complete with ducks, koi, and catfish.  We ignored the tactical designs included in this book for the more involved ones...  (the golf balls are part of the Fertile Chicken project, the clicker is a token of Rho's status as "teacher's pet" his first day of Puppy K, and the zucchini-- heavy feeder, 'nuff said).  

But desperate times call for simpler measures.  The former owner had been kind enough to leave us with not one, but two broken water softeners.  The first one made its way into the dumpster with the help of surgery with a sawzall.  MacGyver emptied the second one this morning, leaving us with a cistern.  We had some left over cinderblocks from our composting stall that we used to build a base and increase the height differential of the tank.  It was just the perfect height to nuzzle up to the former dryer vent hole on the back porch.  No DIY project is complete without a trip to Home Depot...  

We picked up a spare 100' hose, a washer, a spigot, some gaskets, silicon sealant, and a 10' extension for our current washing machine hose.  All in, about $80, $30 of which was the hose and $15 was an impulse purchase of a spigot manifold.  

MacGyver nearly suffocated himself mounting a spigot on the bottom of the water softener cum-cistern.  It needs to be at the bottom because we aren't using a pump and if it were higher, it wouldn't drain fully.  He also indulged me by taping on a sheet of mesh to help filter the lint out of the water (MaGyver had mentioned this was a barrier to her using greywater).     

We tested it by filling it a third of the way by hose-- that's a lot of hosewater, so it took some time to fill.  MacGyver is bolder than me, attempting to "prime" it by sucking air out of the hose.  I think this "priming" step is optional once your system is set up and you know there are no kinks in the hose.  Any roller coaster loop-d-loops eat into your precious height differential as well.  It can only drain downhill (hence mounting the water softener cistern on cinderblocks).  

Then we tested the washer connection by running a load of laundry.  For detergent, I used this baggie of Soap Nuts which are supposed to be biodegradable.  There was a thin film of white foam on the top of the cistern after rinse.  I'm not sure if that was the Soap Nuts or residue from previous washings.  Clothes smelled clean when the load finished, so I guess it works fine.  I probably didn't need the mesh filter as it appears to be clear after the first load.  We'll see in a couple days if we've killed our plants in this adventure-- we're focusing mostly on fruit trees, not applying greywater directly onto crops we would eat (i.e. spinach, peppers, beans).  The Building an Oasis book has a lot of tips on how to filter greywater to limit risks of contaminating/killing your crops.    

Even though 1/3 of the cistern felt like a lot to fill with the hose, our washer uses more water than we gave it credit for.  If we'd put in a second rinse cycle or tried to hold the water to cool off before irrigating, we probably would have had an overflow situation.  With those caveats, this turned out to be a relatively quick and easy way to increase the amount of water we route to our thirsty fruit trees.    

In other news-- The Great Bean Bakeoff Results:

for folks comparing notes from further afield, we are growing in full sun raised beds in Zone 9b (SoCal) with a timer soaker hose irrigation system.  

Best Heirloom Bush Bean:  Royalty Purple.  Velvety purple pods are both prolific and easy to see.  You can tell that they are done cooking because their casing turns green (but the beans remain a pastel purple).  Bountiful proved to be anything but (that said, it was at a disadvantage hidden behind the Zucchini).  Painted Pony beans were pretty, but slow to germinate, if at all.  Burpee's Stringless feature sounds appealing, but the yield was underwhelming.  

Best Heirloom Pole Bean.  tie.  Cherokee was the prettiest, easy to spot purple.  Turkey Craw provided the most impressive yield.  In the future, pole beans are easier to work with than bush.