Apparently I Need a Title

SOO MANY SEEDS

A swale on Zaytuna Farm - © Craig Mackintosh (Remaining images below © Cam Wilson.) Geoff Lawton and Darren Doherty are the

Homemade Garden Remedies

Hanging gardens of Babylon.

Take the white roots of a leek, onion, shallot, lemongrass, green onion, scallion, fennel - anything with that kind of bottom. Use the bit you cut off when you're making food. 

Put the roots in a little container with enough water to wet the roots, but not submerge the vegetables. Place on a sunny windowsill.

In a few days it will sprout up. Transplant into soil after about a week.

Ingredients

Bits of beet left over after making beets to eat

About 1/2 a cup of rose petals

2 tsp glycerin

2 cups of water

Method

To make rose water fill pot with 1 c water and rose petals. boil water until rose petals lose color to water. Strain out rose petals.

take the other cup of water and boil the beet bits until you only have about 1/4 cup left of liquid. Strain out the beets.

Mix in a tablespoon or two of the rose water and the glycerin.

I'm learning about how to make Lye (sodium hydroxide) and potassium hydroxide for soap-making. I was so curious how this crazy harsh base was produced in the olden-times before industrial chemical manufacturing. Also if I was...say... living off the grid in an idealized homestead I fantasize about... how would I make soap? THIS IS HOW. 

Ingredients

Wood ash from a hard wood. Preferably make your fire somewhere that will allow you to have clean wood ash in the end... not dirt + wood ash. Make sure the ashes have cooled completely and aren't burning anymore.

Rain water or just soft water

An old pillow case

two five gallon buckets

a big pot to boil the wood-ash "tea"

rubber gloves

goggles or glasses to protect your eyes

Note: This is a highly caustic solution that you're making so you don't want to get any on your skin. If you do, no biggie just wash it off but don't try to.

Wood ash alone isn't bad to touch or anything. We're extracting a small amount of chemical from a lot of wood ash. After the chemical reaction and extraction process it's not good to touch.

Method

Boil rain water.

Fill one of the five gallon buckets with boiled rain water while it's still hot.

In the other bucket place your pillowcase. Open it up and fill it with the wood ash.

Leave the pillowcase open and pour the water in. Keep pouring water until the ash is completely submerged. Close the pillow case and lift the "tea bag" up and down in the water. Let the pillow case with ashes sit in the water for a few hours. The longer it sits the more potassium and sodium hydroxide you will have in solution. Some people let it sit for a day or two. If you're leaving it for that long I'd cover it with something so nothing falls in. Since you boiled the water first and that speeds it up you shouldn't need to leave it in longer than two or three hours.

Take out the pillow case and let the water drain out into the bucket. You should be wearing gloves and glasses at this point. Pour the water from the bucket into your big pot and stick that on the stove. Your goal now is to boil away the water and just leave the sodium/potassium hydroxide. Just keep boiling. Turn the heat down low when you don't have much water left so you don't burn it. When the water is all gone turn off the heat and scrape off the powder at the bottom. Use that to make soap! 

Additional Notes

When using this lye in soap it's not as concentrated as commercial lye, so use about 3/2 (1.5 times) what you would use if it were commercial lye

Chemistry

Turns out when you burn wood the ash is mostly sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate. When wood ash is soaked in water the sodium and potassium carbonate dissociate into their ionic components.

K2CO3(s) -----> 2 K+(aq) + CO32-(aq)

Na2CO3(s) -----> 2 Na+(aq) + CO32-(aq)

Of course water naturally dissociates into hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions.

H2O(l) <-----> H+(aq) + OH-(aq)

The carbonate ions bond with hydrogen ions in the water, leaving the hydroxide to bond with the metals and make potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide.

CO32-(aq) + H2O(l) <-----> HCO3-(aq) + OH-(aq)

K+(aq) + OH-(aq) <-----> KOH (aq)

Na+(aq) + OH-(aq) <-----> NaOH (aq)

There will also be silica and other non-soluble constituents of the solution, but the pillow case should filter most of those out.

Continuous Process Lye-making for a Homestead

Some people make lye as a continuous process in a barrel. They put rocks at the bottom for drainage, a corked hole at the bottom on the side, and a filter above the rocks. Some people use straw but that isn't going to be a very good filter since particles can be pretty big and still make it through straw. Fabric is better.

You basically do the same thing where you put the ash in the top above your filtering mechanism and pour water over it. Then you let the ash soak in the water for a day or two and then take the water out and either let it evaporate or boil it off. You could set this up under a rain gutter and put more ash in every time it rains and then strain out the water after it sits a few days.

Some links with more information:

Simple barrel method

http://candleandsoap.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=candleandsoap&cdn=homegarden&tm=4&f=20&su=p504.6.342.ip_&tt=3&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.wikihow.com/Make-Lye

Chemical explanation and how-to http://cavemanchemistry.com/oldcave/projects/potash/

Quick process as I've described