Good day everyone!

Hope everyone is having a good week, and looking forward to a great weekend. In the meantime, I thought I would share some other interesting items of note.

In any number of farm magazines, you will always find them addressing a number of issues dealing with soil fertility and the nutrition level in the plants that is grown in the soils.  One is the idea of Sulfur.  In many older publications they bring up the issue of the coal burning plants spewing out that awful pollution.  This was not viewed as a totally bad thing.  They bring up the idea of how sulfur comes back down in the down wind path. Then it eventually falls to the ground,  gets into the soil and the soil is regenerated.

The problem? What the charts are showing is that over the past decade there has been a very serious sulfur deficiency decline in the soil that they have measured.  A decline of these very elements.  This is interesting because of the idea of cutting...

The REAL bottom line on Essential Oil Quality.

Many times we have people really hammer us on the quality of essential oils. It doesn't matter what company you are with, that company's oils is the best by leaps and bounds. Well, really you should feel that way about the company that you represent. It really presents some serious issues and conflicts in your mind and is irresponsible and irrational to know your product is of a low quality and still promote it and sell it. Part of the process of "proving" your product, (essential oils as far as this discussion is concerned), some so called "facts" are presented as as proof that "your" oils are the best. OK, I can deal with that. Most people can. But is it the truth? That is the question. The facts are only the truth to the extent of and the relationship to the available data that the "facts" are based on.

I will explain in this illustration. My favorite apple is a Golden Delicious. For me it is, without question the best. That is a...

I have been wanting to get into this discussion for a long time. Some of you will find a lot of this sort of boring as you already know a lot about the soil. However, many might have a sort of fuzzy, unfocused view of soil and its contribution to the quality of essential oils.

The basic building block of life is Water, Air and a few little tiny bugs and their interaction. Most people know what air and water is, but the little bugs.. those are for the most part known as bacteria, fungi and the sort of things that many times are too small to see, IE; Critters. In fact if you were to take a gallon can and fill it with some good quality soil you would find, not millions or even 10's of millions but BILLIONS of little bacteria and fungi and all sorts of their friends of their choosing, critters. But before we start walking Pavlov's dogs, we need to understand the nature of the dogs.

In an as is state, soil consists of roughly 4 major parts. For ease of discussion lets be general, as...

Hi everyone,

Today we will go in a different direction. We are going to discuss a nice little friend that plagues people in many parts of the world. That little friend is known by the common name of chigger, or chiggers. You have to say it in the plural form because with them you don't just get one, you get a bunch.

So what are chiggers? They are essentially a little immature mites. In mites you have them in 4 stages: egg, larva, nymph and adult. There are many species but in general we are discussing chiggers, which are mites in the larva stage. How these buggers get here is the adult mite lays the egg(s).

Humans usually become exposed to chiggers in nature – tall grasses, forest areas and such. Because of the way the adult lays their eggs, in clusters, then moving on, you can become exposed to the chiggers in a specific spot and yet, 20 feet away, another person can be totally free of them, because they didn't come in close enough contact for the chiggers to...

All the time the question is asked, “How many drops of oil are there in a bottle of essential oil?”

Answer: It really is hard to tell just how many drops are in a 10 ml. bottle or in any bottle for that matter. But as a general rule 200 drops is an accurate answer for a 10 ml. bottle of essential oil and 100 drops per 5 ml. bottle. Here is why it is a general rule.

The oils all have a different viscosity, which makes the surface tension come in at varying points on the scale. Higher-viscosity oils have more surface tension than the lower-viscosity oils. So with more surface tension, the more likely the drop will be bigger.

 Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/viscosity?s=t

When you turn a bottle upside down, a drop (usually) forms right off the bat. A higher-viscosity oil will try to hold on longer and a bigger drop will form before it detaches itself from the other oil or the orifice of the bottle, based on the weight of the drop. So even...

I don't know about you, but every time I am in the hot sun, I get THIRSTY. Not you? Well you're probably dead then! But I am not here to talk to the dead, but to talk to the strong and vibrant people who want to supercharge their day!

Drop the soda can, you don't want that – no, really – you don't! Reach for this instead and you will fall in love all over again with your glass cups and pitchers that have dust all over them. It's September, but it's still hot out there, and if you’re like me, yard work has to happen before we get into the colder months.

Before I get dressed I fill up my fancy pitcher with water and ice, slice up some colorful and scentsational grapefruit and beautifully and most graciously drop them in the water. For the finale I unscrew the lid of my citrus paradisii/Grapefruit, Pink essential oil (see, even the name has paradise in it!). I inhale and I think of all the good that could go right today. Down go three paradisal drops into my elixir,...

My opinion?? I am sort of one of those myth busters. Now think this through. They were steam distilled- Did the heat destroy them?   When I learned something about steam I thought I learned that water turns to steam somewhere around 212 degrees F at sea level, a little less as you go higher in elevation. Still,  I know it can get hot inside of a car on a hot day, but I doubt it gets that hot. 

Cold?  I have purposely, and by accident, set or left bottles of oils out side in all weather conditions. Sometimes I have forgotten about them and several years have gone by, even to point of the label being about weathered off. Sometimes, I  left some oils in my tool box.  Sometimes in a car. Sometimes I have found oils in my Vet kit from having used them on animals and just forgot about them. They were subject to all sorts of weather conditions from as cold as it gets outside to as hot as it gets outside.

When I  noticed them, I said to myself,...

Gluten Free Essential Oils.

Today has been an interesting one.

Here is why. Today I was presented with the whole concept of Gluten Free Essential Oils. Now this is a very interesting concept. I mean who wouldn't want to give it a serious look. I don't know if this is coming from a big company.directly or is just something that is made up by one of their distributors, but this person is with one of the BIG essential oil companies. Despite the whole deal of them having their own whoopers to make their claim to fame, I would think that this would be pushing the envelope a touch too much for them. Now if it was with the other BIG essential oil companies, yeah, it wouldn't surprise me one little bit.

Here goes, Gluten Free Essential Oils. The struggle to understand this; The appearance of a complete lack of understanding of essential oils and Gluten. A quick primer on gluten. Gluten consists of the proteins, Glaidir and Glutenin. These are contained within the starch of the endosperms of...

Sex, Lies and Science (and Rose)

Ahhh … the romance of rose petals as a surprise from your loved one. A sprinkling of petals would pique your interest. An intriguing trail of precious petals would delight you. What would the petals of 10,000 roses do for you? It would collapse your bed and might just literally be a home-wrecker.

The intelligent and thrifty romantic may choose, instead, to put the equivalent of 10,000 rose buds on your pillow – 5 milliliters of Rose essential oil. Real roses die. Rose essential oil is not quite eternal, but it does have a shelf life of three to five years with its chemical constituents of monoterpenols and phenols.

Roses are beautiful and valuable. Sadly, because of the expense, there are unscrupulous sellers of rose oil … those who add extenders and don’t disclose that fact (gasp!). Some will dilute with Geranium (also known as Rose Geranium) essential oil. A rose by any other name, especially rose geranium, is not a rose...

In a FB group that I occasionally view,  they were having a big discussion about some particular EO that is marketed by another company that was sent to this one 3rd. party tester. Some people are all in a huff about his report being wrong and basically trying to discredit him. The problem there is that it would be very hard to discredit the report and tester due to his long history of being on the money and pretty much always right. I trust him even though he is arrogant as all get out. I do see some of his ideas from a tad different point of view when it comes to blending, but still when it comes to testing he is usually pretty right on the money. Anyway, back to blending.  What that deal is is this, that he says it doesn't matter what order you blend the oils, it will come out the same every time when you use equal amounts. Yeah, I have seen that when equal amounts are used, sometimes. But when different ratios are used, yes it does make a difference. I have learned...