October News from Plants With Purpose
New Products!
For some time, we've been trying out a few related products which we think our customers would appreciate. Now we are pleased to offer the following:
Hand-made herbal soaps.
Made on our behalf using pure plant extracts by a local soapmaker, Thistle Soap Company, these gorgeous-smelling soaps make irresistable gifts and conform to all legal standards. They are available as 100g bars, and as smaller, gift-shaped "Green Man" bars, in these sumptuos "flavours":
- Lavender Dream
- Lavender, Oats and Honey
- Lavender & Rosemary
- Rosy Geranium and Ylang Ylang
- Tea Tree, Peppermint & Patchouli
- Calendula (colour and perfume-free for sensitive skins)
- Lime & Patchouli
- Lemon, Mango & Ginger
- Gardener's Soap (with pumice - great for ground-in compost I can vouch!)Bars £2.90; Green Men £1.70 inclusive of postage.
 Essential Oils
We keep in stock at all times Lavender, Tea Tree and Eucalyptus Oil. We will normally have in stock the oils listed in the catalogue on the collections page, and can obtain most other oils within a few days if required. Prices vary due to the varying difficulty with which oils are obtained from the plant, but we're told our prices are very competitive with most suppliers.
Beeswax Candles and Honey
Its been a brilliant year for our bees, and we have Plants With Purpose Honey, in half-pound hexagonal jars, for sale for the first time in two years. Being a creamed honey, it is very nice and sticks well on toast, and is excellent in cooking or salad dressings. There is a Green Man on every jar!
Price: Unfortunately, honey is heavy. We are selling from home at £1.60 a jar, but if buying mail order, the cost is £2.70 to cover p&p.
 We also have a good stock of attractive, pure beeswax candles which we make ourselves. Varying from moulded miniature beeskep candles to tall foundation pillars, they make great presents and smell sweetly when burned. You can see a picture of some in the catalogue under collections, together with their mail order prices.
Other news
We've been on holiday! At the start of the month, we locked the car in the drive, shouldered our rucksacks and caught a bus from Bankfoot, which move ultimately saw us in Devon, walking the coast path, rambling over Dartmoor, and getting to grips with being car-free and dependant on public transport. While the latter could always be improved, the whole experience was wonderfully liberating and totally altered my perspective, to the extent that the large estate car I bought in order to transport plants to market is going to be sold, and replaced by walking, cycling, buses, trains and van hire when required for the business. I have no idea why I never realised the benefits - or did the sums - before.
 Sea Holly, a famed aphrodisiac, on the beach at Woollacombe, North Devon.
While on holiday we had the pleasure of finding plants like Sea Holly (Eryngium maritinum), Calamint (Calamintha officinalis) and Horehound (Marrubium vulgare) in their natural habitats. It was a good excuse to stop crawling up cliffs and stop to take a photo! There was also Rock Samphire (that of Shakespearean fame - the gathering of which is referred to in King Lear as a "dreadful trade". This - and the parasitic plants Dodder and Purple Broomrape had me very excited; a great botanical break.
As the weather was fine, it was clear what a superb late-season bee plant ivy is too - the copious ivies bordering the cliff path and making green tunnels of the sunken lanes and paths (via which we descended regularly to pubs and pasty shops) were in full flower and groaning with besotted bees. If we lived in Devon, we would be extracting ivy honey now!
In the nursery, everything has now been potted up that needs it, and I am currently processing and boxing the home-collected seed and sowing seeds which need to freeze over winter before they will germinate. Things like primroses, cowslips, sweet cicely and a number of other herbs require this treatment (known as stratification), which is why I let such a lot of then sow themselves in the garden - nature makes a better job sometimes than the gardener.
As for the garden, I have NO pumpkins for Halloween. I'll no doubt be daft enough to try again next year.
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