In the beginnings of Garland Goat Soap of Maine, I handcrafted all our soap right in our kitchen, one batch at a time. After many hours of soapmaking in the kitchen, producing thousands of bars of soap, I had developed as system that was as efficient and streamlined as possible under the circumstances. More recently, I have set up a separate soapmaking room in the spare area of the basement. This has been a valuable upgrade, allowing much more efficient production of my soap. It’s also given me the opportunity to “test run” the setup and based on those observations, plan for the new soapmaking room.

It’s not the goal of Garland Goat Soap to become a mass manufacture of soap; we will always carefully handcraft our soap in small batches with all-natural goodness. However, the new soap room will provide an easier way for me to efficiently produce soap, giving me more time to work on new types of soap and all-natural goat milk skin care items! Of course, no matter how hard we work, we can’t build our new house…and the new soap room…instantaneously, so I look forward to it in the future. In the meantime, I am content to keep on working in my little soap room, carefully handcrafting soap one bar at a time!

Last year, my family and I moved from our small, lovely farm in Connecticut to the beautiful, rural farming community of Garland, Maine. It has always been our desire to have more land for our farming pursuits, and last year we purchased twenty-five acres of beautiful farm land here in Garland. We love it here! While we work together to build our home, we are renting a house just a few miles away from our property, complete with a lovely barn for our goats! It had been a disappointment for me to leave behind our small but very tidy, efficient, and snug goat barn when we moved, so I was especially delighted with this barn for our goats!

It is a very new building in excellent condition, originally build as a horse barn with five deluxe, large box stalls opening into several different paddocks. We easily converted one of these stalls into a milk room, and two others into snug, cozy stalls for our little herd of goats. It hasn’t taken long for the goats to adjust, and they are thoroughly enjoying their roomy box stalls and large pasture. That’s a good thing, because in this pleasant environment, they will continue to produce lots of the wonderful, creamy milk that goes into all our soap!

]]> http://garlandgoatsoap.com/soap-news/goat-milk-soap/the-home-of-garland-goat-soap/feed 0 http://garlandgoatsoap.com/soap-news/history/the-story-of-garland-goat-soap-of-maine http://garlandgoatsoap.com/soap-news/history/the-story-of-garland-goat-soap-of-maine#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:00:26 +0000 Moore family http://garlandgoatsoap.com/soap-news/?p=7

Welcome to Garland Goat Soap’s Blog, where you can keep up to date on the happenings at Garland Goat Soap of Maine! The roots of Garland Goat Soap go back about nine years ago, when as a twelve year old, I had the opportunity to observe and help a friend make goat milk soap. My family had a small homestead/farm and enjoyed gardening, canning, cheesemaking, baking our own bread, sewing, growing fruit trees and berries, raising livestock, building, and in general producing as many of our own needs naturally off our small bit of land as possible. To me, soapmaking seemed like a natural — and fascinating — extension of these activities. Besides, we had our own herd of lovely dairy goats, and were always excited about new ways to utilize their wonderful milk. So, soon after that initial soapmaking experience with our friend, we took the plunge and tried mixing up a batch of goat milk soap ourselves. It was as complete disaster! The resulting bars were an oily, gloppy, — and caustic — mess!

However, I was still fascinated with the process of soapmaking, and procured some books that gave me more information on the details of soapmaking. Armed with a deeper knowledge, I again attempted to make soap, careful to be more precise with measurements and temperatures in the process, and this time produced a usable bar of pure, natural goat milk soap that delighted my family and I. Encouraged, I continued to produce soap for my family, constantly expanding my knowledge of the art and chemistry of natural soapmaking by research and experimentation. Several years, extensive research, and many batches of soap later, I had created my own recipe of natural soap, a perfect combination of my goats’ pure milk and luscious oils to produce creamy, long-lasting, mild and cleansing soap.

The soap worked so well for us! It was so soothing and healing and helped our dry, cracked hands, often exposed to the harsh elements of farming, become soft and smooth. We frequently shared soap with friends as a gift, and they were equally delighted with it! It was several years ago that I officially started selling soap, first to local stores and individuals, and thus Garland Goat Soap of Maine was founded. From there, as they say, the rest is history! Even as the business has grown, I continue to love handcrafting the goat milk soap in small batches, and continue to use only natural and pure ingredients in each of our expanding varieties of soap. After all, I first set out to share my goat milk soap because of its pure, natural goodness, and that’s something that won’t change!