Late but not latest

Silks are showing on open oak party and montana morado and cascade ruby gold.

Some silks are starting to dry up on saskatoon white, and have been on gaspe and saskatchewan rainbow for awhile. Atomic orange is somewhere in the middle. All do seem to have some nice clean silks showing too; I wonder if getting big surges of water once a week is driving them to put out more ears?

Three of the gaspe plants have exposed ears so far at weird places on the plants.

If growth was fully linear and not linked to temperature and water, planting open oak party at the start of the last week in May should mean it would grow to a stage where the seed could germinate the next year, by the end of September.

I really am not sure at all when we're going to get our frost. We've got a surge of heat right now, which is nice for the plants, and if it stays warm like this until mid-Sept there might be hope, albeit pushing it greatly? Last year the first frost was on sept 15th. Climate change tool says it's moving from the past date of roughly 11th to the current/near future date of the 21st in a situation of least climate change.

Soap Trialling

I got most of my smelly things to put in soap by post, since I don't really live near anywhere I care to buy fragrance oils and essential oils and whatnot. I ordered things that sounded nice, years back, or that I was curious about. When I made soaps I mostly sniffed the bottles, mixed a couple together, tried to remember which was which or noted it on a piece of paper, and then the paper got separated from the bars of soap after they'd aged.

I have a ton of small, half-full bottled of fragrance oils etc around and I like some of them, don't like others, and mostly don't know which I like. I step into the shower and think, "oh, I like this one!" but that's as far as it goes.

I have a ton of extra lard right now so I've started making sample batches for each scent. This looks like making one batch of soap and splitting it into 1-kilo portions, then adding fragrance to each seperately.

Today I did bergamot oil (not fragrance oil), carnation fragrance oil, "rain" (smells like "men's products" or ozone or something), butterfly orchid fragrance oil, frankincense fragrance oil, hawaiian plumeria fragrance oil, and hyacinth fragrance oil. We'll see how they turn out. I can give away anything I don't enjoy, both the soap and the oil.