Back in spring I planted 2 Seabuckthorn (seaberry) plants. Sadly the male plant didn’t make it. And I didn’t think the female would make it either. Now this is all I have of the female plant. I was able to save the female plant by moving it into a pot.

What happen is all the leaves started to fall off over the months. Then this little branch started to grow from the side.

I’m still wondering if I should re-order the male plant. But it will cost me at least $40 to get a new plant and that is too much for my gardening budget. So I’m going to grow them from seed or cutting.

At this point I would be happy with just one plant with lots of leaves. At least I could make healthy tea with them.

I’ve been wanting to grow Seabuckthorn for years now.  So I finally reserved 2 plants in the fall. They came all the way from a nursery in Oregon.

Seaberry is such an amazing plant that bears healthy orange berries. I hope to make jelly, tea, and other yummy stuff with them. But that may take at least 3-5 years to see any fruits from these plants.

The female plant has more leaves and is 2 years old.  The male plant just has tiny little brown buds and it’s 1 year old.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love seabuckthorn for it’s highly nutritious berries and leaves.  I’m counting the days until the arrival of my own seabuckthorn or seaberry bush next month. In the meantime I’ve been admiring these seabuckthorn plants at the San Jose International Fruit Orchard.

Here’s a photo of the tip of the male seabuckthorn. The leaves are much smaller than the female bush.

And this is the female seabuckthorn. I think this may be the little berries, but we’ll find out by end of the year.

There were lots of giant big thorns which would make picking the fruits or leaves very tricky. But I did get a few leaves to make into tea.

Read the rest of this entry »

These are my new “Seabuckthorn & Green Tea Handmade Soaps”. Since I was having so much fun with hot process soaping, I decided to make these the same way.

You can usually tell if it’s hp soap by the little bubbles around the surface. This is noticeable even when I made sure to fill the mold all the way with soap. Hot process soap is tricky in that sense.

Ingredients: Olive oil, soybean oil, coconut oil, palm oil, distilled water, seabuckthorn oil, rice bran oil, green tea powder, and green tea melon fragrance. Because they are half circle bars, they fit well in the palm of my hands.

The last Seabuckthorn soap I made was was nice and I added lots of good ingredients. Including red palm oil, which gave it the deep golden color.

For this version, I just kept it simple. Except I also added green tea powder. Green tea is making it’s mark in many cosmetic products due to it’s benefits to skincare.

Read the rest of this entry »