Garden Bar Soap and the Wood Wide Web

With spring here, it is time to turn to the garden to prepare for the rush of growth and productivity ahead. With the warmth of the sun and the rains that proliferate at this time of the year, nature works its magic to create the beauty that is our spring garden at Kanturk Country Retreat.

From this environment, we collect our ingredients for making our Garden Bar. A place where everything from mycelium and its fungi, mosses and massive trees cohabitate and connect with their own Wood Wide Web that exists throughout the soil and has done since long before the World Wide Web. A place that is free of pesticides so Mother Nature can flourish and our herbs can thrive in our Medicinal Garden and garden beds. From this place we collect ingredients to make this special bar for gardeners.

We have harnessed the goodness of nature to craft the finest bar we can, to help you deal with the injuries from gardening and relieve the scrapes and scratches that can occur as you nourish and tend your own garden.

Our carefully crafted Garden Bar is made from the finest organic coconut oil (that has been produced from wild harvested coconuts collected from farmers in remote Papua New Guinea) and local olive oil with nourishing, protective, organic shea butter. This soap is combined with rosemary leaves and flowers from our garden and crushed beans for their exfoliating properties, to enable the grime of gardening to be easily washed from your hands.

Finally we have added essential oils with natural antimicrobial and antibacterial properties to help ensure those pesky scrapes and scratches won't become infected.

These include the energising scents of rosemary, peppermint and French lavender which combine to give you lovely clean hands at the end of a day in the garden.

And while you are tending your garden, spare a thought for that very delicate and intricate wood-wide web, the social nature of trees, and how strong trees share nourishment with weaker plants, warn of dangers and communicate with each other to ensure survival of the whole; and how Mother Nature needs insects and of course ants to keep our soil healthy. (You can read more on this subject in the extraordinary book; The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben). So before you reach for that very powerful insecticide or herbicide to kill something that is not suiting your purpose, spare a thought for the magic of nature and ask yourself, is it really necessary?

And happy gardening this spring.