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| Sandra Knuckles |
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Roosterplow Farms
Herbal vinegars, goat’s milk soap &
shampoo, vegetable starts
newport
Fortunately for your face, RoosterPlow’s Plan A didn’t work out.
Sandra Knuckles started RoosterPlow in 2006 as a gigantic vegetable patch, where she would grow buckets of produce to sell at the farmers’ market. But it didn’t turn out that way, because she couldn’t get anything to grow. Her “garden” plot turned out to be a recently-logged section that had been scraped clean of healthy topsoil, and what remained was deficient in almost everything.
For salvation, Knuckles turned to her goats. She decided to raise a small herd of dairy goats, and use their milk to make creamy soaps. Anyone who has taken home a bar, which she sells at the Newport Farmers’ Market, is happy that she did.
“It was kind of a fluke, but the failure in my produce ambitions has led to wonderful things. I got a nanny goat with two babies, and soon I had more milk than we could ever use,” she said. “I decided to make soap, and I’m so glad.”
She begins by combining milk and sodium hydroxide, using an old-fashioned soap-making recipe. To this she adds olive, coconut or palm oil, and allows it to cool a bit more. Later she adds scented oils and herbs, and pours it into molds. Knuckles cures her soaps for at least six weeks, which allows the mixture to mellow. The result is a smooth, luxurious soap that is excellent for shaving and comes in a variety of scents, including lavender, lemongrass, mint garden, cinnamon-spice and patchouli-orange-ginger.
The soap sideline helps pay for the ever-growing herd of Boer, Sanaan and Alpine-mix goats that graze at the RoosterPlow Farm, just outside Siletz. Tending to her dairy herd veterans, like Sassafras and Meadowlark, is one of Knuckles’ greatest joys. They share the farm with a large and roaming flock of chickens, including the roosters for which the farm was named.
She hasn’t given up on her vegetable gardening dreams. Just outside her home is a large greenhouse, which is filled with hundreds of baby broccoli, cucumbers and tomatoes, in modified yogurt containers. She works a small outdoor garden, where she grows aromatic ingredients for her brewed herbal vinegars, and works to improve the soil in her disappointing first acre.
Someday, she hopes, there will be produce galore at RoosterPlow.
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