organic soap

Smoking homegrown: Fairhope man grows tobacco in his yard – Press-Register

FAIRHOPE, Alabama — Tobacco has been demonized with good reason.

It’s a killer.

But in his new book, “ How to Grow Your Own Tobacco From Seed to Smoke ,” Fairhope’s Ray French argues that the deadly weed is also a lot of fun to grow. 

French is not a serious smoker. He’s a professional horticulturalist with a degree from Auburn University. He works for FloraGem, a company that helps Home Depot select the plant varieties it sells all over the country. 

He describes his backyard tobacco experiment as a lark, an attempt to grow something new rather than an effort to satisfy a nicotine habit.

“I like a cigar every now and then. I like the smell of pipe tobacco. But this was just for fun,” French said, discussing the novelty of pulling out a bag of homegrown, organic tobacco after a dinner party and letting his guests roll their own cigars.

The book is part tobacco history lesson, part organic gardening treatise. Organic gardening is French’s real passion. He said he owned an organic produce farm for a time.

Fruit label turns into organic soap

We’ve all been there. Standing wearily at the sink, washing our beloved apples, painstakingly removing the ever-persistent fruit labels from them. First, we gently pick at and peel back the label. If we’re lucky, the process ends here. If not, we find ourselves running the apples under increasingly warm water, rubbing off the paper. Then eventually, scraping at the fruit with our fingernails in the effort to remove the sticky glue from the fruit skin, before turning, with a sigh of submission, to the knife or vegetable peeler lying on the kitchen counter.

Now, it seems, Scott Amron , an electrical engineer in training now turned designer and “engineering atelier”, has a solution that not only removes the harmful pesticides and other residues from our apples, but also the pesky fruit labels as well. The solution: Fruitwash labels . These fruit label stickers effectively dissolve into an organic fruit soap when placed under water. With this solution, gone are the chemicals and the tiresome fruit labels.