What's in a name? Well if your talking about OUR name here is our names story.
Gottes is German for God's. As in this farm belongs to God, we are only stewards of His land. Using it for a time. We have German ancestors in my family and Gottes sounds so much like Goat and God mixed I just fell in love with it.
Belle is French for Beautiful. Our little farm is just that, beautiful. We bought a repo'd home from a bank, not knowing anything about what the land might hold. I loved our first spring here. Such discoveries. 9 apple trees of 5-6 varieties, we have since lost our red delicious tree to a storm. The ONE tree I knew for sure what variety it was. Go figure. We have a wonderful old, thick grapevine, that when kept properly pruned produces wonderful concord grapes. Rhubarb is here, right next to the grapes. We had a single row of asparagus that was quite woody and sparse. It has been mowed over so much, I don't think it has survived. I have so many different flowering bushes that I seem to have something in bloom from early spring to late fall. While we are a bit redneck, with piles of stuff everywhere, this place still makes my heart smile. Belle became the obvious and perfect part of our name when our first does for our goat herd came with the names, Annabelle and Clarabelle.
Farm is English for, well, farm, of course! We went searching for this place so I could have goats as a source for raw milk. We wanted everything we ended up with, the mature fruit trees and vines...
God has really blessed us in this venture of ours to be more self sufficient.
What's in our products?
I began making goats milk soap as a way to use up the over abundance of milk our Saanen girls give us and have chemical free soap. We used it ourselves and gave it away as gifts in the early years. The receivers of those early gifts liked it so much I decided to try my hand at selling it. My dear friend designed my first logo and Gottes Belle Farm's Handcrafted Goat Milk Soap, was born. I've since redesigned my logo to be a tracing of one of our goats heads, Angel is her name.
I went online with sales in 2013 when a blogger friend in Texas did a review and giveaway and before the giveaway went live she had pleas from her readers "where can we buy this soap?!"
I quickly threw together a store front here on my blog, with her advice from afar, and our online store was born!
I use mostly organic oils, but all oils are food grade. I feel the slightly increased price for food grade, instead of cosmetic grade, for my oils is worth the peace of mind to know I'm not getting the contaminants that can come with cosmetic grade. I also choose food grade lye for making my soap for the same reason. I only use Essential Oils for fragrance and plant based colorants such as cocoa powder, nettle leaf powder, and alkanet root powder. I will do pre-paid custom orders with fragrance oils of your choosing.
Pull up a chair, sit a while and enjoy our antics here on Gottes Belle Farm. The Lord knows we sure do. :)
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