Market Find: treasures on the street
Product ‘smells like a salad’
Market season is officially underway, with more than two dozen seasonal markets in full swing in and around the city pretty much every day of the week — from modest gatherings in neighbourhood parking lots to large-scale undertakings that shut down streets. While fresh produce and homemade foods are a key part of any market, so too is the wide array of clever crafts and offbeat oddities created by enterprising artisans.
In our new weekly feature, Market Find, we’ll take a look at some of these seasonal surprises, and tell you a bit about their creators and where you can find them. You’ve likely seen soaps made from various oils, creams, flowers, herbs and the like. But soap made from lettuce?
Yup. Lettuce, tomato, carrots, dill and possibly coming soon, shiitake mushrooms soap, made by local soapster Sherry Galan, who has aptly named her fledgling business Garden Squirrel.
Whatever those furry little pests would eat out of your yard, Galan has made into soap. She has two different themes going: one, her Garden Variety soaps made largely from various veg; the other, her Field and Stream soaps made from grains, such as oats, corn and wheat.
“All my soaps are made with things you would either take out of your garden or out of your kitchen cupboard,” she says. They include a maple syrup soap and an oatmeal- stout soap, a particular favourite among men.
The pretty green bar in the photo above is lettuce soap, flecked with sea kelp, which is good for the skin, and poppy seeds that act as a light exfoliant. “It smells like a salad. It’s a nice, fresh, crisp scent,” Galan says. It sells for $5 a bar.
All her soaps are made from a base of olive oil or goat’s milk, good things for your skin.
“We should just use the things that Mother Nature gave us, even in what we put on our exterior. If you’re going to ingest something that’s good for you, why aren’t we using it on our exterior too?” she asks.
Galan carries that use-whatyou-have philosophy in her main business, a store called Home Reusables, which sells salvaged and used building supplies for the home. Her enthusiasm for the garden also extends to Home Reusables, where she plants garden beds and boxes outside the warehouse.
The brick upon which her lettuce soap is displayed in the photo above is from the former J.B. Little Brickyard in Riverdale, which shut down in 1958. It was salvaged from the river by her son during a Scouts trip.
Galan will be at the 124th Street Grand Market every Thursday night from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.