Making Salt

It's Summer and school is officially out, though we are homeschooling, I figured it was time for some fun lessons rather than just sitting around writing reports and doing math problems. 

Today Caleb and I decided to pursue the time honored tradition of making salt. The history of salt making goes back as far as the earliest recordings of history and perhaps beyond that. Salt has been used as a food preservative especially for meat and as a flavoring for foods. Salt has many other uses such as being used in paper making and in clothing dye. Caleb and I collected sea water from the Tampa Bay in order to boil it and extract the salt. After boiling in the house we have to lay out the remaining brine water in pans out in the sun to evaporate the remaining water. 

Of course we took the bikes. 

b

Maybe not the best location to get water, but it is sea water. 

Coffee Pot Bayou, an inlet off of Tampa Bay.

Collecting water

Using the water-proof function of my camera. 

hauling away our harvest

Filtering out the floaties.

Again, water proof cameras are fun, this one from inside the pot!

A lesson in distilling... didn't work great but what little water
we got tasted pure!

after we boiled off most of the water we let the goopy mess
of salt brine roast in the sun in the bed of my truck. This is the end result.