Thursday, September 13, 2007

Natural cleaning....

Well, one of our missions for this week/month is to tidy our bedroom. It SO isn't happening, it's not funny. Something else we've been thinking about, though, is going greener- right now we're kind of at the midpoint on the green continuum- we think about it a lot and talk the talk, but sometimes our footsteps are those of someone wearing factory-farmed Nike trainers. So this is our mission at the moment.
In some ways, I'm doing good. We haven't used the tumble dryer at all in over a month, all the lights in the house have low-energy bulbs and we're using green washing up liquid all the time and as many commercially produced "green" cleansers as possible. OTOH, ecover does NOT get the boys crap off their clothes, and I either need to get more proactive with stains or handle the idea of dirty clothes. And I've tossed a LOT of clothes this week for no other reason than staining :(

So, this afternoon I whipped up a batch of cleanser from a recipe loosely based on one given in the guardian:
8 tablespoons sodium bicarbonate
4 teaspoons of vinegar
Juice of half a lemon
And I added four drops of cherry plum flower essence, given that me and cleaning have issues at the best of times.
And you know what? It worked. The bathroom sink looks beautiful, the bath is pretty good and the cooker hob is clean (and oiled) too. I feel really, really, really proud.

2 comments:

Honey Youngblood said...

Yay for going green! The small steps feel so good, especially when scented with cherry plum e.o.! But what's a cook hob?

--:) Teresa

Judith said...

Found you via ravelry! I have used Ecover for over 20yrs and it will get stains out but you need to work with it. Pre treating stains helps and use some Borax in with the wash but soaking is great and using the ecover bleach even on coloureds it does no harm. Also astonish oxy-plus stain remover is fairly eco friendly and very good with stains. Failing all that I always rub over stains and collars and cuffs with good old fashioned green or white washing soap from the Co-op or Boots.