Kitchen Table Wisdom: Use Natural Green Cleaning Supplies in Your Home Part 2 «

Kitchen Table Wisdom: Use Natural Green Cleaning Supplies in Your Home Part 2

As I promised in my last post, here are the other 3 of 6 suggestions for using commonly found ingredients in your kitchen to create your own green and natural cleaning products and solutions. These were excerpted from an article in the April 2009 issue of Real Simple magazine. Be sure to check out some of the books in the resource section at the end, including a room-by-room guide from Real Simple and continue to share your real-life experiences with these solutions, if you’ve used any of them.

Borax
A water softener that when added to laundry, makes detergents more effective. It’s also alkaline so it’s effective at killing mold and fungus. Pour it into your toilet bowl, swish it around then let it sit overnight before flushing. Add it to dishwater to soak and clean your china (including hand painted china), and sprinkle it on the bottom of your dishwasher and let it sit overnight to deodorize it.

Vinegar
Because of its acidity, this common kitchen ingredient can wipe out tarnish, soap scum, mineral deposits as well as dirt and grease. Pour equal parts vinegar and water and run it through the brew cycle in your coffee machine. Halfway through turn the power off for about an hour then resume. When done, run several cycles with clean water. Use it straight to clean drains (flush afterwards with cold water). Spray it directly onto walls to kill mold (rinse after 15 minutes and let dry). Use a 50/50 mixture with water to clean mineral deposits in your steam iron. Add a 1/4 cup to a bucket of warm water to clean almost any type of floor (except marble and wood). Mix 1/4 cup with 2 cups of water and a squirt of castile soap in a spray bottle and use as a window or glass cleaner (for best results wipe off with newspaper).

Baking & Washing Soda
Sodium Bicarbonate (baking soda) and its cousin Sodium Carbonate (washing soda) are hardworking cleaners that effortlessly cut through grease and grime. Washing soda is stronger and can’t be ingested. Use washing soda for tough jobs like cleaning barbecue utensils, stove burners, and even removing tough stains from garage floors or other concrete surfaces. You can sprinkle the washing soda directly onto the concrete and sprinkle a little water to form a paste then let it stand overnight, scrub and hose down or wipe clean. For stove burners, soak them overnight in a mixture of 1/2 cup washing soda and 1 gallon of warm water, then clean as usual. For stained tea cups and coffee mugs use a mixture of 1 part baking soda to 2 parts water and soak for 30 minutes before washing them.

Some additional resources for more information and recommendations:

Better Basics for the Home, Annie Bond