Stocking Your Non-Toxic Cleaning Kit
A few years ago I detoxed my cleaning routine. Before that I was using “green” products, but they can be pricey and sometimes they’re not any better than regular products. Some of them still contain artificial fragrances, along with toxic ingredients. Once you get rid of all of your old cleaning products and stock your cleaning kit with a few inexpensive items you’ll never look back. Your house will be sparkling clean and you won’t have to worry about what is in those cleaners lurking in the cabinet. Here’s what I have in my cleaning kit:
CLEANING SUPPLIES
carrying case
vinegar* – you can use white or apple cider vinegar (I prefer apple cider vinegar because it’s not made from petroleum and I can make it myself) I keep a squirt bottle and spray bottle with vinegar.
baking soda – which is easy and inexpensive to obtain in bulk
castile soap (regular and scented if desired)
peroxide
essential oils if desired for fragrance & cleaning power
spray bottles
foaming soap dispenser
parmesan cheese shaker
cotton rags
variety of scrubbers & sponges
old toothbrushes
pumice stone
*if you dislike the smell of vinegar, consider infusing it with citrus peels, lavender or herbs – here’s how.
Fill a parmesan cheese shaker with baking soda and keep one in your cleaning kit and one by your kitchen sink. Baking soda is the perfect non-abrasive scouring cleaner to give your sinks, toilets, tubs and pretty much everything that nice shine. It’s especially nice for cleaning stainless steel pans and leaves them sparkling. Baking soda is also a natural odor absorber. Keeping it in a cheese shaker makes it super convenient to use. You can simply save a plastic shaker jar, I happened to have these glass ones that I use since I don’t purchase pre-ground parmesan cheese. I’ve been using them for about 10 years without ever breaking them.
In my cleaning kit you will also find a spray bottle filled with vinegar and one filled with my own homemade multipurpose spray (recipe to come later this week). Vinegar is a natural disinfectant and is perfect for spraying countertops after cutting raw meat. It also is a fantastic soap scum buster, spray on sinks, tubs and showers, let sit for 10-15 then scrub with castile soap. No need for a that super blue liquid for cleaning mirrors & windows, use plain vinegar (citrus infused vinegar works even better) or the multipurpose spray on windows & mirrors. Spray on and buff off with a cotton towel or a microfiber. You can use saved spray bottles but I prefer to get new ones, then I know they don’t have any chemicals that have leeched into the plastic. You can find a variety of them on-line, this Clear Spray Bottle 16 oz. is nice and I also love this colorful Crystal & Neon Mist Bottles as well. A foaming soap dispenser is also a great thing to have, you can purchase empty ones. All of mine were Method bottles.
Castile soap is one of the best when it comes to non-toxic cleaning, it comes in unscented or with essential oils. You can use Dr. Bronner Organic Castile Soap if you’d like, I purchase mine in gallon jugs from Mt Rose Herbs. If you want the essential oil castile soap, Dr Bronner’s come in a wide variety of scents like peppermint citrus, lavender, tea tree, rose, almond and my favorite eucalyptus. I also keep a bottle of Dr Bronner’s Sal Suds* on hand and linseed oil soap, they’re fantastic at busting grime and dirt that regular castile soap won’t (like that burnt on grease that gets on your oven mirror and super dirty rags). Sal Suds does contain SLS though, even though it’s biodegradable I use it sparingly and only when needed. <em>*Note that as Sage pointed out Sal Suds from Dr Bronners does contain SLS. I keep a bottle around and use it sparingly only if I actually do need to dissolve grease from my hands/clothing. It’s then followed up with castile soap to remove any residual SLS. </em>
You’ll also want to keep a variety of scrubbers, sponges, old toothbrushes, q-tips and a pumice stone in your cleaning kit. Keep whatever kind of scrubbers you like to use. I’ve talked about my love of Twist Sponges here, they’re compostable and made from all natural materials. Why a pumice stone? It works at getting those tough rings off the porcelain of your toilet. Although it does still take some elbow grease, it’s easier to just keep the toilet clean in the first place.
I also keep some rags in my cleaning kit, along with a microfiber (although I admit that I hate microfiber with a passion and when these wear out I will not replace them). I’m more of an old towel cut up for rags than a paper towel kind of gal, I think they work so much better and are much more absorbent. The microfiber will come in handy for polishing mirrors and faucets (though a towel works just as well).
All my cleaning supplies fit in this shower caddy that I picked up a long time ago for a few dollars. When I’m not cleaning it lives in the laundry room closet. When I’m going to clean I grab it and work my way around the house. The rest of this week I’ll be showing you my methods for using these products to clean the cottage here at Chiot’s Run. We’ll go room by room and I’ll share any tips I’ve learned along the way, like non-toxic toilet cleaning made easy (which a lot of you asked about).
The truth is that it’s easiest to keep you home clean, you’ll spend far less time if you maintain clean rather than letting it completely out of control. This is often when people feel like they have to reach for heavy duty toxic cleaners.
What’s your biggest cleaning challenge?
NON-TOXIC CLEANING SERIES
Stocking Your Non-Toxic Cleaning Kit
Learning to Love Castile Soap
Make Your Own: Foaming Soap
Make Your Own: Infused Vinegar
Make Your Own: Multi-Purpose Cleaner
Make Your Own: Color Safe Oxygen Bleach
Homemade Whitening Scouring Scrub
Non-Toxic Cleaning: Doing the Dishes
Friday Favorite: Charlie’s Soap
Friday Favorite: Twist Sponges
and more to come
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Friday Favorite: Handmade
Over the years I have discovered the joy in honoring those whose work I will never match – and learning to love that I don’t have to. When I find them, I buy mosaics made my artists with a better eye for design and color than I have. I serve potatoes in an exquisite purple bowl thrown by a potter from my hometown in Iowa. I keep flowers on the kitchen table in an indestructible water jug made by a main I met is Asheville, NC, fired in a kiln powered by methane gas from a landfill. I brew tea in a mustard yellow pot that I picked up dring one of my best days I spent in Japan. I’m drawn to all of these things for their beauty and utility of course, but it’s also the people who made them – and the stories behind them – that make the difference to me.
Robyn Griggs Lawrence (The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty)
Whenever possible, I like to purchase items made by hand by someone here in the USA. Being a small business owner myself, I see this as important. I know the care and detail that goes into each item, though we don’t make something tangible, we still put our heart and soul into our product. Handmade items just have something about them, a soul of sorts. Just this week I bought this beautiful hand coffee mill made by the Red Rooster Trading Company.
Mr Chiots and I are coffee lovers and freshly ground coffee is so much better. When we travel we have always ground coffee beforehand to take with us. Now we can take this beauty along for the ride. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this mill, for only $60 it’s a bargain since it’s handmade. When we ground a small batch of coffee we were pleasantly surprised, it can grind the coffee finer and more evenly than our pricey burr grinder. We’re espresso drinkers, so the fineness and evenness of the grind is very important to brew the perfect shot of espresso.
It’s so nice that it may even trump our other mill. Happily I add this to my list of growing items in the house that are made with love by someone with a name, including my salt & pepper mills from Tea & Gold, and a few lovely wooden kitchen utensils that rest in my lovely handmade crock from the local Moorefield Pottery.
Any great handmade items in your house? Any great small businesses to recommend?
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Taking Root
Some of you may have been around in the fall of 2010 when I talked about the boxwood cuttings I got from a friend’s home. I have no idea what kind of boxwood it is, but it’s a big beautiful shrub that thrives despite his neglect. Since it does so well in his garden, I figured it would be prefect for mine as well since we are in the same climate. Three years ago I took a dozen or so cuttings and stuck them in a pot that was overwintered behind the garage. Last summer I planted 2 of them flanking the stairs that lead to our front porch.
These box seem to be fairly slow growing, so I can only imagine how old the ones I took cuttings from are because they’re HUGE. No doubt they spent last summer taking root and this year they’ll really start putting off some top growth. They are about three times as big as they were when I first cut them.
If we end up moving, these little box will be potted up and taken with me. There’s simply too much history to leave them behind. There are also other plants that will go with me and some from which cutting will be taken this spring/summer in preparation for a possible move. All of my hydrangeas will move with me, my collection is now up to about 20 different varieties. Some will go by cuttings because they’re too large to dig up and take. Others are small enough that they can be dug up. I love starting plants with cuttings, it’s a great way to inexpensively propagate plants you already have in your garden and a great way to get starts from friends.
Do you like to propagate your own plants from cuttings?
If you’re not sure how to propagate plants with stem cuttings here’s a post I wrote a few years ago about it. Start with something easy like catmint and soon you’ll be off trying to propagate all kinds of plants.
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A Facelift for the Cottage
Last summer, painting the shutters, doors, and foundation of the house was on the to-do list. Then we purchased the lot next door and spent our time getting a new edible garden space ready instead. As a result, the painting never got finished but we enjoyed a lot of great homegrown vegetables.
Since we have had such warm weather here in NE Ohio this past week and the soil is still too wet to work, we decided to get a jump on painting in order to mark a few more items off the “to-do” list. Off came the shutters, down came a few doors, and we were off.
We found this fantastic little sprayer that hooks up to an air compressor. It uses pint jars for the paint. That way you can use a few different colors, or in our case, primer and paint. Simply close up the jar when you’re not using it. It’s called the Critter Paint Sprayer and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It turned a job that would have taken me hours with a paintbrush into minutes. It’s also made to be repaired and comes with a parts list for each part, I can certainly appreciate that!
Our current shutters were painted green by me the first year we moved in (10 years ago). They were starting to look a little dated, not to mention they were faded and shabby looking. I settled on black as my color of choice for the shutter/doors a few years ago figuring it would be a classic look with our tan siding.
The foundation was also given a fresh coat of paint. I’ve always read that using a dark color on the foundation anchors the house to the garden. After one coat of paint I stood back and was amazed, it’s completely true. Not to mention, the plants and flowers look fantastic up against the dark background. I think the green was competing with the plants all along.
The exterior doors on the house were also in need of a fresh coat of paint, most of them were peeling and they were getting quite faded as well. Most of our exterior doors aren’t covered with porches and thus they take quite a beating. After a fresh coat of paint and some new knobs I couldn’t believe how nice they looked.
The weather has once again turned too cold to paint, so I turned my attention to scraping the loose paint on the exterior door trim. Not a fun chore, but a necessary chore. I’m all about getting the job done right, even if I don’t plan on being here forever. We inherited a lot of “good enough” jobs when we purchased this place and I’d never want to pass any of those along to someone else. (if you don’t have one of these painter’s tool in your toolbox I’d highly recommend getting one, I love it and use mine all the time and not just for painting).
There are still four more doors that still need a coat of paint (I know we have lots of exterior doors), when the weather wArms that will be the first thing to get finished so it can officially be crossed off the list. In the mean time, we will be replacing all the porch posts as a few of them are completely rotten. It’s a good thing they’re not structural! We’ll be going with square posts painted in white with a little bit of trim detail.
Overall, things are shaping up nicely. It’s nice to see the house getting whipped back into shape. We’ve spent so much time focusing on the gardens the last couple years that the house has been slightly neglected. My neighbor even stopped by the other day to tell me how much she liked what we’ve done. If I had to pick a favorite house color it wouldn’t be tan, but you live with what you’ve got. I’m more of a cedar shake, dark bluish gray, or a crisp white when it comes to the color I most like to see on a house.
What’s your favorite house color?
If you’ve got a lot of painting to do – invest in these tools. For not much money you’ll save yourself tons of time and a lot of hassle!
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Friday Favorite: Twist Sponges
Since I’ve been working on writing up the posts for the non-toxic cleaning series, cleaning has been on my mind, when I’m not working outside of course. My friday favorite this week had to be one of my all time favorite cleaning tools: Twist Sponges.
Why do I love Twist Sponges? First, they’re made from natural materials! The sponge side is made with unbleached, undyed white cellulose and the loofah side is, well loofah. I bought these on a whim once when I was at the health food store and fell in love. Second, they’re compostable! When the sponge is getting a little ragged around the edges, into the compost bowl on the counter it goes. Thirdly, my most favorite reason, they never get that kitchen sponge smell. You know exactly what I’m talking about, that weird smell that kitchen sponges get after only a few days of use, the one that never goes away no matter what you do, the one that clings to your hands for hours afterwards. That never with these sponges. Why? I have no idea, but I’m guessing that the natural materials inhibit molds and bacteria unlike their synthetic counterparts.
I cannot recommend the Twist products more highly, my favorite is the Loofah Sponge for scrubbing the dishes. I also have a Heavy Duty Agave Scrubber that I use on the shower stall, and a Euro Sponge and Loofah Sponge for cleaning the bathrooms. I just got some of their heavy duty scouring pads and they’re great for scrubbing the toilet and other tough chores.
Any great cleaning tools you’d like to recommend?
NON-TOXIC CLEANING SERIES
Stocking Your Non-Toxic Cleaning Kit
Learning to Love Castile Soap
Make Your Own: Foaming Soap
Make Your Own: Infused Vinegar
Make Your Own: Multi-Purpose Cleaner
Make Your Own: Color Safe Oxygen Bleach
Friday Favorite: Charlie’s Soap
Friday Favorite: Twist Sponges
and more to come
