Clothesline Challenge 2009 Update

Just wanted to pop in and let you know we are a go for line drying! Shinerman fixed the clothesline by adding some braces to each post. We've already done quite a few loads. It's a good thing, we were running out of clothes! I stopped by Gift of Green's blog and there are a bunch of folks signed up for the Clothesline Challenge. You should sign up, c'mon, you know you want to - no pressure :)

Clothesline Challenge 2009

The new clothesline challenge for this summer has begun!

We began drying our clothes outside last spring; read about the ghetto-fabness and then the sweet clothesline that followed. We've cut our electric bill by about 2o% and we no longer have to run the clothes over and over in the dryer to get them dry - so annoying.

But, with all this rain the last few weeks - the clothesline is out of commission. Not because of the rain itself, but the ground is so soaked that one of the poles started leaning like the Tower of Pisa. Shinerman pulled it out and said there was a big 'ol puddle under it. Now we have to wait until it stops raining and the ground dries to fix it. In the meantime, I think we're going to work the shower curtain and hanger action. But I did put some clothes in the dryer tonight...sigh, the eco-guilt cometh :)

But YOU should take the plunge. Gift of Green has several levels for your choosing. We are trying for Super Star, but that was before the clothesline crisis.

Sooo, Earth Day?

I've been pretty stoked about Earth Day this year. What would we do, I wondered. Last year I took the day off and the littlest man and I went to the Arboretum. Maybe we could do something more giving this year, clean up litter maybe?

But, alas, work had to take over the day this year. Too much to do and too many other days taken off; plus, I had to go to the Dr about a weird rash on my back - boo. Adding to that, I really was beginning to feel very blah about the whole thing. Taking just one day to do something green? We're pretty Green all year-round.

A list of green stuff we do everyday of the year:

• No paper towels - ever.
• 100% recycled toilet paper; except once when we had people over, it was late at night and we were about to run out - bad combo
• We haven't bought plastic baggies in a year and a half
• Only using natural cleaners, mostly baking soda and vinegar
• Making our own homemade laundry detergent
• Making our own hand soap - verdict is still out on that one so no post, yet
• Buying almost all organic food
• Line dry clothes year round, we've used the dryer only a handful of times since we started a year ago
• Composting everything we can
• Recycling everything we can

This list isn't exhaustive and also isn't meant to be a 'nanana-booboo' either. Perhaps I'm trying to assuage my guilt over not doing anything today to celebrate.

So, what did you do for Earth Day? Or what do you do everyday that makes you feel better for not doing anything today?

Homemade Laundry Detergent - the math

I had a couple of requests to talk about my laundry detergent, so I decided to focus on the money aspect in this post. With the economy like it is I know everyone is trying to save where they can. Be forewarned - I am not a math person, there is a reason I write for a living, so do not expect all of the numbers below to be 100% correct. Thank you for your understanding.

I've been making my own laundry detergent since August, here is the post where you can find the laundry detergent recipe I use. I really like it, it works great on the littlest man's clothes. He's 3 going on 4, so that's saying A LOT! It also lasts forever. I just made my third batch, so that works out to four months per batch. We average three loads a week, so that's 48 loads . The ALL Free & Clear we used to use says it has 32 loads. That's over a month's worth of laundry more! The ALL is about $8, so $.25 a load. Compare that to the numbers below.

Most of the stuff I just got at my local store, including the Dr. Bronner's for my first two batches. For this last batch, I ordered the last Dr. Bronner's from vitacost.com. Their prices are great and they have $4.99 shipping no matter how much you get. The soap I ordered was $2.80 per bar. I saw later they had a three pack for 2.39 per bar. I will definitely buy this one next time. That would make it $.08 per load!!

Conclusion - The homemade laundry detergent is DEFINITELY a good buy!!

The batch itself is a bit more than can fit into my biggest mason jar, so I put the extra in a smaller jar and gave it to a friend. She shared it with her mom and now they both are making their own laundry detergent. I cannot tell you how excited that makes me! I love hearing how I'm making an impact on people and how they view greenness and the planet.

I've been creating some other homemade things at the Green H - those posts will have to come later, it's late here and Shinerman has fallen asleep on the other couch - sorry Mom, sofa :)

Too many clothespins!

We have a really cute tote bag with a front pocket that we use for our clothespins. But since we dry so many clothes on the line we needed more clothespins. Of course then the darn things didn't fit into the pocket anymore and the bag is just sort of hanging from the hanger hook.

A solution has presented itself - a clothespin bag made out of a kids button-down shirt. It's genius! I get a new bag and make use out of one the littlest man's out-grown shirts.

Now I just have to borrow a sewing machine...or perhaps one of my friends who sew could do it for me? hmmm, indeed...

Homemade Laundry Detergent

I've been using vinegar as a general purpose cleaner for a while and have even tried making my own dishwashing detergent. Not so successful with that last one. The stuff doesn't seem to want to rinse off of my dishes.

But, I can claim success with making my own laundry detergent! Woohoo! I've had the ingredients for a while, but was pretty intimidated and worried that it wouldn't work – although that shouldn't have made me not do it; the worst that could really happen is that I'd have to rinse the washer out a few times and rewash the clothes.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this site, where she (I'm assuming) had 10 different recipes for laundry detergent. I've seen several, but the powdered ones all call for using Fels Naptha laundry soap. If you look at the ingredients it's essentially oil in bar form, it's made up of mostly petroleum products – not what I would call 'green'. So, I bought Dr. Bronner's Castile soap and then proceeded to not make the detergent. However, on this site, it gave the recipe for powdered detergent calling for Fels Naptha, but THEN said you could try whatever soap you wanted! The heavens parted.

So yesterday I made some laundry detergent, my recipe is below. It didn't take very long at all, about 20 mins, including time to take these pictures. I spent the most time grating the soap using my micro planer, but if you have a decent food processor you could use that. I then mixed up the rest of the ingredients and - tada - Laundry Detergent.

My Laundry Detergent recipe:

1 bar pure castile soap, finely grated
1 cup borax
1 cup washing soda
½ cup powdered oxygen bleach – chlorine-free
20-30 drops lemon essential oil

I'll let you know how it goes...

bring out the good paper plates, honey

Everytime I see one of these commercials, I get really ticked. It pretty much says "Let's trash the earth so I don't have to do the dishes" I don't really understand why you can't read your kid a story at bedtime AND do the dishes. And honestly, as old as some of these kids are in the commercials, they should be helping with the dishes anyway. The littlest man helps as much as he's able. But really - if you run out of time to get the dishes done before you're too dead tired (been there many a time), it's OK to have dishes in the sink. There is no Dish-Gestapo who will break through your windows to berate you for not having a sparkling efffin' kitchen!!

And their whole line about preventing diease through a paper cup...I'm 30-some odd-years old and have NEVER used a cup to rinse after brushing my teeth. And I'm pretty healthy, too.









In the interest of full disclosure, I do have paper plates. I have some leftover from my non-green days that we pretty much only use when we camp. We also have more enviromentally friendly plates I bought for a camping/bbq. I got them at Wal-Mart. I don't remember how much they cost, but they couldn't have been to expensive.

On another note, sorry I've been AWOL for so long! No excuse, just life. I plan to do better in the future!

How does your house get clean?

I'm finally catching up on work and personal email after my trip to Mexico (no I didn't buy carbon offsets - I know I suck) and visited BabyCenter - it went green! Just kidding, it was just a couple of posts. But, I saw in the comments of this blog post that people are just in LOVE with bleach. I have memories growing up of a sink full of a bleach/water mixture 'cleaning' our white enamel sink. I hated having to put my hand down in that to pull the stopper - it hurt! - and I did occasionally ask my dad to do it for me. I've never liked the smell of bleach; so I've never used it in my house as a general cleaner, just in the laundry. I did, however, use a plethora of chemicals to clean our three bedroom two bath home. Scrubbing bubbles, toilet cleaner, formula ### - you name it. But several years ago - the dot com bust actually - we went through some not so fun times and one of the things I did was make my own cleaning products. So I've really been using vinegar for a while, but I have recently discovered baking soda. I now use it when I clean the bathroom; the tub, toilet and sink, and the kitchen as well. My friends joke about how we should have a soap-making party (they joke, not so much me) and I recently read about a group doing Green Cleaning parties. It's like a Tupperware or Avon party - only not earth-killing. But I'm not sure if I could justify the cost of paying for that when I could just do it myself, we'll see.

Anyway, so how do YOU clean your house? Any ideas on a decent do-it-yourself dishwasher detergent?