Unlike ready-to-use products I find that simple bicarb is versatile and lends itself to a variety of cleaning tasks that no one single ready-made product can tackle.  I like to think this homespun approach to cleaning cuts down on production and packaging and generally works out cheaper.  It is definitely a must-have for fans of papier-mache volcanoes.  So here is my list, by no means exhaustive, of five fabulous uses for bicarbonate of soda. 

Happy cleaning!

Use a box of bicarbonate of soda as a fridge deodorant.  We all do it, either leave something in there to the point of mouldiness or forget to cover food items. (I have a bad habit of doing this with half used onions!)  If your fridge has got a bit whiffy just leave an opened box of bicarb at the back of the fridge on one of the lower shelves.  Bicarbonate is well known for its odour absorbing properties.  If the smell was particularly offensive remove the box and dispose of after a couple of days.  As a general deodorant you should be able to leave it in there for two to three weeks.

If you’ve been hulling and chopping strawberries this summer, your wooden chopping board will tell the tale.  To get rid of these tell-tale stains rinse the board with water (do not dry) and scatter with a large spoon of bicarb.  Almost immediately the stains will begin to change colour.  Wash and scrub the board as usual afterwards and the marks will virtually disappear.  This works because bicarbonate of soda has a high alkaline content and neutralises acids.  Try it on other acid food stains as well.

Use bicarbonate of soda as a carpet freshener.  I do this especially on all the areas that our dog Willow  habitually occupies.  Again you are capitalising on bicarb’s ability to absorb odour.  Scatter the bicarb over your carpets. Leaving it there overnight is ideal but a couple of hours will do.  Next sweep up the excess with dustpan and brush and then hoover.

Use bicarbonate of soda as a gentle non-scratch scourer for sinks, basins and baths.  Just scatter over the surfaces, scrub with a clean cloth and rinse well. (Rinsing with vinegar gives an extra boost to the cleaning power.)

You really do have to make fizz bombs in your toilet bowls and down plug holes.  Pour a cup of bicarbonate of soda down the bowl or plug hole and follow this with a cup of distilled malt vinegar.  (You can use any vinegar of course, I suggest this as the cheap option save your nice stuff for salad dressing!)  Enjoy watching this fizz and feel the clean.  Don’t worry about a residue of bicarb in the toilet bowl, it will still be doing a good deodorising job down there and will eventually flush away.

If you’re keen to get going with eco-friendly cleaning  but don’t know where to start So Organic now provide complete ecover conversion kits and also ecover products in bulk, which saves on costs considerably.  Don’t forget to apply the fizz-bomb methods to your papier-mache volcanos, especially useful when you have children in the 7-10 age range.  You don’t make those all the time?  Shame on you!  It’s all compostable after the fun too.   

Poor Willow has had a terrible weekend.  She started being sick at the end of last week, and I really feared she might not recover.  She’s getting quite old now and probably doesn’t fight infections as well as she used to.  Over the weekend she had a two day spell at the vets for intravenous fluids and anti-biotics.  We were very glad to have her returned to us yesterday, looking much, much better.  Well enough in fact  for me to feel happy to share with you what the conscientious eco-cleaner does when faced with large amounts of yellow bile all over the carpets.

• Mop up the excess and blot with all those rags you made out of unrecyclable clothes.  Most of our clothes fall into this category because we wear them until the stitches are falling out.  This particular operation required two XXL shirts belonging to The Man from Salford and a virtually unrecognizable dress once belonging to a smaller Goldilocks.    
• Spray the affected area with a 50/50 mix of distilled white vinegar and water.  This is primarily to disinfect the area, although it will also make the smell a little less offensive.
• In a mixing bowl, whisk equal amounts of water and an eco-washing-up liquid of your choice into a foam. (30 mls of each should make a reasonable amount.)  I cheated and used an electric whisk, I guess if you’re being truly sustainable you’d use a hand whisk and elbow grease.  Spread thickly (about 1cm) over affected areas and leave to dry out for a couple of hours, as the foam dries up it lifts dirt out of the carpet.  Then you can blot the area again or as I do vacuum over it.  (I’m not sure the manufacturer would approve of this.)  
• To deodorise your carpet, wait till it has thoroughly dried out and scatter with generous handfuls of bicarbonate-of-soda.  Leave as long as you possibly can, over night is ideal, but even a few hours will be beneficial.  Use a dustpan and brush to sweep most of it up and then vacuum.    

Wishing health to you all and your dogs, happy eco-cleaning!

Vampire Slaying the Nice Way

What did occur to me while watching, is that vampire slaying, traditionally at least, relies upon using  good old fashioned materials that are naturally anti-bacterial – wood, silver, garlic and holy water (not sure if our hole in the ground meets this last requirement!)  Proper S.L.P cleaning in fact.  I was delighted then to discover for sale in our local Morrisons (sorry, yes I do go to supermarkets) some cleaning cloths from ‘No More Chemicals’ which purport to clean and sanitize with the addition of nothing more than warm water.  (Their website isn’t up and running yet, I’ll put in a link when it is.)  The antibacterial action comes from silver micro-particles embedded in the cloth, which trap and disable bacteria.    There are three cloths in the range, one for bathrooms, one for kitchens and one for glass.

I bought the bathroom cloth first as I thought this would be the toughest of the three challenges, we are a filthy lot!  The little blue cloth didn’t look terribly convincing but it really did clean. It even managed oily scum marks which I thought would require something more abrasive and most importantly for people like me, who don’t get a kick from cleaning, it did it without fuss.  The kitchen cloth made short work of cleaning also.  I just had to wet it in hot water, wring it a little and it was ready. It is great for high frequency contact areas like cupboard and fridge handles as well as work surfaces, the beauty is in the simplicity and ease of use. 

Now I have to admit, I don’t do windows much, I tend to consider it cosmetic housekeeping which is quickly undone by small people and dogs pushing their noses up against them.  My windows would have to get a whole lot dirtier, opaque for example, before I’d consider them a threat to my health or well-being.  Having got used to the no-fuss of the other cloths, I was a little put out that the window cloth required me to spray water on my windows first.  If it wasn’t for the fact that I keep a spray-mister for my indoor plants I would have probably sulked and not done the product test at all.  ‘Just do a couple of windows,’ I told myself.  Again I was surprised and impressed, it didn’t seem to involve a great deal of elbow grease, and I had nice, shiny smear-free windows.  I got so excited I even did a mirror or two – my complexion improved instantly!          

You can wash these cloths up to a hundred times before they become ineffective, so even if you worked on the assumption you would wash them twice a week, you’ ve nearly got a year’s use out of them.  I bought mine on special offer so they were only a £1.oo, but they not going to break the bank at full cost (£2.49) - they work out a million times cheaper than buying chemicals ( and the cloths you still need on top anyway) and they don’t involve lots of nasty plastic bottles.  Give them a try I say, you’ve very little to lose and if you don’t like them you can always keep them handy for suffocating passing vampires with. (Always useful.)

The vampire-slayers in Demons actually smite ( I believe this is the correct technical term) their half-life victims with scary looking guns.  ‘What are they firing out of those?’ I ask Goldilocks.  ’Oh, special stuff,’ she sagely informs me.  I hope it’s not bleach!