Oct 282012
The Naturally Clean Home: 150 Super-Easy Herbal Formulas for Green Cleaning
You don’t need to pay a fortune for expensive “green” commercial cleaning products. It’s easy and inexpensive to mix up effective, nontoxic alternatives using basic kitchen staples — baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice, herbs, and borax — plus a handful of easy-to-find essential oils. Karyn Siegel-Maier offers 150 all-natural recipes for cleaning everything in your home — from bathrooms to bedding, carpets to cabinetry. The formulas are so simple that anyone can make them, but they are at l
List Price: $ 10.95
Price: $ 5.97
I love this book!,
This book contains recipes for any cleaning product a person could ever want to use around their home, including carpet shampoo, laundry soap, garden and pest control (even deer), potpourri and sachets, tarnish remover, wood cleaners and polishes, computers and office equipment, oven cleaner, BBQ grills, wicker, cars, exterior siding (including stone and brick), and garden tools! And all of the ingredients are completely nontoxic. Not only that, it teaches you HOW to do the jobs and properly care for your home and items you own. It is an excellent all-around instruction book for green housekeeping in every sense.
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|Some of these work great, some not so much..,
I purchased this book in order to make my own natural cleaners rather than buying the commercial ones at the healthfood stores in order to save money. Initially you’ll have to spend some money on buying essential oils(these cost the most) and so forth.
I have tried several of the recipes. The Tough Dirt & Grease floor cleaner works great. I’ve also tried a couple of the different copper cleaners on my Revereware pots and both worked great.
The castille based dish soap, I’m not too crazy about for several reasons, 1. the water turns white 2. it doesn’t suds up much and 3. if you don’t towel dry your glasses they look cloudy. I used Desert Essence castile soap with tea tree oil the first time and the second time I use Dr Bronners and both had the same results. My hands don’t dry out but that didn’t really balance out having to towel dry every dish. So I guess I’ll be using BioKleens’ dish soap again.
The overnight toilet bowl cleaner was just the same as adding plain borax, letting it sit for an hour or overnight and scrubing with a brush it just smelled nicer due to the essential oils.
Basically it came down to this: borax, washing soda, baking soda, white vinegar and castile soap, which all of us green cleaners keep on hand this book just tells you what essential oils to add to the mixture.
The author also has a section about drying your own herbs to make scouring powders and such. Baking soda is a fairly good scouring powder on it’s own.
It does have very handy tips on how to clean everything in your house except for leather furniture.
You can find almost all of these recipes online on different green sites, but it is nice to have handy in a little book that tucks nicely away in the cleaning cabinet.
The index is rather confusing, if you are looking for say scouring powder it won’t be listed under scouring powders, you would have to look under bathroom cleaners for them.
Overall the book is okay, but I guess I was hoping for more than just adding essential oils to everything.
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|I love this book!!!,
I love this book. Super helpful without being over the top. Easy to find ingredients and the cleaners really work!! Every recipe that I’ve followed in this book has worked better than anything I find in the store, and they’re a ton cheaper too. I would highly recommened this book to anyone who wants to save money and not give up quality cleaning products.
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