By Sarah Johnson — Summertime presents unique housecleaning challenges. Mud follows everyone around, and dogs shed enough hair to knit a sweater. Yards need mucking out and grills need scouring. Athletic cleats come out of storage and start bringing home souvenirs of the playing fields.
Walls, light fixtures, cupboards, ceiling corners, closets, light switches, footboards … all seem to be covered with dirt, dander or dinginess. Most are suffering from all three. Time to get serious about housecleaning.
But I’m not going to spend a fortune on cleaning products or wreck the environment in the process. Our foremothers made their own cleaners which worked well and didn’t involve nasty ingredients. Here are my favorites. Try them and you can toss your commercial cleaners (recycling the containers, of course). Cheaper, greener — what’s not to like?
Disinfectant: Combine 2 tablespoons borax, 1/4 cup lemon juice and 2 cups hot water in a spray bottle. Use as you would any commercial all-purpose cleaner.
Glass cleaner: Use equal parts vinegar and water in a spray bottle. Or use this recipe.
1/4-1/2 teaspoon liquid detergent
3 tablespoons vinegar
2 cups water
Put all the ingredients into a spray bottle, shake it up a bit, and use as you would a commercial brand.
Tub and tile cleaner: Sprinkle baking soda like you would scouring powder. Rub with a damp sponge. Rinse thoroughly.
Creamy soft scrubber: Pour about 1/2 cup of baking soda into a bowl, and add enough liquid detergent to make a texture like frosting. Scoop the mixture onto a sponge and wash the surface. This is the perfect recipe for cleaning the bathtub because it rinses easily and doesn’t leave grit.
Drain and disposal cleaner: For slow drains, use this once a week to keep drains fresh and clog-free.
1/2 cup baking soda
1 cup white vinegar
1 gallon boiling water
Pour baking soda down drain or disposal, followed by vinegar. Allow the mixture to foam for several minutes before flushing the drain with boiling water.
Oven cleaner: Particularly heinous chemicals are often used to scour the insides of our ovens. Just say no and use this much healthier method.
1 cup or more baking soda
Water
A squirt or two of liquid detergent
Sprinkle water generously over the bottom of the oven, then cover the grime with enough baking soda that the surface is totally white. Sprinkle some more water over the top. Let the mixture set overnight. You can easily wipe up the grease the next morning because the grime will have loosened. When you have cleaned up the worst of the mess, dab a bit of liquid detergent or soap on a sponge, and wash the remaining residue from the oven.
Last resort only: Fill a small glass bowl with 1/2 cup full-strength ammonia, place in oven and close. Let stand overnight, then wipe loosened dirt with paper towels or newspapers. If necessary, rub surfaces with an abrasive, such as fine steel wool, then wash with warm soapy water and rinse. Repeat process if necessary. Provide plenty of fresh air and wear gloves.
Air fresheners/deodorizers: Try a couple of these natural ideas instead of your aerosols.
• Place cloves, cinnamon sticks or allspice in a pot of water. Simmer for 1 to 2 hours.
• Put a few slices of leftover orange or lemon rinds in a pot of water. Simmer for 1 to 2 hours.
• Place baking soda in an open container of your choice. Set in closets, refrigerators and other small, enclosed spaces.
• A couple of slices of white bread absorb refrigerator odors.
• Place lemon slices, charcoal, vanilla extract or vinegar in an open bowl in the kitchen.
• Light a match for a few moments or burn a candle (scented or unscented). The flame from either will “eat up” bad-smelling gases in the air.
• Add a couple of drops of your favorite essential oil to the inside of the cardboard toilet tissue roll. With each turn, fragrance is released into the room, and you can ditch your aerosol spray.
Toilet bowl cleaner: Sprinkle baking soda into the bowl, then squirt with vinegar and scour with a toilet brush to clean and deodorize. Or, drop two denture cleaner tablets into the bowl and clean as you would with toilet cleaner.
Cookbook Corner
Related Photos
Related Links
Discussion
Cookbook Corner: Go green with homemade spring cleaning products
<i>Originally published in the July 10, 2009, print edition.</i>
- Cookbook Corner
-
-
Cookbook Corner: 'Damn good' recipes straight from Hell's Kitchen
What a kook. With his Minneapolis and Duluth Hell's Kitchen restaurants, Mitch Omer has created an eating experience that transcends the norm. Hellish décor. Weirdly dressed servers. Awe-inspiring cuisine that can't meet demand: Long lines are common outside the gates of Hell.
-
Cookbook Corner: 'ad hoc' offers comfort food from foodie legend
Whatever accolades you can pile on a chef, Thomas Keller has 'em in spades. Keller shares some of his successes in his latest cookbook, "ad hoc at home."
-
Cookbook Corner: ‘Easy Entertaining’ for big spring, summer events
This collection of recipes and wisdom emphasizes pre-planning, preparing ahead as much as possible and ideas for shortcuts. You learn all the cheats, in other words, that are more valuable than gold when there’s a horde of hungry heathens salivating at the table. Or maybe that’s just my house.
-
Cookbook Corner: ‘FARMfood’ cookbook an informative, hilarious feast
What do you get when you take a Midwestern boy, turn him into a famous East Coast chef, and then return him to his homeland and give him free rein? You get chef Daniel Orr, a Bloomington, Ind., native who thought working in a kitchen was “a lot more fun than getting your eyes sliced open while detasseling corn.”
-
Cookbook Corner: The best (and more) of Darla Baakker’s recipes
Some cooks have a recipe box. Some cooks couldn’t fit their recipes into a five-gallon pickle barrel. It’s the second kind of cook that should, and rarely does, write a cookbook, if only to get all these recipes organized.
-
Cookbook Corner: Collection cooks up genealogical ‘apples’
Good cooking is just as much about our culture and the people we share it with as about getting nutrients into our gullets. Not only do we have food memories from our shared ethnic and regional past, but each individual family has its own list of favorites, no two alike.
-
Cookbook Corner: Tasty homegrown recipes from the South Dakota prarie
In the Coteau Hills of South Dakota lives a woman named Verna Knapp who wrote and published a cookbook just for the sake of finally getting it all down.
-
Cookbook Corner: 'Homemade Life' offers meals of comfort, humble freshness
Food is intimately entwined with memory. Molly Wizenberg follows her memories when she cooks, and the results are her popular internet blog and a new cookbook called “A Homemade Life.”
-
Cookbook Corner: New life start offers homestyle recipes for your family
“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is not a cookbook. It is a book, with recipes.
-
Cookbook Corner: Wonderful recipes helping fight hunger worldwide
With a copy of “Come to the Table,” Swedesburg, Iowa, Evangelical Church’s newest cookbook, you can combat hunger right at your table while fighting hunger all over the world.
- More Cookbook Corner Headlines
-
