Open Eye Health: All Natural Alternatives with Recipes

Now that we’ve switched to laundry with soap nuts, we’ll never look back, but we weren’t enjoying the extra chore of boiling tea every time we needed clean clothes (I rarely use hot water for laundry, but hot water is what draws the cleansing saponins out of the soap nuts – hence the tea for cold water washes). A prerequisite chore to a chore is never fun, and led to serious procrastination as clothes piled up in the laundry room.

Enter, solution: Naturoli Soap Nuts concentrated cleaner.  Where have you been all my life?! This is the soap nuts tea already made and bottled – and as a Green Dot award winner, it’s one of the best formulas you can get, pure and free of chemical fragrances and oils.

As you can see, the product is advertised at 96 loads, but when you order, even the manufacturer states you can double or even triple this yield. My approach to maximize it is pretty simple: just pour one capful into a large pitcher and add hot water to about the halfway point. This gives the solution a sudsy light color that mimics what I got when I made the tea from the nuts myself.

A half-full pitcher of soap nuts solution is enough for all the laundry I need to do all weekend – and now it takes only seconds to create and have on hand, as opposed to at least a half hour when you start with the raw materials.

Another bonus – I received a surprise sample of soap nuts body wash with my shipment and I am loving it! This is a great company that knows how to treat its customers well and make it easy to make the switch. At just $18 (I’ll be modest and gauge 200 loads out of this bottle . . . that’s just 9 cents a load!), my laundry is taken care of naturally (for probably at least the rest of the year), I don’t have to lug giant jugs of neon chemical detergents from the store ever again, and it’s so much easier than making tea from scratch . . . even your boyfriend can do it!

I disappeared for a few weeks, “spring cleaning”, and I’m happy to report back with a gentle and effective formula for dusting and polishing finished wood surfaces. It’s super simple too (just be sure to use quality ingredients):

1. Cut a lemon in half, and squeeze the juice from both halves into a non-metal mixing bowl
2. Add a little olive oil and lemon oil to the lemon juice and stir vigorously to create an emulsion
3. Voilà! You have just made your own natural wood cleaner. In every sense of the phrase! You may want to transfer it to a more portable container; I just used it out of the bowl.

Grab a “soft cloth” (old rag) and you’re ready to go. Add a tiny amount of your mixture to the cloth and smooth it over your wood surface where you have dust or just want a natural shine and fresh scent. I tried it out on a cherry side table and was so pleased with the effect I proceeded to polish the entire living room floor. Give it a try today!

A quick and easy alternative to chemical-based sink cleaners is simply a mix of  baking soda and salt paired with a little hot water. I found this great tip on ThriftyFun and like that I can have it stored ready to go for anytime cleaning.

I added approximately 1/3 cup baking soda and 1/4 cup sea salt to an old glass peanut butter jar, covered it and gave it a good shake. I sprinkled some on the porcelain sinks in our laundry room and kitchen and then used a sponge and hot water to give to give them a good scrub.

The salt & baking soda worked well on the sinks as well as the faucet and handles. If you try this, just make sure to rinse everything you srub well so as not to leave a dry film on anything (especially the faucet). The scrub worked well to cut grease in the kitchen sink as well as remove dust and grime from the laundry room sink. Hopefully, you already have the ingredients in your house now to give it a try and enjoy the results!

Last summer when I saw this article on NaturalNews.com I was inspired to visit my local health food store and find a good haircare line with nothing to hide. This proved to be a tall order indeed. Not only did the store carry several of the brands named in the article above, but I spent the better part of an hour picking up a bottle, turning it around, scanning the ingredients label, and then returning it to the shelf. No lather, no rinse. Repeat.

As discouraging & scary as that was, my search finally ended and my efforts rewarded with Aubrey Organics. I started out with their Rosa Marquetta and Glycogen balancing formulas, and I have loved many things about them, but lately felt I was wanting more. Then I finally found my match when I noticed a new color on my store’s shelf this weekend: Blue. Blue-green, to be exact. (more…)