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Naturally Clean – On My Mind

Written on July 8th, 2011 by Hear Mum Roar in Going green, In the home, Saving money

I’m once again joining in with Rhonda’s on my mind weekly link up.

I have a few things on my mind this Friday. One is homemade cleaning goods. The lovely Kelli from KelliOnegave me a copy of the book, ‘Speed Cleaning’ that she didn’t want anymore, and I found an idea I’ve been keen to try out…

Homemade timber cleaner! I mixed up a paste with some ash from the fireplace, and used it to clean these chairs my father made for me.

I personally would only ever try this on sealed timber, just to make sure it’s ok. Wanna see how it turned out?

And yes, I know the floor below is filthy, I just figured if I’d be cleaning with ash paste, I’d need to clean the floor afterward anyway, so why worry, right?

All in all, I’m happy with the result. I’ve talked before about how I’ve used oils as wood polish, but no matter how much I buff it, my children always slip off their chairs afterward! With this paste, I wipe it on, rinse it off with a wet cloth then buff it dry. I found using less ash to be more effective than ton of the stuff.

I love that this is using a resource that normally has no use. We burn boxes in our house as a cheap way to keep warm in winter, and to reuse our household waste. I’m so happy that this book has given me a free option to clean our wooden furniture.

The other thing on my mind is that today I’m launching my new site within Hear Mum Roar: Winning Mums. I know how much some of you love a giveaway, and I’m the same. So I’ve created a site where bloggers or other companies can submit their giveaways at one, easy to find site for free. The only thing it needs now is the forum installed and some giveaways posted on there. If you are currently running a giveaway, I’d love it if you’d submit one, so I can check it’s all working well.

With the forum side of things, it will start out with one or two categories, and if it takes off well, I’ll add more. If it doesn’t get used, I’ll get rid of it. Time will tell.

I hope you have a lovely Friday and weekend. What are your plans?

Other reading:

Vinegar cleaning

How to clean carpet naturally

Homemade air freshener

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Vinegar Cleaning

Written on May 24th, 2011 by Hear Mum Roar in Going green, Handmade, In the home, Saving money

I know a lot of people are aware that white vinegar is an awesome way to clean the home. It’s cheap, doesn’t contain nasty chemicals and is much healthier for the family. It’s also far better for the environment than harsh chemical cleaners.

I’ve been using white vinegar for many years now. I started out just using it mixed with essential oils such as lavender, eucalyptus, tea tree and lemon scented tea tree. Of course, there’s many other great oils that can be added, but these were the ones I regularly used.

Now, living out here in the middle of whoop-whoop, it’s a little more of an effort for me to just race to the shops to grab some essential oil. Sometimes I’ve needed to clean the house then and there, without time to replace those empty essential oil bottles. What’s that saying? Necessity being the mother of invention? Anyway. Maybe someone else has already come up with this idea, I don’t know.

I’ve been a little bit mean with some of you on facebook, asking you guys to guess what I’m doing with the bottles in the picture above. These are three white vinegar bottles that were empty to start with. I’ve picked some plants from the garden (from left to right in the photo): wormwood, lavender and mint.

How to make it:

I’ve picked as much of each as I could carry, then chopped it finely. I pushed them into the empty bottles, then topped them up with white vinegar. So basically, they’re pickled herbs, and when they’re ready to be used, need to be strained first. I am saving the wormwood for summer when the flies really get out of hand around here. The lavender just smells pretty and is so soothing. (Don’t use in pregnancy, though). I’ve also heard that floors mopped with mint essential oils mixed with vinegar can deter mice, so I’m curious as to whether or not it’d worked with my pickled mint. I’ll update this blog as I find out.

I’ve found, having made these concoctions a few weeks ago, that the wormwood becomes potent quite fast. The lavender needs a little longer, perhaps a week or two, and the mint needed the longest. In fact, the mint smelt like salad dressing for a long time! It’s only now, a few weeks down the track that it actually smells like mint! I’ve heard that slugs dislike mandarin peel, so in future when I have some fresh peel, I’ll try pickling some to see if it’s useful. Because our home is over one hundred years old, we often get disgusting slugs on our floors!

The ways I’ve used this vinegar so far include:

- Making up spray bottles of one quarter vinegar solution and the rest, water. Makes a fantastic all-purpose spray cleaner.

- Adding a splash of this vinegar solution to the mopping bucket water.

- Mixing the solution with baking soda (also known as bi-carb of soda, they’re both the same thing) to make a paste. This makes a good scrubbing paste for cleaning the bathtub, shower, stovetop, etc. Basically, anything that requires a little extra ‘oomph’. (Edited to add: don’t mix vinegar and baking soda into a paste then store it in a container or bottle. It’ll explode! Just make up enough to use once at a time)

- To unblock the sink with baking soda

- As a final rinse in the washing machine.

…But the job my kids like doing best with pickled vinegar is scrubbing the cereal-encrusted dining table with a cloth nappy splashed with straight solution. How great is it to be able to get kids so involved in nature, and to be able to let them clean up safely without worry about them handling poisons?

As for me, I’ve not bothered buying any essential oil for cleaning for a few weeks, now. Don’t get me wrong, the oils mixed with vinegar are still by far cheaper than buying chemical cleaners. However, I’m so chuffed that I can use something natural, nice-smelling with useful properties (eg pest control), and it works out cheaper still!

I remember when I first began cleaning with vinegar all those years ago. I remember being gobsmacked at having less headaches in general, and not coughing and sneezing when I cleaned anymore. And it works just as well, if not better. Vinegar works as a disinfectant and an odour neutraliser. Of course, it does smell strongly for a few minutes, but once the smell fades, it takes those stinky house odours away with it.

I can’t wait to try some other plants/scents in this way. What do you think would be good ones to try?

Other reading:

How to clean carpet naturally

Homemade air freshener

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Wormwood For Mozzie Bites

Written on January 3rd, 2011 by Hear Mum Roar in Care, Going green, In the home, January 2011, Saving money

…Or if you’re not an Aussie, mosquito bites. Since moving out to the country, the entire family has been getting hammered with mozzie bites; out here they seem bigger and more persistent. I swipe at them on my body, and they just keep sucking! I’ve even caught quite a few draining my blood directly through my clothes. It’s insane.

Of course, this means that we are all blotchy with big, red welts all over our bodies. The initial itch and sting is enough for us to want to tear our skin off.

The good news is, when I was making homemade fly repellant, I was actually on the phone to my good friend Myrtle from Mimsical Soaps, and she gave me some great tips. At the time, she let me know that wormwood, or artemisia absinthium (yes, you read that correctly, this is the stuff that makes absinthe) can be used to make an effective treatment for mozzie bites.

She gave me directions, and about a week ago, I tried it for the first time out of sheer desperation and itchiness.

I picked a basket full of wormwood (I recently learned it’s also called Mugwort. Who knew?), placed it into my slow cooker and drizzled a bottle of oil over the top. I added some lavender as well, because I love its soothing, antiseptic properties. I also have a bloody lot of it, so why not? I hope Myrtle is ok with that idea. Hi, if you’re reading:)

Then, I put the slow cooker on the lowest setting, and let it cook for about 6-8 hours, stirring regularly. I like cooking with wormwood in the kitchen, because it has the side bonus of driving every fly out of the house at the same time.

I let it cool, then strained it into a freshly washed, recycled pasta sauce jar. Because last time I made something with wormwood it went mouldy, I have been keeping this in the fridge. It’s been keeping well so far. The best news is that we can dab some of this onto our mozzie bites with a tissue, and it’s probably the most soothing thing I’ve tried yet. I also have a patch of eczema on my ankle, and it’s been making that a lot more bearable too. Keeping it in the fridge just makes it more refreshing on irritated skin.

Now, there is a better way to make this treatment, but according to Myrtle, it takes much longer. Say, a year. So I’ll make some soon, but we’ll have to wait to see how that turns out.

Do you have any wormwood growing around your home? What works best for your mozzie bites?

Other reading:

How to get rid of flies

How to clean carpet naturally

Lavender

Picking our mushrooms

Our fruit garden is planted

Drying mandarin peel

Homemade air freshener

Fresh, homemade cat food

Homemade flax seed hair gel

Beneficial plants and insects – companion planting

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How to get rid of flies

Written on November 1st, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Care, Challenges, Going green, Handmade, In the home, November 2010, Saving money

Flies, flies, flies! I hate ‘em. I also hate spraying toxic chemicals around the house, so unless I do something a bit more natural, I’m screwed. We have wormwood growing in our backyard, and I remembered our gardener telling us that we could make a fly repellent out of it, so I decided today was the day to try it.

To cut a long story short, I picked it, boiled it, then strained it.

This made rather a lot. Once it was cooled, I poured it into a spray bottle and squirted it around the house. It seems to be working so far! I dropped all the cooked, strained leaves around the backdoor also, in the hope it would deter flies and mosquitos as well.

I was talking to my good friend Myrtle from Mimsical Soaps who knows a lot about this sort of thing. She told me that if you boil the wormwood with some chilli, it makes an excellent spray to prevent fruit flies. So I must start growing some and I’ll try that too.

Edited to add: this mixture went mouldy very quickly, so next time I would probably add some vinegar or vodka to the water to help preserve the spray and let it last longer.

The other thing I was busy with today, was picking loads of flowers from the front garden. I stripped the bushes bare of daisies, lavender, roses and geraniums. I was worried how I was going to dry so many flowers, and didn’t want to fiddle around tying them all into bunches and find places to hang them. So, I took an ugly lace curtain that came with this house when we bought it…

..and made a hammock of sorts for my flower haul to dry out on.

Other reading:

Wormwood for mosquito bites

How to clean carpet naturally

Drying mandarin peel

Kids growing mushrooms

Home made air freshener

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How to clean carpet naturally

Written on October 13th, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Going green, In the home, October 2010, Saving money

With two puppies and a potty-training two year old, we are finding ourselves cleaning our carpet much more often than ever. We have accidents, plus the puppies keep finding things to chew into confetti sized pieces, despite our attempts to hide…well, everything from them!

When we vacuum every couple of days, sometimes we want to just do something to ensure it also smells nice. We don’t like the talcum-based carpet powders or foams in the supermarkets, and my fiance and I are allergic to them for different reasons anyway. We loathe the idea of talcum around our children, as well.

Luckily, I’ve got something much healthier, cheaper and nicer right here at home. Home-made carpet powder. I remember Marita was recently asking me what I was planning to use my dried lavender for. Well, this is one thing! Stay tuned, because I will be using it for other things as well…

All that’s in this little container here is dried lavender heads and baking powder (or bicarbonate of soda, if you prefer, they’re the same thing) shaken together. The longer you store this mixture, the more the baking soda will be scented by the lavender.

You could use any sweet-smelling dried petals for this powder, just use what’s available. We have a rose bush out the front which I’m dying to use for this, but I have to wait until it flowers. Baking soda is fantastic for absorbing and neutralising odours, and obviously, the lavender smells pretty. I also like the calming effect it has on everybody.

You can use it in the same way as the store-bought powder; just shake it directly onto the carpet, then vacuum it off again.

The kids loved running through this with their bare feet, they pretended it was snowing! I love that it’s harmless and chemical free so they can do this with no worries.

…and here we are: clean as a whistle! It’s so nice to be able to have pretty smelling carpets without giving ourselves a headache, hayfever or an asthma attack.

Do you have anything in your garden you could use as a carpet freshener?

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Lavender

Written on September 15th, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Cognitive, Emotional, Fine motor, Going green, Handmade, Language, Preschool aged, Projects, Saving money, September 2010, Social

It’s been beautiful Spring weather here lately. Mr 4 and I ventured outside to pick loads of lavender that has popped out all over the place. We also set about untying and pulling the petals off the dried lavender that has been hanging all this time.

Mr 4 and I compared two very different flowers: a dried lavender flower, and a fresh one. We talked about the differences in colour, texture and smell. He had a ball hanging out in the old shop, having a nice old poke around.

First we sorted through our big wicker basket chock-ful of flowers. Mr 4 and I had to turn them all around so that each bud was facing the same way, then tie them in bunches and lastly, hang them up to dry. I told him about how the air circulates all through the leaves, petals and stems, helping to dry out the flowers so we can preserve them for later use.

It certainly kept him very busy! ‘This is hard work, Mum!’ he kept telling me.

But there was more to do… It was then time to un-tie the dried lavender that Missy 9 had helped me with, and crumble the petals away from the stalks to be stored.

You should have smelt that shop! Oh my…

We’ve also been having some adorable visitors that have been keeping the children amused…

Meet Little Frog. If you remember me telling you briefly about our flooding situation, then I don’t need to explain to you why the carpet has been ripped out and you’re staring at the concrete floor of our currently defunct playroom. It seems Little Frog has made himself right at home amid all the damp.

And have you met Big Toad?

This picture really doesn’t do this beautiful creature justice. Blame it on the neurotic woman behind the camera! This overblown toad was found outside whilst I was outside at the bins. I rushed inside to find a container and a cloth to put over the top.

Big Toad was much heavier than I anticipated, and lurched all around in this temporary home. I was not game to take more than a bird’s eye shot. But I will say this toad is much, much bigger than it looks in this photo. Its tummy was so chubby, it nearly didn’t fit into my container! We all enjoyed looking at its colourful stripes and it’s bubbly neck. Then, of course I let it go. I think it was a very pregnant girl frog…

I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many toads as I have since moving here. And certainly none so colourful! Does anyone know what type of toad it is?

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Picking our mushrooms

Written on August 15th, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in August 2010, Cognitive, Fine motor, Food, Going green, Preschool aged, Saving money, School aged

I hope everyone’s had a relaxing weekend. I’ve been trying to soak a lot of water out of the carpet after our flooding. It should be dry soon, fingers crossed!

The kids have been having fun since they discovered we have grown two huge mushrooms! After we started with this kit, I found out that winter isn’t mushroom season. Apparently, every other season is. So normally, we’d expect to get more mushies than this amount, but it was still exciting for the kids, and these were so large, it really bulked up tonight’s dinner. But more on that later…

Missy 9 and Mr 4 enjoyed picking their home grown mushrooms all by themselves.

They gave our mushroom farm another misting of water, which they love to do.

Missy 9 and Missy 2 wanted to help cut the mushrooms up for tonight’s dinner, which is spaghetti bolognaise. I gave them a blunt knife each, and this kept them busy for a long time.

Missy 9 also had fun mincing the garlic to go with it.

Missy 9 watched the mushrooms and garlic saute in the pan, and we talked about all the B vitamins that mushies provide, what sauteing is, and she swooned at the smell of it! She’s really showing an interest in being involved with the cooking lately, and learning as much as she can.

It’s been such a lovely, relaxing, slow Sunday, and I think what better way for the kids to while away the hours than to pick fresh, home grown produce and prepare it for dinner?

Here’s my confession, though: my two older kids don’t like eating mushrooms very much. But they will eat it chopped up finely into a spaghetti bolognaise or beef stroganoff or similar. And they especially love trying it when they’ve helped to grow it. Look at this pic and tell me if you can even notice two gigantic mushrooms chopped through it.

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Decluttering and recycling at the same time

Written on July 8th, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Food, Going green, July 2010, Organisation, Saving money

My partner and I were faced with an overflowing kitchen cupboard this morning. It’s the result of blindly throwing things in and shutting the door on it when we first moved into this house. The picture above is now a new, large space for food, rather than just a cupboard for storing crap.

As we surveyed the mess in there, we continued with removing tupperware and other plastic containers containing BPA’s. Our childrens’ playroom did rather nicely out of this haul!

(Just ignore the walls with drawing on them! We’re repainting anyway, so I’m saving myself the hassle of cleaning it off just yet)

There’s lots of fun, open-ended things for the kids to play with here. We have tupperware which will be great for pretend home play, or whatever else comes out of their imaginations. There’s many, many cardboard boxes which the kids can do an infinite number of things with. So far, they’ve made a train out of all the boxes in a row, and built massive towers, which they then take great pleasure in knocking down again! (Back in the day at childcare, we called this ‘constructive/destructive play’. Nowadays, we just call it fun.)

Once the boxes are completely ruined, they’ll then go into our fireplace, or into the recycling bin. I think it’s a good idea to use what we’ve got before it gets thrown out, if it still has a use. Which brings me to cheap, recycled storage ideas.

Here’s an old bento lunchbox full of BPA’s, that’s just too damned cute to throw away.

It’s now a hair-tie and bobby-pin storage box in Missy 9′s room. Every morning we have been struggling to find her hair-ties, and more often than not, the cat was stealing them! So this is easier to find, more secure and makes her room look adorable.

The bobby pin packaging that came with the purchase was perfect for my sewing pins in the studio. The packaging I was using before this was cracked and leaking pins all over the floor, so this is much safer and easier to find.

I can’t talk about recycling junk to use it for storage without giving the good old glass jar an honorable mention, can I?

My dried mandarin peel is now ready for use, and its home is now in a clean pasta sauce jar. Hmm… when I think about it, that’s really two items that normally get thrown out, being put to good use. Not bad. Once I get my herb garden going, I plan to have lots of home grown and dried herbs and spices sitting in this spot.

I think it’s important before we throw things out, to get into the habit of asking ourselves, ‘does this have another use?’ Obviously, if you’re decluttering, you can’t keep everything! But I found this dividing shelf thingy in the kitchen cupboard (you know, to put cans on?) and was going to throw it out. Then I remembered, I still don’t have a drying rack for my woollen clothes. These racks can be expensive! So instead, the shelf is repurposed, and money is saved.

I often hear my parents talking about how they would hate to be raising kids in this day and age, due to the cost of living, and I do know what they mean. But then, I look back on how things were with my parents and grandparents, when I was growing up. Glass jars were always reused to store food, buttons, or whatever they were needed for. Ditto for margarine and ice cream containers. We weren’t such a ‘throwaway’ society, that’s for sure.

I’d love to hear your ideas of ways we can re-purpose junk, or even unwanted items in the home. What do you re-use?

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Our fruit garden is planted

Written on July 5th, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Food, Going green, July 2010, Projects, Saving money

Our fruit trees have been waiting for the manure to age, and the great news is, that today our gardener planted them for us! Wanna see?

We have a lovely arc of fruit trees here, and all that dirt you see will soon be a lush, green lawn for the children to play on. I can’t wait until the trees are so huge they can enjoy the shade of them and get lost in their own leafy, fruity little world.

On the other side of the yard is our new emperor mandarin tree (cute puppy a bonus).

For privacy, extra greenery, and a beautiful orange-scented blossom, we have a hedge of murrayas down the fence. We have more to put in, but the last area was too flooded, so that needs to wait. My partner’s Granny used to have these trees at her house, and for him, the scent brings back happy memories of orange lolly-smelling blooms. The label describes it as a ‘formal’ looking hedge, so that appeals to me. I think anything that evokes happy memories will make this place a home.

Here’s a view of the garden from the back fence. The cubby house is now thankfully gone, giving us more space and making it look a whole lot better.

Last, but not least, a photo of Daisy bogarting the camera once again.

All in all, such an improvement on how it was when we first moved in.

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Our fruit trees are here!

Written on June 21st, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Food, Going green, June 2010, Projects, Saving money

Remember I mentioned a few days ago that on Monday we’d be getting some new fruit trees put into our garden?

Well, I was partly right. I’m thrilled to say we did get our fruit trees, but because the manure that was bought to go with it was too fresh, our gardener has decided to not plant them for the next couple of weeks. Fair enough…

But yay! Look at our haul!

New apple tree
Fruit tree

We have:
ten murrayas (pretty hedge trees), and we need ten more.
one Jonathon apple tree (top photo)
one emperor mandarin tree
one seedless navel orange tree
one lemon tree
one peach tree

So excited now!

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