I Love Vinegar ...

... yes, I do!

I Love Vinegar,

How 'bout you?!?

(Feel free to picture me with pompoms right now)

So, vinegar's pretty much da bomb. It can do all sorts of things, like kill mold, become salad dressing, and apparently, even stop cats from fighting. Basically, it's a miracle substance.

A friend recently wanted more information about how I use vinegar to wash my produce. This is very unscientific -- although I have read several times (and sorry I can't cite the sources; I've now forgotten) that vinegar works as well as commercial produce washes alone, and that washing produce in water alone tends to leave pesticide residue on the surface.

So I put a big splash of vinegar in a bowl (to measure -put in enough to make the sound "glug, glug.") Then I fill the bowl with water and put the fruits and veggies in for a couple of minutes. Then, I pour the veggies into a collander and rinse with cold water. Before storing them, allow them to dry completely.

Here are a few questions I've received about this process:

Q: Don't your fruits and vegetables taste like vinegar?

A: No.

Q: Please elaborate.

A: As long as you rinse them in water first, they taste fine.

Q: Do you do this just before you eat them?

A: You can. But if you are trying to eat fewer processed foods, sometimes it's easier if you wash all of your produce when you get them from the grocery store. I try to do that, except when I am being really lazy.

Q: Should I wash things with a peel, like avocados?

A: Yes! Cutting into such veggies can cause cross-contamination, as your knife slices through the peel and then into the part you eat.

Q: How did you learn all of this amazing stuff?

A: I am a genius. Also, my friend Kelly is a domestic goddess teaches me the ways of the truly tidy.

Apartment Cleaning Smackdown - Rounds 3 & 4

With a week off, I continued my cleaning odyssey, attempting to use as many green cleaning methods as possible, and being honest about how well I fared. Thursday and Friday were my last days at home before my real vacation started, so I had to get the house finished. Here's how it went (I've divided my story up into green, meaning the greenest cleaning methods I know; light green, meaning I used somewhat green, or commercially-prepared "green" products; and red, meaning I used conventional cleaners).

Round 3 - The BedroomHere's my side table. Dust bunnies gone. Dust owls? Hmm ...

The bedroom was really a replay of the living room, so I'm not going to say much about it. Dusting, sweeping, mopping. About a week ago I washed the curtains. And I had a whole rigamarole involving my bedding ... but you will be able to read about that tomorrow. So, without much further ado, let's move on to the bathroom, linen closet.

Round 4 - The Bathroom

This little table was hand-painted by yours truly many years ago, and has traveled hither and thither with me for years, even though it doesn't match anything in my house. Still, it's perfect bathroom storage for your recycled toilet paper (there's a little cubby underneath).

I have a teeny-tiny bathroom that has a lot of issues. The tile is buckling. The floor is painted wood and has cracks in it. The room is unventilated, and so tends to get mildewy. And since Hurricane Ike, when I vacated the premises for a couple of weeks due to lack of power in the 90+ degree September heat, I've had hard water stains in the sink that have been impossible to remove.

Nevertheless, it is a happy place, just perfect for my girly routines. The tile is cute aqua, yellow and pink. The linen closet is within arms reach of the sink, so I can get everything I need. The light is great in the mornings. All in all, I can overlook all of those issues.

See the cute tile? And the cute owl soap dish? Have I mentioned that I like owls?

But it had been awhile since I'd given it a good scrub from floor to ceiling. Here's how it went:

Green:

• I've been treating the mildew stains in the shower with undiluted vinegar (Seriously, I think vinegar can do anything). Each day I spray it on the grout where it is getting mildewed. This does seem to be working, albeit slowly. Because the cat loves to jump in the shower (as long as it's dry!) I'm leery of using more heavy-duty chemicals to get rid of the mildew, even though I know that mildew and mold are also bad for you.
• I dusted with my handy-dandy homemade rags!

Light Green:

• I used Seventh Generation Tub & Tile Cleaner to clean the tub, sink, and outside of the toilet. And yes, I've given Seventh Generation a hard time, from time to time, for putting greener products out there that don't work too well (paper towels, laundry detergent), which I think might deter some consumers from using greener cleaning products (Envision Betty Draper, ca. 2009, saying, "you know what, screw Bounty. I'm going to try this 'green' paper towel," then getting it home, finding it doesn't work, and swearing off "green" for the rest of eternity, believing it to be simply a communist ploy to get everyone in America to have a dirty house and begin the slide into becoming dirty hippies. It could happen). All this, however, is to say that the Tub & Tile Cleaner really works. It uses the ubiquitous "plant-based cleaners," and without more research, I can't tell you more even from the material-safety data sheets (and people are never going to go green if they have to do a lot of research before they buy something. They just aren't). The Tub & Tile Cleaner has a pleasant "emerald cypress and fir" scent, which I love because it isn't checmically, and also sounds like walking in a forest. Thumbs up.
• I used Clorox Green Works to clean the toilet. I know that many in the green community are pretty skeptical about the Clorox Green Works family of products, and some of my loyal readers (Thanks Mom and Melanie!) have disputed the effectiveness of the glass cleaner in particular. Treehugger.com has a very thoughtful article about these products. Click here to read it. I feel better about them knowing that the Sierra Club - of which I am now a member, yay! - has endorsed these products in an effort to make greener cleaning more available to more Americans.

Red:

• Here's where things got tricky. While organizing the linen closet, home to all of the health and beauty products I use rarely/never, I came across a conundrum I didn't know the answer to, and being computer-free for a week, couldn't research easily. There were a few bottles I threw away because, frankly, with my weak, post-sprain hand, I couldn't open them to clean them out and recycle. A few others contained medicine. I was going to just chuck the pills and recycle the bottles, but then my brain went into overdrive, thinking about the possums who eat the garbage in Houston, and how they might die from a mouthful of expired Zoloft. So I just threw the whole bottle away. They'll probably end up in some landfill, and the pills will stay in there until Wall-E comes along and decides to see what they are, and becomes a robot drug addict. However, it's what I did. Flog me now.

So, what are the results of the Apartment Cleaning Smackdown?

Greenest Clean: The kitchen! Cleaned almost entirely with vinegar, baking soda, and reusable towels, the kitchen is now Mother Earth's favorite place to come, hang out, and make martinis with organic herbs.

Reddest Clean: The bathroom! Read above to see why.

I enjoyed my super-clean apartment for one day, and then it was off on my vacation, where I will be hitting Spokane WA, Portland OR, and Long Beach WA. As I venture throughout my homeland, the Pacific Northwest, I'll certainly be taking pictures, looking for green happiness, and enjoying time with family and friends. You'll get to read all about it.

Apartment Cleaning Smackdown - Round 1

Round 1 = The KitchenLook! The galley is shiny-clean!

As I mentioned the other day, I am transitioning to a new job soon, and am blessed to have a few weeks to chillax before that job starts. Of course, being the person I am, which is the sort of person who likes to give herself projects and goals, I set a big goal for my first week of "freedom."

Each day this week, I plan to clean one room of my small apartment - but not just clean. Deep clean. Organize, do the floors, take everything off the shelves and scrub them. I figured one room per day would give me the opportunity to do other things each day (of course, I have goals for that "free time" as well).

Each day, I'll be blogging about how I wrestled dirt and germs to the ground, using cleaning methods of a variety of shades of green. I'll be labeling them Green, meaning I used the least environmentally-harmful methods I know; Light Green, meaning I was used methods that were somewhat green; and Red. Red means traditional cleaning. I hope you'll be able to try out some of these methods as well, and if you have any suggestions for my Red cleaning options, let me know.

Green:

• I cleaned the cupboards, shelves, stove, fridge doors, and pretty much everything else with undiluted vinegar, spraying it just as I would a store-bought cleaner and wiping with a wet sponge.
  
• I used a combination of vinegar and baking soda to clean the sink. First I filled the sink with about an inch of vinegar to cut the mineralization, then rinsed it and scrubbed using the baking soda as a mild abrasive.
• I used homemade rags (cut up T-shirts from my closet-cleaning adventure) to dust and dry.
• I recycled a bunch of containers and cans, and found some reusable stuff for Goodwill.
  

Light Green:

• I washed the dishes with Mrs. Meyer's dish soap, which uses plant-based cleaners.
• I used about 5 paper towels. They were a recycled brand - Small Steps. They work well, I've found, as compared to some others I've tried (see below).
  

Red

• I washed the rags, rug, and towels with Tide Essentials with Baking Soda. I don't think it's really any different than Tide, because it has the same material-safety data sheet. It doesn't, however, have the uber-chemically fragrance of regular detergent. When I have tried more environmentally-responsible detergents, such as Seventh Generation, they have not worked AT ALL. I actually had to wash my clothes again after using Seventh Generation, because they were still stinky. What's the point of buying "green" products if they don't do what they're supposed to? (Seventh Generation is on my bad list for this particular reason, after their paper towels also failed me.)
  
• I used some floor cleaner that I had under the sink to mop.

Tomorrow: The living room!

Re-Purpose: Vinegar

The Many Uses of ...
VINEGAR

Uses #2 (Killing Insects) and #3 (Washing Produce)

It's handy to keep a spray bottle filled with a mixture of water and distilled white vinegar. I have one next to the sink. Here are two of its uses:

A Natural "Insecticide": Living in one of the buggiest places in, at least the U.S. (I won't claim it to be buggier than, say, the Amazon) one sometimes needs to get a little nuclear on some insect-ass. Most insect repelling products, however, are filled with toxic chemicals that I certainly don't want around my kitchen or my cat. When sugar ants invade my sink area as they sometimes do, or when we have one of our semi-annual fruit fly infestations, a blast of vinegar + water takes care of the pests.

Washing Produce: While I'm certainly not above rubbing an apple on my shirtsleeve to clean it off, it is probably better to be a little more pro-active about cleansing chemicals/ E.coli from produce. The vinegar + water solution can be used for this purpose as well. Just spray the solution on the produce. Rinse the produce with water and rub.

Vinegar is awesome! Ask the tiny ants!

Re-Purpose

The Many Uses of ...

VINEGAR

Use #1
Cleaning mineralization from your sink drain

During Hurricane Ike, I stayed with friends for about two weeks. When I returned home, Houston's hard water had formed a rusty ring in the sink. Because that is my cat's very favorite place to get water, and I don't want to poison him with rust removers, I hit the web to look for alternatives.

What I ended up trying was distilled white vinegar. Here's how it works:

Step 1: Plug the drain in your sink.

Step 2: Pour vinegar in to cover the hard water stain.

Step 3: Let it sit. My drain doesn't seal well, so I just let it sit until it had all drained out, probably about 30 minutes. I think longer would have worked better.

Step 4: Drain the sink. Using a lightly-abrasive sponge or towel (or baking soda, but more about baking soda in another post) scrub the remaining stain.

As I've said before, once you move into green cleaning territory, you need to re-adjust your idea of what "clean" is. The stain was not 100% gone, but it was MUCH better. I will probably need to use a more heavy-duty cleaner at some point, but this was a great non-toxic alternative.