1/29/2024 0 Comments Green clean me“I use it pretty much for anything,” she says. “Boil it and, when it’s cold, add two or three drops of lily of the valley essential oil.” Make an all-purpose cleanerīirtwhistle’s recipe is 150ml water, 60ml white vinegar and 40ml surgical spirit, with essential oil for fragrance. She takes it from her water butt a litre at a time. This is what Birtwhistle uses in her iron, rather than buying expensive distilled “ironing water” or using hard tap water, which can fur up an iron with limescale. Photograph: EJ-J/Getty Images/iStockphoto Harvest rainwater Take water from your water butt for your iron. I’ve got lots of it in the garden.” (Although remember that ivy can be a skin irritant for some people.) In the autumn, she collects conkers and boils them up to create a creamy laundry liquid. Conkers have it as well.” Birtwhistle uses ivy “when I can be bothered to go out and cut some. I knew in the depths of my memory something about ivy and saponin, so I Googled it. “It excites me so much my husband thinks I’m crackers. It sounds miraculous, but Birtwhistle swears by ivy as a laundry detergent (about 60g, cut up and put in a muslin bag, then put in the drum). “And I bought myself a variety pack of essential oils, because I do still like a little bit of perfume in fabric conditioner, or my ironing water.” Forage for soap So keep out of the reach of children, wear gloves if needed and follow the safety instructions on the packaging). Her main ingredients include bicarbonate of soda, “because that’s used a lot”, a big bag of citric acid, a bottle of surgical spirit, sodium carbonate (known as washing soda, which can be a skin and eye irritant) and a bag of sodium percarbonate (known as “oxygen” or “green” bleach it’s not as toxic as chlorine bleach, though you still have to be careful with it, as you do with all these ingredients, which, while considered acceptable natural cleaning alternatives, aren’t entirely benign. Nancy Birtwhistle at home … ‘I made the point of making it affordable.’ Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer Bulk-buy ingredientsīirtwhistle buys her most-used ingredients in bulk – an initial outlay, but money-saving in the long run. I made the point of making it affordable.” Here are a few of her tips to get you started. Green cleaning, she says, is “accessible for everybody. I used to use bicarbonate of soda in the 1970s, but I stopped using it because there were products I thought would do a quicker job, but they’re causing such a lot of damage to the environment.” She has now written a book, Clean & Green: 101 Hints and Tips for a More Eco-friendly Home, which is packed with advice and ingenious tricks. “We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that natural products are inferior to synthetic ones. Once a fan of bleach and strongly perfumed products, she now makes everything herself. She says her machine no longer gets gunked up from chemical overload.īirtwhistle, a no-nonsense retired GP practice manager and grandmother of nine, won the fifth series of The Great British Bake Off in 2014, but she has also become known on social media for her green cleaning tips. “And that’s the sort of culture we’ve become: ‘I’ll replace it.’” Instead, she gave it a thorough clean and switched to homemade detergent. “I was nearly at the point where I thought I needed a new washing machine, because it was a disgrace,” she says. I t was a filthy washing machine that prompted Nancy Birtwhistle to embrace the power of eco-friendly cleaning.
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