Vinegar, The perfect green cleaning solution!

Guest Post by Liz

I love vinegar and it’s not only the yummy salt and vinegar chip kind either.  (Mmmm and cue mouth watering now.)  I love cleaning with vinegar.  Let me tell you, if you haven’t started using vinegar as a cleaning agent in your house you’ll soon want to.

It all started when Buggie began crawling on our laminate kitchen floors.  He was already into eating solids so our kitchen floor was an absolute sticky mess 90% of the time.  I needed to clean it on a weekly basis but the more I thought about it the more anxious I felt about him crawling on the floor that I had just cleaned with store bought solution that was not natural.  Then the thought of him using his hands to put everything that was in sight into his mouth made me do a quick search on the ‘net for natural (and cheap!) cleaning products.  I happened upon vinegar but a lot of my mommy friends had already been raving about it for months before I too became a convert.

Here are the ways I use vinegar to clean in my house:

• Floor washing solution – I’ve already mentioned this but I use it to wash my floors.  I simply mix 1 part warm water and 1 part white distilled vinegar into a large spray bottle.  Then I simply spray it on the floor and wipe it up with a reusable Swiffer pad and my Swiffer.
• Cleaning my dishwasher – I don’t know if this has happened to you or not but sometimes after I’ve run my dishwasher there’s this nasty white chalky film on my dishes.  It’s disgusting.  Bleh!  Even thinking about it makes me want to wash my hands.  Well, apparently it’s a calcium build up or something like that (really it doesn’t matter THAT much what it is – it’s gross) and guess what can get rid of it?  White distilled vinegar!  That’s right.  Simply fill a bowl full of white distilled vinegar and place it upright into the dishwasher.  Then run your dishwasher for a full cycle.  You can do this monthly to help clean your dishwasher of soap buildup and calcium deposits. This can be done with either an empty machine or full of the filmy dishes.
• Cleaning my garbage disposal – They get yucky with all that stuff we shove down them.  So…I simply pour ½ cup of baking soda down the drain and then I add ½ cup of white distilled vinegar to that.  It makes this lovely bubbling sound.  I like to imagine the guck and grime fizzing off. Let it sit for five minutes and then rinse it down with hot water.
• Cleaning toys – It’s a safe and non-toxic way to clean toys.  Fill the sink with soapy water and add the white distilled vinegar to it.  Soak, rinse and that’s it!
• Cleaning my beloved coffee maker – The instructions in the manual say to do it!  Duh!
• Cleaning mirrors, windows and any other kind of glass – I don’t know why but my vinegar solution consisting of water and vinegar is an awesome glass cleaner!  No waxy streaks left behind.
• Cleaning my stove – I have a smooth top electric range and my little spray bottle does a great job making it sparkling clean!
• Cleaning the counters in my kitchen – We eat off of them…enough said there.
• Cleaning the funk out of my diapers – Because of its acidity vinegar is a great neutralizing odor eliminator for cloth diapers.  I use it in my cold rinse cycle.
• Cleaning the microwave and refrigerator – Again, if you eat stuff that touches it why would you not use something natural to clean it?

I hope this sparks the inner June Cleaver in you and you become a vinegar cleaning fool!  Do you use vinegar when you clean?  If so, what are your uses for it?

Elizabeth (aka Bert) Anderson married her college sweetheart in 2005, and started her journey into motherhood in 2008 with the birth of her son.  She started blogging in 2009 as a way to keep track of her thoughts on being a first time mom, especially her struggle with postpartum depression, and as a way of reaching out to other moms who are struggling with the same things.  This July, Bert had another first in her motherhood travels - a little girl!  Even though she's newly a mother of two, Bert maintains that no matter how many children you have you will always be a "first time mom" because there's a first time for everything!  Visit her blog, at FTM. Bert is a contributor for She Thinks Media.

Just Julie: If you plant it they will come! re: Butterfly Gardening

You may have read in my Meet the Geek Squad post that I am interested in Butterfly Gardening. I thought I'd use today's Just Julie post to give you guys a little more in depth explanation of it and how easy it is to do.

For me my interest in butterflies started when I attended a play date at a local friends house. Outside in her backyard was a garden and butterflies were fluttering all around it. I couldn't believe how lucky she was to have them all congregating in her backyard. She began to explain how if you plant butterfly attracting plants then the butterflies will come. She rattled off the names of some of the plants and I tried my hardest to commit them to memory.

That weekend I loaded up the kids and headed to our local Home Depot. I purchased Milkweed, Porterweed, Lantana and planted them outside my kitchen window so that I could keep an eye out for the butterflies. It took 1-2 days (maybe), and like magic I began to see butterflies, especially Monarch's feeding on my Milkweed. Within a few weeks my Milkweed was covered in Monarch caterpillars and I had to go out and buy more Milkweed just for them to eat.

Since then our garden has grown and so has the variety of butterflies we attract. We're able to watch them feed, lay eggs, hatch into caterpillars, turn into chrysalis and emerge as beautiful butterflies. It is super easy to do and maintain. I do NOT have a green thumb at all yet I have been able to accomplish keeping these plants alive for nearly a year now.

If you live in the right climate for gardening then I highly recommend you try attracting butterflies to your garden. I promise you won't regret it.

Some great sites you can visit for more information on starting your own butterfly habitat are

• Monarch Watch
• Butterfly House
• The Butterfly Site
  

Gateway to a Greener Life?

I am curious if cloth diapering has impacted the rest of your lives in any way? Inspired any other green lifestyle changes? Personally, the use of cloth diapers opened up a gateway, in a sense, to a greener more eco-conscious life for my family.

Having used disposables on my twins for at least the first 4 months of life I was no stranger to taking out the garbage and boy did we know how to make some garbage. Usually it was so heavy I'd actually have to wait for my husband to get home to lift it out of the can and bring it outside. This seemed like almost a daily routine.

Suddenly, after starting cloth, I realized that I could take the garbage out! It wasn't loaded with disposables and we also weren't having to take it out as often. Very quickly I realized, what's the sense in using cloth diapers if we aren't also going to recycle? We called our local sanitation department and had our recycling bins delivered a few days later.

After getting the hang of recycling we added two more bins to accommodate all of our recyclables. The end result was that we were only having to take our garbage out once a week and we were putting three bins full of recycling out twice a week! It felt good.

Currently I'd say we're somewhere on the "spectrum of green" between recycling, cloth diapering, purchasing more reusable goods as opposed to disposable ones, attempting to compost (although you might just call it feeding the raccoons), making our way towards eating more healthily, and trying to curb ours and our kids wasteful tendencies.

Could we be doing more? Absolutely! But baby steps are better than no steps at all.

Has cloth diapering led you towards making any additional eco-friendly changes or were you as green as could be before starting to cd?

I'd love to hear your comments!