Little Green Project - Soap Nuts

Join us at Heavenly Homemakers for the little Green Project!

My little green secret this year is definitely soap nuts. I found out about them through Passionate Homemaking. Here is one of her great posts about them. I mainly use the soap nuts to make a liquid that I use for laundry and all purpose cleaner. I usually add 2 ice cubes worth of lemon juice to the batch for both the cleaner and laundry soap.

Soap nuts do work, although they aren't perfect. If you like your laundry to "smell clean," you won't like them. If you like your laundry not to smell like anything, you will. I am having trouble getting the hub's extremely dirty construction jeans clean with soap nuts. However, he asked me to use regular detergent once, and that didn't work. His pants are just too dirty!

I bought this pack in November, and I am less than half way through them. I am hoping they will last close to a year. Basically the only cleaning products I still buy are dish soap and dishwasher soap.

The greatest thing about soap nuts, in my opinion is the lack of packaging. Just imagine all of the bottles and boxes I would have gone through in laundry detergent alone by this time. It takes very minimal processing to prepare them. They are also biodegradable and non-toxic for everyone in the house.

Using soap nuts is also quite possibly the weirdest of my weird crunchy ways. So weird in fact, that I hide it from my family. I am living with my in-laws right now, and I have decided to slowly introduce them to our crunchiness. I don't think they're ready for the soap nuts.

So. . . I make my soap nuts liquid during the night after they're asleep or some other time when they aren't around. If they happen to show up while they're boiling on the stove, I just don't mention it. Pathetic, I know.