Green cleaning fudged again

Karen Christensen — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:54:38 +0000

I can’t tell you how many times I have read this statement, about “How to Clean Windows with Vinegar”: “If cleaning with vinegar left streaks on your windows, it wasn’t the fault of the vinegar, it was a residue left from commercial products.” I may even have made this statement in one of my own books. It’s nonsense, I’m sorry to say, one of those blithe green clean facts written by people who are simply repeating a convenient untruth – one that might be true sometimes, but certainly doesn’t explain the fact that vinegar has its limitations! Since the biggest green cleaning expert I know of told me once that she never ever cleaned her house herself (she had a cleaning person now and then, I think, but there wasn’t much evidence of anyone doing any cleaning), I count this kind of thing with tips like those in a UK book of some years back called 1001 Ways to Save the Planet, which Penguin should be embarrassed to have published. Here’s my favorite: “Write small so you use less paper.” I quickly became a skeptic about the idea that vinegar and baking soda could do anything and everything (though in fact they are terrific for some purposes), and even more of a skeptic about the people turning out green copy. Maybe that’s why I don’t write much about cleaning: I can’t say that it occupies a lot of my time at the moment!

Nontoxic pest control

Karen Christensen — Tue, 03 May 2005 15:01:38 +0000

The words we use for this season are interesting to consider. In French and Spanish, the words for ‘spring’ relate to first life, a beginning. In English, we use a word that suggests both movement and a source. Life really does spring up before us in springtime, especially in a climate like ours in New England. Most of my perennial plants die back to the ground every winter, and it’s hard to imagine the lush fullness of the bed along the terrace in August now, when they’re just beginning to push out leaves.

Along with plant life come the insects. We don’t suffer much from the flies that sometimes plague people in May, but this is the time when our kitchen is suddenly awash with fairly large black ants. It doesn’t last long, and they’re quite harmless, so I certainly wouldn’t dream of taking violent action. Just keeping things clean helps, but they’re still on the prowl. I’m happy to report that my son has devised an ant trap that is breathtakingly simple and has completely solved the problem.

He fills a small glass bottle–an old spice jar or salt shaker–with sugar syrup, made by dissolving two parts white sugar in one part water. (We keep this around for sweetening drinks.) He then covers the top tightly with a small piece of aluminum foil and pokes a tiny hole in the middle with the tip of a knife.

And that’s it. The bottle, in our case, goes under the sink by the compost pail, because that’s where there are the most ants. They climb in and can’t get out, and that’s that. Flush ‘em or add them to the compost. Kids love this—they are amazingly bloody minded and unsentimental—we were comparing the ant trap to the final scene in Titanic last night.

Armchair Environmentalist Blog » Cleaning

Green cleaning fudged again

Nontoxic pest control