My education

I may be out of school forever (yey!), but I find that I am continuing my education just the same. Although, the fields that I am being educated in are a bit different from what I studied before. Right now I am taking Gardening and weed-killing 101, Ant and Spider-killing, and Advanced Laundering. Of course, most of these are independent study, but all have labs. Have you ever taken an independent study course with a lab? It can be a bit sketchy. Arthur's a great teacher as far as the gardening goes, and Grandma Baber is full of good tips. I'm still trying to help myself some with this one though. Through my collateral reading (a.k.a. the internet), I have discovered that you can use a paint brush to apply Brush-b-Gone directly to poison ivy leaves and kill the whole plant without affecting the surrounding plants (like raspberries). Then, you have to use gloves and pull the dead plant up and dispose of it in a plastic bag. If you don't kill the plant before pulling it up, more plants can develop from the broken roots. If any more come up, you have to wait for them to get leafy again and reapply the weed killer. I'm going to try this. Hopefully, I can keep from getting it again while pulling the dead plants up as I'm still not over the last exposure. The poison can remain active even on dead leaves for over a year. Ick!

Next course of study: Killing Bugs. The garden has quite an ant infestation. I have never seen such big ant hills in all my life as the ones that are near the edge of the garden. From what I have read, ants actually farm aphids, which can be damaging to vegetables. The ants keep the aphids in their nests all winter then take them out and lead them to the plants the aphids feed off of. The ants also protect the aphids from other predators. The aphids produce a sweet substance that the ants feed off of. In theory, if you can get rid of the ants, you can get rid of the aphids, and your garden will be a safer place for plants and vegetables. What I have discovered through my study is that you can kill ants with cornmeal if it stays dry. You sprinkle the dry cornmeal, the ants eat it, then when they drink, the cornmeal expands and kills them. Sounds cruel, but so is killing all of my vegetables. The other way I found to kill them is to mix borax and sugar with a little bit of water. You put it near the nest, the ants take it home and feed on it, and it kills the whole colony. I have decided to use a one two punch. The borax isn't recommended for use directly in the garden as it can damage the plants. The cornmeal won't work if it gets wet before the ants eat it. What I'm going to do is take old canning lids and put a dab of the borax mixture on top to help prevent it from just seeping into the soil. I'm going to set those around the nests at the edge of the garden. I'm going to sprinkle the cornmeal around the nests and in the garden. I'll have to reapply some after it rains, which is pretty often right now, but I have a large bag of cornmeal. I'll let you know about the results of my experiments. I may put cornmeal only on one nest and see if it seems to do any good (so long as they don't wander down to the sugar mixture at the other end of the garden). If it kills them good enough, it might be a good option for in and around houses where there are pets and children. From what I've read, the amount of borax I will be using shouldn't be too harmful to children and pets, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. As for the spider part of the equation, I have found a rather vicious looking spider in my house and trapped it under a jar. I do not want vicious spiders in my house, so I'm trying to see if I can find good ways to kill them too. The borax is said to be helpful. I also read that spraying a mixture of vinegar and a little coconut oil is suppose to make your home inhospitable to them, especially for their web-spinning. I may have to try this. I trapped the spider yesterday, and it's still alive today, so I slipped a little of my ant-killing mixture under the jar to see what happens. From what I've read, the active ingredient in Terro ant killer is borax, which you can get in the laundry aisle of your grocery store. It's also a great household cleaner, which brings me to my next subject:

Advanced Laundering: Hopefully this will be advanced. As I mentioned earlier, I recently got a new high-efficiency washer. My mom has one, and she just uses much less of the regular detergent. I was a bit hesitant to do this, but I thought I'd try it and see. I tried it for awhile, and it seemed to do okay. However, while folding a load the other day, I noticed that the laundry didn't smell especially fresh. I opened the detergent dispenser on my washer and found that it appeared to have the same amount of detergent in it that it had when I started it. It should be noted here that I was using a powder. After doing a bit of research, I found that you can use a small amount of regular detergent in a high efficiency machine for awhile with apparently no adverse effects, but over time, it may clog the machine because the machine is not build to use all of the suds that regular detergent produces. It can also build up a film and eventually damage parts. Some people continue to use regular detergent with no problems, but I decided that the expense of possibly having to repair my machine would probably outweigh the expense of the HE detergent. Something else to consider is that a sudsing detergent will not get clothes as clean as the HE detergent in an HE machine, because the collision with the water is the effective part of the cleaning process in an HE machine, and the suds tend to lessen that collision. I decided that I would go ahead and at least look at the HE detergent.

Arthur has somewhat sensitive skin and has had some problems with it at times flaring up and being very itchy. My mom had told me that her dad experienced similar problems once, and his doctor told him to switch to Cheer detergent. My grandma switched to Cheer and his skin cleared up. She recommended that I switch to Cheer at least for Arthur's socks. I went to the detergent aisle and looked at the HE detergent. The only one that had a powdered detergent was Tide. I did not want to switch to liquid, because I cannot use the delay timer on my washer if I use a liquid detergent. I decided that I would do some more research before deciding on a detergent. After a bit of searching, I discovered that I could make a homemade powdered laundry soap! Call me crazy, but I decided to give it a try. It is said to be perfectly safe to use in HE machines because it is non-sudsing. It is also said to be gentle on skin because it is a soap and not a detergent. Many people use it on cloth baby diapers, so I figured they must have found it to be both gentle and affective. It has three ingredients: Fels Naptha laundry bar, washing soda, and borax. The borax was easy to find in the laundry aisle at Wal-Mart. The other two ingredients weren't there though. I had read that some people used baking soda but that it wasn't as effective. I also read that some people used Ivory soap or another bar soap but that it was not as effective as the laundry bar. One person also reported that it left a little film on her dark clothes, but others that used it did not report the same problems. Either way, I didn't want to use it if I could find a better option. I searched several stores and finally found all the ingredients in one place at Kroger. If you'd like to try this but have problems finding the ingredients, the websites I read said that most stores would be happy to order them for you. The washing soda is made by Arm and Hammer, and the Fels Naptha is made by Dial Soap Co. Other laundry soap bars were mentioned, including Zote, Sunshine, and Castile, so I assume you could use any of those, but the most talked about one on the sites I read was Fels Naptha, so I got it. Apparently, it's been around for over 100 years and is probably what most of our grandparents used to do laundry. Anyways, the Fels was 1.29 for a bar, the soda was 3.09 for a 3-plus pound box, and the borax was 2.96 for a 4 pound box. Here's the recipe:
Grate 2/3 of a bar of Fels Naptha laundry soap (I used the grating blade on my food processer and the chopping blade so that it was really fine and done really fast). This should come out to about a cup of grated soap.
Mix with 1/2 cup of borax and 1/2 cup of washing soda. Mix well and put in an container with a lid.
Simple enough, isn't it? The sources I read recommend using 1 Tablespoon of soap for an average sized load in a high-efficiency washer. I used that and it worked great. However, in the next load I washed, I had two of Arthur's HEAVILY soiled work shirts. I found that they weren't as clean as I'd have liked, so I put the work shirts back in along with some other heavily soiled clothes and used a heaping tablespoon instead of a level tablespoon, and they came out great! The smelled and looked clean and were pretty soft too. I haven't washed many loads yet, but so far, so good. I'll let you know how it goes after the next load of work clothes. I must say that the soap is indeed non-sudsing, or at least VERY low sudsing. I never saw any suds while the laundry was washing, but there was a little bit in the seal at the bottom of the door when I opened it. From what I've read, though, it can take several wash loads to clean all of the suds out of your clothes and machine if you've been washing with regular detergent for awhile. They say that the detergent actually deposits on your clothing and can take quite awhile to wash out, so I'll see if the suds lessen with a few more washes. Either way, there are hardly any suds, whereas there were loads of suds with the regular detergent, even though I was using a tiny amount.
Assuming you use 1 level tablespoon of detergent in each load, two bars of Fels Naptha mixed with the other ingredients should wash 96 loads of laundry! I'm not sure how many cups of borax and washing soda are in a box, but it looks like quite a few to me! I dumped out the borax I had left into a batter bowl with measuring marks on the side and there are about 9 cups left in there. I used a cup in the soap, because I made a double batch. I also used about a cup in cleaning my drains and making ant killer, so I figure there's roughly 11 cups in there. That's 13.45 cents for one batch of soap. There were about 5 cups left in the washing soda box. I used 1 cup in the soap and probably closer to 2 cups to clean with. It makes a great pre-soak for stains, and I've never seen anything get stains of of walls or linoleum so easily! Anyways, it comes out to 22.07 cents worth of washing soda for a batch. 2/3 a bar of Fels soap costs 86 cents. That means that one batch of soap costs $1.2152. We'll round it to $1.22. That comes out to 3.39 cents a load. I suspect however, that it is actually a little less than that because I am guessing about how much I used in general cleaning. Of course, you're going to use more for a very large or very heavily soiled load, just like with any detergent. This site: http://www.consumersearch.com/www/house_and_home/laundry-detergent/comparison.html says that Cheer HE costs approximately 23 cents a load. If we round to the nearest cent, I am saving about 20 cents a load with my homemade stuff! I was 5 or 6 loads a week. That's between 260 and 312 loads a year. That's a savings of between $52 and $62.40 a year! That's not bad for something that can be made by pushing a button then shaking a plastic container. I could make this stuff in about 1 minute per batch. I need 9.75 batches for 312 loads, so lets make that 10 batches for 320 loads. For ten minutes worth of work, I can save $64. That's $384 an hour. Maybe I should start selling this stuff. ;-) You may say that I spend the extra time at Kroger, since I seldom stop there, but I DO stop there now and then, and if I buy 7 bars of soap and 1 box of washing soda, that'll do about a year's supply of soap! That's about 12 dollars worth of supplies. See what a little education is worth? If you use this instead of Tide, you're saving a whopping 32 cents a load, and that's not even for HE. Of course, if you use the Wal-Mart brand, you're saving about 9 cents a load, but I'm not sure they make HE. Either way, not bad.