Luckily, in all the boxes, I found a bag of lemons. I don't know why my mom had sent me a bag of lemons right when I was moving, but luckily they got in with all the lost stuff I put in the car last minute. (Lots of stuff must have been lost, as the car got pretty full - in a full size van, nobody could put their feet down and most people had something on their lap.)
So I took a lemon and cut it in half (I don't remember where I found a knife in a house full of boxes.) and squeezed it all over the oven. I think I must have poured some water on it then too. Then I went to the neighbors house and begged off a scrubby. (My husband was gone with the car somewhere and we didn't have a phone hooked up yet, just how I like it, disconnected from the rest of the world!)
By the time I got back, the oven had barely cooled off enough to touch the hot water mess inside of it. I took that scrubby, and I don't know if it was the heat or the lemon or what, but that oven came cleaner faster than any oven I have ever tried to wash. I was addicted to cleaning with lemons.
So easily did lemons clean kitchen stuff, that I decided to expand their territory. My hair is thick and fine. That is, there is LOTS of it and each strand is very very skinny. It is what I like to call, naturally snarly. I can brush it all out, and lift the brush to the top of my head, and not be able to pull it all the way through my hair because it will have developed another snarl already.
I used to Have to shampoo and condition it every time I showered. Then I read about "no poo". After 2 weeks of really really gross hair, my hair stopped being "stick out straight out to the side of my head" frizzy, and I was addicted. I still used my favorite conditioner a couple of times a year. I do live with babies...
So I was out of my favorite conditioner. (They actually stopped making it :( ) And we were getting ready for church. I had already told my toddler to "just hop in the toilet really fast and wash off" and corrected my unreliable brain too late! So I had decided that this was one of the days in my life I was going to wash my hair.
Like I said, I was enamoured with lemons ability to wash things. And they couldn't be as bad for hair as shampoo, right?
Now, most people that I tell this story too, at this point start laughing. They then proceed to tell me of the lightening effect lemons have on the color of hair. The color of my hair was not the main problem with my results.
About halfway through the main meeting, while balancing three squirming kids on my lap, as I flicked a strand of hair out of my face, I noticed something. I pulled a larger clump of my hair in front of my face to see it better, then used the screaming baby as an excuse to make a hasty retreat to the bathroom. There I could see what I had done to my hair in all it's glory!
Every single strand of my unruly hair had little tiny bits of lemon pulp tangled into it; millions and millions of tiny bits of Lemon pulp!
You see, in my excitement of being "all natural", I had simply cut open a lemon and rubbed it into my hair. Maybe there is a reason normal "earth killers" (and I am one most of the time, when I don't have brilliant ideas!) use stuff in plastic bottles. Even bottled lemon juice would have been better, or a rag to wrap around the lemon and squeeze it through. For some reason I thought that the lemon itself touching my hair would magically make it beautiful!
After a good 15 min. of trying to pick "the most noticeable" bits of pulp out of my hair, with absolutely no improvement, I admitted defeat. Did I mention I had THICK fine hair? I realized that this was going to be a couple of hours long project at best. My choices were now, go home and miss church. Church is 3 hours long, but there was no way I was going to be presentable before it ended. Or stay at church with the lemon pulp in my hair, put on my stage presence, look people in the eye, and dare them to notice what I was oblivious to! This is actually easier than it sounds, for me, as I forget things almost instantly. If I wasn't looking in a mirror, I wouldn't actively know I had lemon pulp, lots of lemon pulp, all throughout my hair. The thing is, it didn't look like lemon pulp, it looked like a really really really really really bad case of lice!!!!!
I don't go to church for the other people there, so I'll let you guess what I did.
On a more practical note, I decided lemon, even without the pulp, wasn't the best thing for my hair. It does however clean everything else really well. I tried it with laundry, and it needs something else - oatmeal works well with laundry too. But my favorite natural cleaner that actually works - not one that I pretend works for a couple of months until it is all too obvious it doesn't quite really work... My favorite out of all the natural cleaners that I have tried over the years, is soap nuts. To really get the laundry clean, I put in some orange or lemon peal. (Unlike with hair, a whole lemon slice, pulp and all works wonderfully well.) For some reason grapefruit doesn't work well at all. I wonder if crab apples would (maybe mushed up?) as they make good pectin (the stuff that makes jelly gel) as well as the citrus fruits.
For the dishes, I take an old sock and put a couple of soap nuts in it and some lemon peal or slice, or a cucumber slice, twist the sock closed, then turn the left over top part inside out over it. This makes it easy to open and close, but it doesn't open when I'm using it. I then use it as a rag or sponge to wash dishes with. The lemon or cucumber helps cut the grease better than just soap nuts. The best thing about washing dishes with it is that you don't get yucky chemicals and an even yuckier taste if the dishes aren't rinsed off enough. With some chemical soap, especially the "beautifully scented" kind, it seems almost impossible to rinse the dishes enough to get that extra taste off!
I like using cucumber, because as green as I like to think a lemon is, it isn't local and the toll it's travel takes on the environment is real!
But my favorite thing to use on my hair now, is soap nuts. I still only wash it a couple of times a year, but I could probably do more with soap nuts without damage. It is SO soft and not traumatized when I get done washing it. Nothing else comes close to actually washing it without traumatizing it! I guess I have sensitive hair.
I keep on thinking I'll actually take the time to soak or boil some soap nuts to make shampoo or hand soap with, but that's not my reality. I just use the above mentioned sock method that I use for dishes (without the lemon, for some reason :) It works best if I let it soak in the tub with me and the baby first. Unlike normal soap, this doesn't kill my skin and burn me. Then I just ring it out on, and rub it into my hair. So Soft! (and a good way to get throw up and "other" niceties indigenous to parenthood, out of your no poo hair.)
This is the cheapest I have found them! It is pieces instead of whole ones, which, if there is a difference, these would be better, as the soap comes off in water, and this gives more surface area. It came in a cardboard box with 2 plastic bags as shown full of soap nuts, and that one little book. I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of additional packaging. Well over a year later, we still haven't depleted our supply, and we are a LARGE family that uses them for pretty much all cleaning. Think of all those plastic bottles!
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