SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

Blog 4: by Stacey Gasson

When Kylie Jurgensen buys household cleaning products her list is refreshingly simple: baking soda, borax, washing soda, Sunlight soap, white vinegar, and eucalyptus or tea tree oil. Kylie has been making her own general cleaner, laundry liquid, baby wipe solution, shampoo, herbal hair rinse and dishwasher powder since her youngest son was born 9 months ago.

As she explains it, “Being more of an ideas than action sort of person, the nesting phase of my pregnancies is more likely to find me trawling Trade Me for a new house or a secondhand sofa than scrubbing the tiles with a toothbrush…”. This time round though her “latent greenie tendencies turned into a full-blown mania for the cheap and sustainable lifestyle”. Long insomniac hours online reading about permaculture, biofuel and the like led her to treat a (super) itchy scalp the natural way when anti-dandruff chemicals weren’t doing the trick. The remedy follows, but she describes the results as bordering on the miraculous. And so it began.

The formulas she uses today are the result of stringent in-house testing with an eye to both efficacy and effort: though her husband Steve may have initially mocked her concoctions, his interest was captured when it came to scientifically rating them. Lining up a range of formulas, each was sprayed in turn on the oven splashback, left for 10 seconds then wiped off. Recipes have also been reviewed with an eye to cost after Kylie calculated that it was going to cost $35 for all the ingredients for a workshop for 15 people, but the essential oils were going be $65. Now she usually sticks with tea tree and eucalyptus oils and uses a general cleaner for most things, avoiding the need to make a range of specific-use products. In her role as the coordinator of Rainbow Court’s entry in the Greenest Street competition, I’ve heard the words “Kylie” and “dynamo” used together more than once, but with five children ranging from 6-year-old twins to the baby she’s not looking to make any extra work or expense for herself.

When I asked Kylie why she thought there’s been a move back to natural cleaners, she explained that her shift was largely economically driven. Having twins meant she and Steve needed to have both of them at home, at least for a while, hence they moved from Auckland to somewhere cheaper where they could live off the land a bit. It was while researching places where they could achieve this lifestyle that she noticed all the online recipes for homemade household products (in fact, she made a list of all the links to different recipes so she could triangulate them into the most effective über-recipes – it ran to almost a dozen pages!).

She laughs as she admits that she tries to not to tell people she makes her own cleaners as she’s “not the most domestic person”. Perhaps, she suggests, the trend is part of a growing concern for our planet and general budget consciousness, especially as today’s wave of proponents are a generation of women who don’t necessarily want to be defined by their domesticity. And using products you’ve made yourself adds an interesting spin to cleaning.

Having children can also be a powerful motivator, especially “when things start not going to plan [health-wise] and you’re thrashing around. You want to eliminate everything [that could be causing the problem] and the internet puts it out there that you could deal with it without chemicals”. For this family at least the transition has been pretty much effortless, with no regrets at all about the chemicals they’ve left behind.

As a personal testimony, Kylie says the laundry liquid doesn’t aggravate the skins of their eczema-prone boys, Xavier’s their first baby who hasn’t had even a hint of nappy rash, and Steve (a super-fussy kitchen cleaner) has been heard trying to convince total strangers of the powers of their general surface cleaner.

And getting all those cleaning products off their weekly shopping budget has shrunk it dramatically to the point where “we no longer have to have those ‘dishwasher powder or meat?’ weeks”.

If you’re keen to learn more, you can hear Kylie talk about her household cleaners at the Kāpiti Coast Sustainable Home and Garden Show, 26/27 March 2011, in Paraparaumu.

Kylie’s great anti-flaky scalp hair solution

In the shower, wet your hair and rub a few tablespoons of baking soda into your scalp. Rinse out. Apply a herbal hair rinse just before you leave the shower. You can rinse it out again with clean water or leave it in. Gives amazingly shiny, flake-free hair.

Kylie’s herbal hair rinse

½ cup chopped fresh herbs (or 2 Tbsp dried herbs)

1 litre boiling water

½ cup white vinegar

Pour the boiling water over the herbs and leave to steep for 15 – 20 min (or until the water cools). Strain the herbs out, mix in the vinegar and store in the shower. I keep it in a 1 litre softdrink bottle with an H2Go bottle cap on so that I can easily pour it over my hair. This does about 3 – 4 rinses for me.

Note: You can reduce the amount of vinegar to about 1 Tbsp if you are using the rinse within 1-2 days. If you want it to last longer without going mouldy you need the extra vinegar.

Herbs to use: parsley (great for dandruff), rosemary (dark hair), camomile (light hair)

Tags: green clean