Green Cleaning Tips

I've already posted about the cleaning super powers of simple baking soda and regular white vinegar. Now I'd like to add a third cleaner to the list: diet coke.

Here's my experience with it this weekend. When the Karch family grills outside, we like to use our cast iron pans and skillets, but when we pulled our largest pan out this morning (we planned to have an outdoor barbecue lunch) we discovered that it had rusted badly. No idea how since we don't wash them after using them and the one in question was well seasoned. In any case, the thing was coated in rust. Yuck! It looked like a lost cause (wish I'd taken a before picture so I had visual proof to back up this story).

Then I remembered a friend back in college telling me that he'd once stripped clean a rusted bike chain by soaking it in diet coke for an hour. 'Yeah, right," I'd though to myself at the time. But here I was staring at this once beautiful and much loved cast iron pan and I thought to myself, 'It certainly couldn't hurt the situation.'

My husband ran out to Walgreens and picked up a 1 liter bottle of diet coke and a steel wool brillo pad. He got the big chunks of rust off the pan with the brillo first and then poured half of the bottle of diet coke into the pan. We let the coke sit for two minute and then started rubbing the pan with the brillo. Five minutes later you couldn't even tell that the pan had been rusty. It was sparkling clean! I'm not kidding.

I wondered if diet coke would work on the rust around the drain on our ancietnt bathtub. I went inside, stoppered up the tub and poured a quarter of the diet coke that we had left in the bottle into the tub where it settled around the drain. Again, I let it sit for two minutes and then (gently) scraped at it with the steel wool brillo. To my amazement (and repulsion) our drain looks 1000 times better.

I had to share this trick with the rest of you. And for the record, I don't think I'm ever going to drink diet coke again.

Fresh Veggies on the Back Porch

It's that magical time of year when certain members of the Pingree community start to get a gleam in their eye--planting season has begun. That's right! This past weekend was the first weekend for the dedicated gardeners among us to start planting our cool weather vegetable seeds. We sprout and raise them indoors for a few weeks so that they're ready to be put in the ground just as soon as it thaws.

There's nothing better than home grown vegetables. Not only are they YOURS (you're personally invested in their growth, which psychologically makes them taste better), but they're as local as you can get and they can be as organic (or not) as you want them to be. But for many of us, committing to a garden (even a very small one) isn't feasible (you might not have a yard or the soil in your yard is questionable) and it's inherently intimidating if you didn't grow up with a garden. So what's a wannabe gardener to do?

Enter "Bag Gardening." This is, hands down, the easiest way to grow your own delicious vegetables.

Here's what you need:
- One 40 lb plastic bag of topsoil ($1 to $5), and I know the bag is plastic but we've got to start somewhere, right?

- One packet of seeds (I recommend a nice salad greens mixture for your very first bag experiment).

- A 2 x 3 foot area of space that gets sunlight most of the day, such as your back porch (or front porch, whichever is sunnier).


Here's what you do. At the beginning of April put the bag outside where you want to grow your salad greens. Poke a bunch of small holes in one side of the bag with a screw driver (for drainage). Flip the bag over and cut the top portion of the bag off to expose the soil inside of it, effectively turning the bag into a container. Plant your lettuce seeds according to the instructions on the back of the seed pack. Water lightly (just enough for the soil to feel "damp" but not "wet." Fertilize if you like, but it's not really necessary.

Tah-Dah! In just a couple of weeks you will have a crop of delicious lettuce that was grown as local as local can get. Harvest at your whim, making sure to pinch off any flower spikes that try to grow. Yum!

Go on. Try it. Be the type of person who tries it out!