Missing soapsuds...

... doesn't always mean an ineffective clean. Today's reading bought me to cleaning products; namely laundry powder, soap and dish washing liquid.  I learnt of the many marketing ploys geared toward women and cleaning; things such as products which produce the most soapsuds do the best cleaning job, the endless advertisements towards having a 'sparkling house', and the 5 billion cleaning products you HAVE TO HAVE if you are a decent housewife with a clean healthy home. I also also learnt of the seemingly endless list of chemicals washed down the drain and into the land or onto our bodies. There are a great amount of products available nowdays which are 'green cleaners' which is really great, however SO expensive.. again it is easy to grab the cheap stuff, but at what cost to ourselves and the environment? It reminds me so much of fruit and vegetables and how a lot of the time it is actually cheaper for families to feed their children junk.
This bought me to a website called 'Aussies Living Simply' and a 'how to' of home made cleaners. Tomorrows project will involve making our own Laundry detergent and dish washing liquid which I'm quite excited about, it is SO much cheaper and far far greener than the products we have previously been using.

I watched a documentary a couple of days ago on two families undergoing an eco challenge to try and make their house as neutral as possible. One family used 1500L of water per day and their challenge was to reduce this by 50%, they were really great and got into the spirit of things quite quickly. They really embraced the challenge and I thought for sure they would have reduced their usage by far more than the required 50%. When it came time to view how much they had used results showed they had only managed to reduce their usage by a couple of hundred litres! I was baffled! This family were collecting rainwater, monitoring shower time not using dishwashers etc. It turned out that the actual problem was a leak in a poorly fitted reticulation system, the family were bleeding approximately 500L of water PER DAY ! Needless to say first thing this morning we turned all the water off and checked our meter, we think there appears to be a very very slow leak. We are yet to determine what is happening but there is a leak and we will find it !

I also paid a trip to Bunnings today, probably for the last time in quite some time. I picked up a little present for our family as a little incentive for our journey, some lovely fresh parsley that we can keep in our garden. It is a pot of mature parsley so it's not home grown, but it is a symbol of things to come and an reminder of where we want to go. We also had the best time teaching Lila how to water it!

Lila watering the parsley

Ready for home-made pizzas tonight!