Hello my happy and healthy friends! I hope you are all enjoying your summer and savoring the heat while it lasts (I’m definitely a warm weather gal!).
Somehow it seems like my Spring cleaning ends up happening in the Summer each year. I guess better late than never, right? Before switching to non-toxic products and a more natural lifestyle, I used to dread cleaning. I would use regular, commercial cleaning products and end up coughing, sneezing, wheezing, and battling a headache each time I tried to clean. I came to realize that these cleaning products were actually full of toxic chemicals (no wonder I had such bad reactions!), and I wasn’t actually “cleaning” my house at all!
I discovered that making your own natural, non-toxic cleaning products is super easy, super cheap, and (most importantly), super safe! So, I thought it would be fun to create a non-toxic cleaning series where I show you how easy it is to create your own cleaning products for a safe and clean home!
First up is the dishwasher. How many of you clean your dishwasher on a regular basis? I’ll admit that I certainly didn’t – until I looked down there one day and realized how yucky it looked! I realized my dishwasher couldn’t run efficiently if it had food and other “gook” caked on the bottom!
So, I turned to my 3 favorite natural cleaning ingredients: white vinegar, baking soda, and essential oils.
White vinegar and baking soda form the base of most of my DIY recipes because they are so cheap, they work, and they are both non-toxic. Then, depending on what I’m cleaning, I will add different essential oils, because, let’s face it, I don’t want my house to smell like vinegar!
For this recipe, I turned to doTERRA’s OnGuard Cleaner Concentrate – it’s full of essential oils like Wild Orange, Clove, Cinnamon, Eucalyptus, and Rosemary. It smells ah-mazing, and it’s really tough on grease and grime!
Check out how easy this recipe is below!
- 1-1/2 cups white vinegar
- 2 T. OnGuard Cleaner Concentrate (optional)
- ½ cup Baking soda
- Place vinegar and Concentrate in dishwasher safe bowl or measuring cup. Run through the heated cycle on your dishwasher. Once that cycle is complete, remove bowl from dishwasher. Sprinkle bottom of dishwasher with baking soda, and run through another heated cycle. Remove remaining "gook" with paper towel or cleaning brush and wipe clean.
So, if you do this once a month, you can keep your dishwasher clean and sparkling so that it can do a better job of cleaning your dishes! Do you have a favorite non-toxic cleaning tip? We’d love to hear it!
