After our dishwasher broke, we waited for a month for the maintenance crew to actually fix it. Long story short, it’s been 2 months and no one has come to fix our broken dishwasher. That’s ok! The hippy husband suggested that we wash our dishes by hand for a few months and see the difference it makes on our electricity bill! (You gotta love a husband who so willingly follows in the quest of living a more sustainable lifestyle!) After I finally ran out of the Dawn dish soap that I had been finishing up, I needed a new dish soap that I could make just like all of the other cleaning products in my house. At first I tried only using castile soap as my dish soap but I needed something to cut the grease. The first recipe I tried combined castile soap with lemon juice and vinegar, but I eventually realized that the reason that the solution curdled so often was because I was mixing castile soap (a base) with vinegar and lemon (an acid) which was advised against by Dr. Broner’s themselves because the acid/base chemical reaction makes the soap de-saponify causing it to no longer be soap and render it useless as far as cleaning.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 ¾ cups boiling water
• 1 Tbsp Borax
• 1 Tbsp of grated bar soap (I use castile bar soap, but you can also use homemade soap, Ivory, or whichever natural bar you prefer)
• 1/2 teaspoon orange oil (also known as d-limonene, it’s a GREAT natural cleaner that is cold pressed from the peels of oranges. I use this as a de-greaser and it smells amazing!)
• 10 drops tea tree essential oil (optional)
• 10 drops lavender essential oil (optional)

DIRECTIONS

1) Heat water to boiling and combine the bar soap and borax, mixing until fully dissolved.

2) Let sit out on the counter, at room temperature, to cool for about 6-8 hours. Stir whenever you think about it. It will gel upon cooling.

3) Mix in the orange oil and transfer to a re-purposed soap bottle or some other container.