I don’t like using much soap to wash my dishes or me because without copious amounts of hot water, a soapy residue stays on, so, I have been using baking soda when I have a greasy pan to wash and sometimes I use it to wash my hair as well, as I learned to do from this Mother Earth News article. The baking soda acts as the alkali and the grease in the pan or the oil in my hair acts as the fat, put them together and you have soap. It has been working really well until I ran out of baking soda. Lye (the alkali that soap is usually made with) is made from wood ash so I tried washing a greasy pan using hot water and ashes from my wood stove, and it worked great.
Day: November 17, 2006
Backwoods carpet cleaning
I used a pan of hot water (no soap) and a scrub brush and the rug looks a lot better. Last year I tried cleaning my rug in the snow as told to me in this Mother Earth News article but it wasn’t a complete sucess and dragging my dirty rug out into the brilliant snow and sunshine made it look that much more dingier.
Ponderosa Pine needles cause abortion… and prevent scurvy.
From http://stripe.colorado.edu/~mitton/ponderosa%20pine.htm:Pine needles have been used to produce abortions in many societies, for a long time. Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder, physicians writing almost 2,000 years ago, both reported that
consumption of pine needles caused abortion. American Indians, including the Arapaho, independently acquired and used the same knowledge. During harsh circumstances, a pregnancy had a low probability of producing a healthy child and it endangered the life of the mother; a tea of ponderosa needles was used to produce an abortion.
From the site http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Environment/CulRes/conifers.htm: Ponderosa pine needles and branches may cause abortions and stillbirths in pregnant cows browsing them, and a tea of needles is reputed to cause miscarriages in pregnant women (Turner et al., 1980).
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine : “A tea made by steeping young, green pine needles in boiling water (known as “strunt” in Sweden) is high in vitamins A and C.â€?
Seems like the perfect famine tea, causes abortion and prevents scurvy.