Hot on the heels of my liquid soap experiment, I delved into a homemade dish liquid experiment. It was the next homemade cleaner on my mental (that can be taken either way) ‘To do’ list. Mostly because we had run out of dish liquid. The recipe I used is Homemade Dish Soap by Betsy Jabs at DIY Natural. It requires three or four ingredients: boiling water, borax, natural bar soap and optional essential oils.
Again, this was very easy. If I’d known it was so easy to make homemade cleaners I would have started long ago. At least that’s what I’d like to think. My attitude is a lot different now. I’m slowly coming out. I think I should finish that sentence. I’m slowly coming out of the consumer-driven, convenient, need-it-now, supermarket addict mindset. Yup, I’m in Supermarketholics Anonymous. It now seems so illogical to me to think every product has to be purchased from the supermarket or to just grab things off a supermarket shelf without much thought as to what’s in them and what effect they’ll have on my body. It’s not just cleaning products, but food too. Who would have thought that plain All Bran is 13.6% sugar? More about sugar later. I have created a tangent…
So, this is how it went. I whisked up the grated Sunlight soap, borax and water in a bowl, then let it sit for 6 to 7 hours, stirring it a few times. Yes, the dishes are waiting. Then I put it in the old, cleaned dish liquid bottle. I added 10 drops of lemon essential oil and shook it up well. The end.
But not quite the end. It smells really nice. Just like lemons. Or lemonade if you’re less familiar with real plants. Which reminds me of the time The Husband and I were cooking a Thai green curry for The Parents at their place. The Mother walked into the room and said, “What’s that smell?” She was looking around for “some sort of cleaning product” that smelt like lime. I had to explain to her that the lime-smelling fragrance was coming from the fresh kaffir lime leaves in our curry. “But it smells like a cleaning product!” Poor kaffir lime. I think I saw it crying in the corner.
Boy, I’m full of tangents today. I just about forgot to add comments about the first dishwashing test. This homemade dish liquid does not produce suds in the sink. It was good that I read that beforehand otherwise I might have felt inadequate. It is pretty weird not having a sink full of bubbles when that’s what you’re used to. But this homemade stuff cleans most things very well, with just a cloth and no bubbles needed. The only downside is that it doesn’t seem to cut through oils as well as commercial dish liquids with their powerful chemicals. The dishes created through my homemade coconut products were a bit stubborn. But they were at the end of a large heap of dishes. Maybe doing smaller lots of dishes more often is the answer. Ha…
Disclaimer: If you are going to try the above recipe, heed the safety warnings given, like wearing gloves and opening windows, and do your own research before using any of the above ingredients. I am not an expert, I am an experimenter.
Wild Hope Homestead 
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