Unconventional: being out of the ordinary.
Bohemian: an individual looked upon in society as strange and different. Imagination controls a Bohemian’s life.
Bohemians care very little for money and spend their lives creating art, music and literature.
Without Bohemians, the world would be a complete bore….
Welcome to the debute of The Unconventional Bohemian!!
I am ecstatic to share with the world the practices I have learned over the years to make oneself less conventional and more…. YOU! The exclusive, unrivaled, one-of-a-kind YOU that is inside all of us.
Each and everyone of us are artists in some respect. The mother who concocts a meal for her family. The contractor who skillfully designs and builds our everyday buildings. Even a hen who carefully nitpicks stray bits of straw before she lays her egg…
We may not initially realize this as these days, life just gets busy.
As a mother to a very active toddler, a housewife to a vegan/vegetarian household, and a person who loves her gardening, sewing, painting, reading, learning etc.. I find that time is not always on my side.
BUT… it can be done… Somehow, I’ve been able to make my homemade soaps, brew my homemade Kombucha, cook at least two meals a day, sew those curtains I’ve been procrastinating about, and keep a constant flow of homemade raw almond milk in the fridge. Not to mention getting in a good book or two.
One of my ultimate goals in this existence is to truly live a sustainable life. Of course, by sustainable life, I mean as much as our bustling society will allow. There are the norms of course such as bringing your own bags to the grocery store (which I still occasionally struggle with) to the ever growing trend of home composting, but my dreams include one day completely living off the land. A great example and my very first post/review is the Soap Nut.
The Soap Nut…
You may have seen them in your local health food store in the household/cleaner section. They claim to “clean your clothes with a 100% natural detergent that grows on trees”. Well, I admit, I’ve seen these multiple times when choosing which detergent to clean my laundry and always bypass them… Was it because of price… maybe skepticism that a berry that GREW on trees could actually get our clothes clean… I mean come on, I have a two year old and a man who loves to get his hands (and everything else for that matter) dirty under this roof. So, yes, I opted for the natural yet processed liquid soap detergent. Why? Because it’s conventional and that’s what I (and 95 percent of America) was raised on.
So after years of using liquid detergent, I decided to give the Soap Nuts a try. I went to Google to do a little more research on them. A native plant of Asia, the Sapindus Mukorossi or Soap Nut has actually been a means of cleansing for hundreds of years.
The brand I ordered was from the Green Virgin Products off Amazon. Green Virgin Products has an actual website, but shopping on Amazon is just so much simpler for me. It was $14.00 for a 1 pound bag of nuts and two wash bags that claimed 165 wash loads. Instructions were as followed:
Place 4-7 berries in a wash bag.
Add to dirty clothes in your washer with no added detergent, fabric softener, etc.
Wash as you would normally wash clothes
Clothes come out smelling cleaner and feeling softer than ever!
And you know what…. THEY DID!! I was absolutely AH-mazed that these little miraculous berries cleaned our clothes! As a tester, I put in a sweatshirt with some dried broken egg yolk in one of the pockets ( a certain someone went to collect eggs from our chickens and accidentally left the egg in his pocket all day.. let’s just say the egg didn’t make it to the fridge). Well, I anticipated several washes before getting the gunk out, but it was actually gone!! No egg smell or any residue! Wow! Sold for life…
You can even use these to clean just about anything.. your car, your counter, your hair, your fruit… the possibilities are endless!
Another great thing about this product is that you can reuse the same bag full of nuts 4-7 times before tossing them into your compost or putting them in the ground as they are 100% biodegradable. And if you ever get into gray water collection, which we hope one day to convert our kitchen, shower, and laundry waste water to, this berry will actually make the gray water cleaner to water your plants with. Not to mention when boiled with water then cooled, it makes an excellent alternative to chemically harsh, petroleum-based insecticidal sprays. Win-Win if you ask me…
So to wrap this whole thing up and to tie into the theme of “Living Off The Land”, I purchased some Soap Nut seeds to see if I could germinate them and one day have my own Soap Nut trees to supply our need for soap. Sure, it’ll take 5-10 years before any of our trees produce Soap Nuts, but the hardest part about beginning your journey into freeing yourself from this world of commercialism is ironically planting that first seed.
The growth of my soap nut trees is still to be determined, but rest assured, I will post any updates and tips for anyone wanting to grow their own as time goes on.
Thanks for reading and signing off until the next time I get inspired…
I love soapnuts!!!