Making vinegar at home

There are a lot of apple peels left over after making sauce, pie fillings, and dried apples.  The last two years we just composted them, but this year we figured we'd make use of them by making vinegar.  We use vinegar for cleaning (including conditioning my hair), cooking, preserving, and I even found ideas of using it for making your skin soft.  It wouldn't cost us anything to make, and it was easy enough, so we went for it.  Using a 5-gallon bucket, we put all the peels in (no peels with black spots or rotten areas).  Put a plate over that to keep the peels down and then put another weight (we used a canning jar full of water) to keep the plate down.  You don't want anything floating around and get exposed to the air.  Cover it in water and put in a place where it can remain undisturbed.  We had our bucket in the cold storage room. After about 6 weeks or so we brought it back up and stored it in sterilized canning jars.  We had a successful first attempt and I'm certain we'll be doing this again next year.

We used a funnel with cheese cloth in it to filter, and just put it in a used gallon container, and then started filling up a few mason jars.  On the left, you can see the green 5-gallon bucket on full of vinegar.  On the right side, you can see that we were also making laundry detergent.

By the end of November, we had our own home made vinegar.

Laundry on the line & detergent recipe

Our dryer died a few weeks ago.  Thankfully, my sister had one just sitting around that we could have for free, but we had to wait for 2 weeks until we were going down for a visit.  In the meantime, I couldn't bear having that much laundry piling up.  I did tell the day care to stop using cloth (she really didn't mind that) because I did not want dirty diapers piling up.  I would have to hang the laundry on the line outside (the basement is too damp).  Since it was late November, it was cold with potential for rain or snow, so I could only do laundry on days that it would be dry.  As much as I didn't mind using the line in the summer, maybe even enjoying having clothes on the line, I didn't want to be required to use it, especially in the cold.  It just so happened that it was late, dark and cold when I noticed that the dryer died but I wanted dry clothes so I was hanging laundry in the dark that evening.  I think it was the highlight of my day the day we got the dryer set up and I had warm, soft clothes.  I know it's not very green, but I do love that dryer.  I like to put laundry on the line when it's an option, but in summer.   

Since I was seeming to spend too much time of laundry already, I figured I'd spend some more time on it.  I'd planned on making our own detergent as an experiment when our detergent ran out.  It happened to run out during this time so I went back to the research I'd already done on making detergent.  I originally planned on making it with water and putting it in a big bucket, but then I figured it'd just be easier to make it dry and I can experiment with a smaller batch.  I grated one bar of Ivory soap, put in one cup of Borax, and added one cup of washing soda.  Put it in a container that has a lid, mix it all together and that's it.  I added a few drops of orange essential oil because I like the smell, but it doesn't transfer to your clothes, which is my preference anyway (if you want the smell to transfer to your clothes, then you wouldn't use essential oil but a fragrance oil).  I use about 2 tbsp per load and it seems to work rather well.  You could use Fels Naptha soap (grated) instead of the Ivory soap, but I use the Fels Naptha just for rubbing directly on soiled spots.