Ethics Trading seems to be being treated as 2 distinct sites by Google.

I’ve been doing some search engine optimisation work and looking at rage rankings as well as search positioning for certain key words.

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EcoKnits is run by a friend of mine and we’ve been talking soap nuts for wool washing.

Proper wool is tricky to wash safely without felting, shrinking or matting it nastily and ruining that perfect, soft and squishy scarf/hat/whatever you made for your best friend for Christmas.

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I have sundew, fly trap and pitcher plants. As carnivorous plants they have some quite specific requirements. They need to be constantly moist but with rain water as tap water is toxic to them. They need reasonable sun, some like full sun some prefer shade.

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Reduce your rubbish and win prizes! with MyZeroWaste.com.  It’s simple - go over there and pledge to do something, there’s a list and you’ll need to feedback on how it went after you do it, so no cheating!

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Janey Lee Grace was on BBC London early this morning - before sane people are even awake!

You can listen again on the BBC London site - she’s on The Breakfast Show about 45 mins in and there’s around 15 mins of credit crunch tips including soap nuts! YAY!

Soap grows on trees! Anyone who has been reading here for any length of time or known me on forums, or even in real life, will know this already. So to manufacture soap nuts you need some land, a tree or several and a person able to harcest the berries when they dry. That’d be no waste going to landfill from the production process then.

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Soap Nut Juice

Pour approx 1 litre of water into a cooking pot; add about 50g cracked soap nut shells; cover and boil, then simmer for approximately 10 minutes. The boiling process extracts the saponin from the nut shells and combines with the water. Let the infusion cool and you can use it immediately, or let it steep overnight. The soap nut infusion is theoretically suitable for every kind of cleaning - even wash your car with it!

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Soap Nut Information.

Imagine you could get away with using no chemicals in your Laundry. Now imagine there is a single product that would help you with all the cleaning in your house – with no chemicals. Now take the leap and imagine the product I am describing is natural and grows on trees, Sapindus mukorossi, the soap berry tree. Soapnuts are also known as Soap berries or soap pods in various places online and around the world.

Soap Nuts are actually not nuts, they are a shelled seed or berry - it’s the shells that we use. They grow wild in Nepal and India and are a natural source of high quality Saponin.

The wrinkly brown part is the berry or shell, and is also known as the soap nut, or soap berry. That is the part that is dried and is packed full of natural saponin for you to use round your home. You shouldn’t find any of the round black seeds in your delivery of soap nuts because I believe that if you pay for a cleaning product then you should get that product with nothing else taking up the weight of your purchase. They have no saponin and are useless for cleaning, but great if you want to grow a Soap Berry tree. The seeds are useless unless you want to grow a soap berry tree, although they do have uses other than cleaning, but they contain no saponin.

To use them you take about half a dozen soapnut shells and chuck them in a draw string cotton bag. Bung the bag in the washing machine drum with your dirty washing and set it going. They are odourless so if you want fragrant washing then add a few drops of an essential oil of your choice to the bag.

Soap Nuts contain no bleaching agents and no optical brighteners - so if you like your whites dazzlingly white you might want to add a box of Ecover Laundry Bleach to your basket!

If you need or want to know more then please do ask a question in the comments and it’ll be answered as honestly as possible.