Our 5 a day.

Follow my blog with BloglovinNormally we are a supermarket fruit and veg buying type of family. I usually look for what is on offer and make my selection from there. Thinking about it now don't think I really pay much attention to where the fruit and veg is grown, whether or not it fair-trade or if it is organic my main concern has really been that the sell-by-date lasts long enough for when I calculate it will all be eaten. That doesn't mean that I always calculate it right, last week off the top of my head I'm pretty sure I threw away half a bag of potatoes as well as almost a full bag of carrots because they had started to sprout things that they shouldn't of. So I think it's fair to say that I'm not very savvy when it comes to buying my fruit and veg every week.

One of my biggest mistakes I think is that I don't really write down the veg and fruit I'm going to use for each meals the same way that I write down or at least have a mental list of what meat or fish the family will be having throughout the week. I can see doing that could definitely cut down on wastage.

I've also spent sometime on the computer looking up alternatives to the supermarket there is a local veg and fruit box delivery service offered as well as a small farmers market every Friday in our town, perhaps worth a snoop?

Soap nuts.

Laundry...the chore that never ends! At least in our household, no matter how much I try and do there always seems like another 1 or 2 or 3 more loads of laundry needing to be done. And, I have a confession - I have a thing about buying washing powder as a treat. Is that a weird this to admit? I don't mean I only wash our clothes as a  treat haha but that I usually buy only the cheaper washing powder day to day and buy a more expensive one only sometimes.

Anyhow, the quest for soapnuts  doubled up into a bit of a homeschooling lesson for Flower last night as she sat next to me whilst I looked them up on the internet after finding a reference to them in the book I mentioned in my last post.

For anyone unfamiliar with soapnuts they aren't actually nuts but a fruit found on a tree. I believe that they contain saponin a soap that lathers when it comes into contact with water. Soapnuts have apparently been used in Asia and Native America for thousands of years.

You can get them cheap on the internet, It seems to have lots of positive reviews and the only criticism I found so far from one reviewer is that the recent batch of soapnuts were not create quite as much lather as another batch that they had but still did the job- so sounds promising.

Instruction wise  I've read that you place between 3 and 6 in a muslin bag into the main drum and they last for about 5 washes, although many people tend yo use them until they start to disintegrate and then throw them on the compost.

I'm hoping to buy some off the net in the next couple of weeks and then I will write a review up on here.