Today I am making a batch of powdered laundry detergent from a blog called Great Oak Circle. It calls for four ingredients:  washing soda, baking soda, Fels Naptha soap  (which smells wonderful, by the way) and borax.  I use the washing soda and the borax in my dishwasher detergent soap so I had that on hand, and I bought the soap, but I was concerned about my batch of baking soda.  I bought it at a big box store about a year ago and haven’t really had a use for 15 pounds of baking soda until now.  Can’t even remember why I thought I needed that much, but now I am concerned that it had lost its potency.  So before going out to buy more, I thought I would do some research.

Did you know that there’s a website called www.doesitgobad.com?  There is a list of items that at one point or another someone wondered if they go bad.  For instance, vanilla extract, coffee, sugar, flour, ketchup, chocolate and many more.  They did a wonderful job of explaining how to store baking soda, the shelf life and how to test if it’s still good.  I love a good experiment so I added 3 Tbsp of white vinegar to a Pyrex jug and then 1 tsp of my baking soda.  The website said, “If there are some bubbles on the mixture’s surface that means the powder is still potent enough to do its duty.”  Well if ‘some bubbles’ means a version of Mt. Vesuvius then my baking soda is good to go.

I grated my soap and mixed all the ingredients together.  The blog suggested storing the soap in 4 quart-sized mason jars, but I chose to use the plastic container from our previous purchase of laundry soap.  It’s not nearly as pretty as the mason jars, but maybe I’ll work on customizing it for our household at some point.  It also makes me feel uber-repurposey.

It cost me $7 to make this batch and at 2 Tbsp per load will last us 128 loads or about 8 months.  You really can’t beat that!

So I’m off to do a load of laundry.  I’ll let you know how it works out. 

“Are you sure that’s not cheese mom?  It sure looks like cheese.  Are you messing with us?”