Available at Greene County farmers market
Linn Price’s quest to save money at home led her to a product that can save other people money, too. Doing business as Price Family Farms at the Greene County farmers market, she sells produce grown in a high tunnel near Spring Lake. The produce is “transitional organic,” she explains, as she’s in her third year of organic production. Next year it will be certified by the state as “organic.” She also sells organic eggs.
A side line, though, has nothing to do with produce and everything to do with saving money on a household necessity – laundry detergent.
Household frugality became important to her three years ago when she and her husband Chuck’s household size doubled with the addition of daughter Sophia and son Matt. “Our household size doubled and our income didn’t, and I was doing a lot more laundry than I had before,” Price said.
She started looking at recipes for do-it-yourself laundry detergent. She didn’t like the first ones she found. “A lot of recipes have you grating a soap and adding some borax and washing sodas and things like this, but then it’s like any other powdered soap. It would leave a residue if it didn’t mix properly in the washing machine…. I was looking for something that would mix well in the machine, that would do a good job and still save some money.”
So she experimented. “I looked online and did a lot of research and trial and error until I found one I liked, and then I modified it a little bit,” she said.
She starts with Fels-Naptha soap, an old-fashioned soap made from tallow. (She admits there are a lot of additives, and that vegans won’t use Fels-Naptha.) She first grates the soap, and then uses a very time-intensive and exacting process with heat and water that bonds the Fels-Naptha with washing soda and borax. Her detergent has a cheesecake consistency, a thick gel, that easily dissolves in a washing machine. It has no fillers, so two teaspoons is all that’s needed for a load of laundry. That calculates to a little more than 6 cents a load.
She created another laundry detergent out of necessity because son Matt has eczema. That detergent is based on castile soap made with saponified olive oil (lye). It’s a more difficult process because the lye is so caustic until it has bonded with the other ingredients.
Price admits that people are skeptical about homemade laundry detergent, and that many of her sales have been to people to whom she first gave a sample. They’ve recommended the detergent to others, though, and the business is growing. “I haven’t heard any complaints yet,” she said.
She is still expanding her line. She has a facial soap made with bee’s wax, almond and honey, with oatmeal as an exfoliant. She has a sugar-based hair remover that can be used rather than wax.
She makes liquid hand soap, too. She’s working at formulas adding essential oils that will make the soap anti-bacterial. Adding lemon juice will make it a dishwashing detergent.
At home, she uses her grandmother’s formula as a household cleaner – vinegar, water, and a bit of corn starch – for a cleaner that costs less than the all-surface cleaner she used to buy. She uses vinegar as fabric softener; it has no fragrance when the laundry dries. She adds essential oils if she wants fragrance.
She’s teaching Sophia about saving money, too. Sophia helps make a dry Italian dressing mix that she and her mother sell for a lot less than the national brand.
