My whole family is pretty old-fashioned when it comes to most things. My parents garden and we all cook from scratch and work towards being more sustainable with our water and energy consumption. However, one thing that I haven’t convinced the rest of my family to do is switch to homemade cleaning products. This is mostly because the list of ingredients you need is long and some of it is a little hard to find where I live.

However, while some of it you can’t get around purchasing (I have yet to find substitution that I like for castile soap, for instance) one of the harder-to-find ingredients here, oddly enough, has to be washing soda. Fortunately, it’s also one of the few ingredients you don’t have to buy separately. In fact, you can make it pretty easily from baking soda, which I already buy in bulk for other purposes around the house. I know it sounds weird, but the steps are actually pretty easy.

How to Make Washing Soda

Ingredients

• Baking soda

Steps

1. Preheat oven to 400°F
2. Spread a thin layer of baking soda on a glass dish (I used a 9×13 dish I had) no more than 1/4 inch deep
3. Place the baking soda in the oven, and bake for an hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so.
4. Remove when the baking soda has crystallized and is dull and grainy.

That’s it! You can store the washing soda in a container and it will keep on the self indefinitely. I usually make huge batches at a time simply to save on time. Washing soda is used in a variety of our homemade cleaning products including some for the kitchen and bathroom as well as the laundry. It’s also the main ingredient in most all-purpose cleaners.