Clean+Green - a Miracle Cleaning Product for Pet Owners

I don't use the word miracle very often.  Truth be told, I didn't really believe in miracles until recently, when I got a package in the mail containing these two aerosol cans of Clean+Green cleaning products [legally, I have to disclose that they sent me free samples to review their product].  Even upon inspecting the cans, I was skeptical, especially since the directions instructed me to spray the mess and then do nothing, no wiping no blotting, nothing.  You can imagine, then, why I use the verbiage of a religious experience when I first had an opportunity to use this brilliant product and it worked better than anything else ever.  And when I say that it worked, I mean I didn't do a thing, the product literally did all of the work.

The word 'aerosol' in the last paragraph may scare some people, as CFCs which deplete the ozone have been used as aerosol propellants in the past.  But please, do not be alarmed, because CFCs are not the only effective propellants.  In fact, the folks at Clean+Green use nitrogen as their propellant, which does not deplete the ozone, is not a green house gas, and has no toxicity at all.  Nitrogen is already the most abundant element in our atmosphere, and spraying it out of a can has just about exactly zero impact on the environment.

The packaging of this product is almost entirely aluminum, which is not only 100% recyclable with very little loss or degradation of materials, it's vastly more energy efficient when recycled than when produced new (it has been estimated that recycling aluminum takes 5% of the energy of producing it from bauxite).  The remaining components are plastic, which is also recyclable (though less awesomely so).

[Update: I assumed the packaging was aluminum.  In fact, it is a pretty new and exiting process for making tin free steel aerosol cans, which is lighter (more fuel efficient to ship), made from two solid pieces with no welding (reducing the need for copper and water in manufacturing).  Steel is still 100% recyclable with almost no loss or degradation to the product in the recycling process.]


The most impressive thing about this product, however, is not that it works miracles with pet waste and odors, nor that it comes in recyclable packaging or uses nitrogen as its propellant, no.  The most amazing thing is that the cleaning agents are completely non-toxic as well.  No chlorine, no ammonia, no alcohol, no oxidants, it is not bleach based or enzymatic in nature, it is not even perfumed (aromatic compounds can irritate some people, especially those with severe allergies).  Everything that goes into this cleaner is biodegradable, and completely safe for pets (who have a tendency to lick interesting smells on the floor), kids, and the environment.

So in short, if I was prone to using a star system, this product would get as many as I can give.  It handled multiple different kinds of pet stains and odors from my dogs and my cats, leaving no residual smell or stains in carpets or upholstery.  We even tried it on an old ink stain on a sofa, and to our utter shock and amazement, it reduced the visibility of the stain significantly (they don't make any claims about ink though, so don't hold me or them to that).  Marry that performance with a non-toxic, biodegradable product packaged in recyclable materials, and you have one great, green product that I am happy to promote.  In shorter: Clean+Green is one of the best cleaning products I have ever used.

The Lovely Town of Oakridge, and What To Do With Fresh Eggs

Image via Wikipedia

This past weekend the wife and I visited some friends in Oakridge (featured in a recent NPR show: State of the Re:Union), a beautiful little town an hour outside Eugene/Springfield.  Nestled in the Cascade Mountains, this former logging town is fast becoming known as one of the best mountain biking/ hiking locations in central Oregon.  The quiet, natural beauty of the mixed deciduous and evergreen forests crisscrossed with rivers and creeks of clear snow melt is remarkable.  We soaked it in with our friends and their family while visiting a swimming hole that is part of the Middle Fork Tributary (I think) to the Willamette river.  The ice cold water was a perfect complement to the 100 degree weather.  A few large rock formations did a fair job of impersonating diving boards.

After a swim and picnic by the river, and after picking up more trash than we made (apparently other swimmers had been a little less conscientious), we packed up and headed back to our friends' place to visit with their chickens.  Hens which are raised and socialized by people are very friendly, and love to be held and pet.  They make sounds kind of like purring cats when you scratch their neck.  They also, as you may have heard, lay eggs.

When you see eggs from chickens on a small farm or from a home garden it suddenly becomes very odd that eggs in the grocery store are all white or uniformly brown, and all exactly the same size.  This is most unnatural.  Our hosts in Oakridge provided us with a dozen eggs, most of which were either brown or speckled brown, and one of which was green.  No two eggs were the same size or color.

2/3 of a dozen fresh eggs

(the four missing were used in today's breakfast)

White hens lay white eggs, brown hens lay brown eggs, and green hens... you get the idea, I think.  The point is that the eggs resemble their hens, and a dozen eggs that are all identical speaks to our drive to master nature, make it uniformly productive and predictable.  Several shelves of cartons and flats of eggs from several different 'farms' that are identical speaks volumes, and is a pretty good picture of what industrial agriculture is all about.

Fresh, organic eggs taste quite different as well.  I don't really know how to describe it except to say that they taste 'cleaner.'  The best way to experience this difference in flavor is to poach the eggs, and serve simply with a dash of salt and pepper with (or on top of) buttered toast.  Poaching has the least influence on the flavor of the eggs, and is the easiest way to get perfectly cooked whites with completely soft yolks.  It can be a little stressful if you have never done it before, but the results are well worth it.

Eggs should be poached in just barely boiling water which has been slightly acidified with a bit of plain white vinegar.  The Cooks Book (my kitchen bible) recommends cracking the eggs onto a saucer one at a time and gently sliding them into the water, to minimize the splashing effect.  Then, using a slotted spoon, gently roll the white over the yolk until it is enveloped.  Repeat with the next egg, up to about 4 at a time.  Cook them for 2 minutes or so, and then plunge them into a simmering pan of salted water to remove the vinegar and season a little.  Set on a dish towel to drain for a few seconds and serve immediately.  With fresh eggs, very little seasoning is required, and Hollandaise sauce is kind of overkill (though delicious overkill...).

Unfortunately, fresh organic eggs are pretty expensive, so we are very lucky to have friends producing their own.  Still, for a special occasion, perhaps to impress your significant other on valentines day, fresh eggs are a relatively inexpensive and effective splurge.  You can find them at most Farmer's Markets.

Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr

Floors you could eat off

The addition of the lovely little miss Cleopatra (our puppy) to our household has, in short, made a bit of a mess. For those few of you out in the internet who have not heard, dogs are dirty. You might even say filthy. At the Dog Park yesterday I watched with resignation as Cleo chased and fled through, rolled and wrestled in, and even ate (I know, gross) the mud. Luckily she loves jumping in the little stream near the parking lot after a good wrestling match, which makes it a little easier to towel off some of that caked on dirt, but the upholstery in my car is still basically ruined.

Cleo uses our tiny patch of back yard as a bathroom, and half the time when she returns she trails muddy paw prints through our kitchen (I like to think there is nothing in those paw prints but mud, please don't enlighten me if I am wrong). The result of all this is that keeping our floors clean has become a daily struggle. To make matters worse, most commercial cleaning products have either bleach or ammonia in them, or some other substance that is toxic to our pets. So Cleo makes the floors dirtier and makes it harder to clean them.

As a solution, I have started sprinkling baking soda on the floors before sweeping. The results are amazing. I got the idea when I remembered working in the scene shop at UCLA. When they swept the shop, they first sprinkled this stuff that looked like red dirt (I never found out what it actually was) which stuck to the dirt and sawdust and clumped up into easily sweepable clumps. I thought "well I don't have red dirt, but I have baking soda." After this technique, the floors are sparkling, as if I had just mopped with bleach.

The soda turns grey as it adheres to the dust, and I think it helps hold it down too, instead of flying up in the air and causing me to have an allergic fit. I sprinkle it in the corners and along the walls and sweep it towards the center of the room, and this also allows me to see quite clearly where I have swept and where I need to do more. Finally, and most awesomely, the baking soda disinfects as you sweep, and it is totally harmless to the pets. This is important, because as the title of this post suggests, Cleo eats off of the floor all the time.

Keeping our home healthy is part of going green, and since we purchase the baking soda in gigantic bulk bags and it replaces several individual bottles of specialty cleaner, it is reducing waste and consumption.

Just wanted to share that little tid bit with everyone, because it makes me happy every time I clean the kitchen now.

Puppy Kibble

Today, I decided to take the plunge into DIY dog food. We got the books, we did the research, we talked to our (completely unhelpful) vet, and now we are making Cleo's food. Well, sort of.

Basically, dogs need vitamins A through K and basic minerals like potassium, magnesium and such, most of which will be covered by a well rounded diet (that is, feed the dog different stuff every day, not just chicken). The only thing that she will definitely not get enough of is calcium, and especially for puppies too much or too little is a big problem. Eggshells have tons of calcium, but must be ground in a coffee or spice grinder (not just crushed) to be edible and effective.

So, although I am pretty sure I know what I am doing, until I am 100% positive, I am mixing our home made food with store bought puppy kibble, about half and half. That way, I can be sure that the correct blend of vitamins, minerals and nutrients is getting to her.

My first dog food recipe, I will call Puppy Potato Salad. This is modified from the Tuna and Potato Dinner recipe from This Book. We didn't have tuna packed in oil, so I used some canned herring (which had been sitting in our pantry untouched for months, don't even remember why we bought it) instead, after much research into its healthfulness and a little taste test with Cleo.

First, I boiled some potatoes. Only one would end up in her meal, but if I am going to heat up that much water anyway, I might as well make potato salad tomorrow. Next I mashed the herring with the oil it was packed in (dogs, especially puppies need a high protein, high fat diet).

To the herring, I added some yogurt (dogs need good bacteria in their gut just like us), grated carrot and parsley for vitamins and fiber. A little olive oil for fat content, and finally I cut up the potato (about a half cup, chopped) and mixed it in.

The result looked really terrible, but Cleo loved it. Mixing the home made food with store kibble, it made about six servings. The ingredients were probably around $3, so that makes 50 cents a meal. Not quite as cheap as a pure kibble diet, but much healthier (I hope) in the long run.

Eventually, the goal is to feed Cleo mostly with the scraps of our kitchen, but plan our meals so that the scraps will be just what she needs. I figure we should spend some time preparing her meals pretty much separately, but at least trying to overlap the ingredients. Over time, ideally, most of our vegetable waste will be composted, and all of our meat and fatty scraps will go to Cleo. In other words, the long term goal is to make Cleo part of a more sustainable kitchen.

Green Pet Care

Since we have adopted Cleo, we have been confronted with a hundred new choices a day. What food do we buy? Wet, dry or mix? How many toys does she need (a: a lot)? what kind? How do we train her? Crate or no? There is so much that has to be done right away, so many decisions, that how green the choices are doesn't even enter the equation at first.

Truth be told, keeping pets is not really a green practice, in the strictest sense, because you need to feed them and provide them with entertainment, all of which usually takes up energy. One of the main criteria for making decisions for you pets, however, is a big part of going green: health. All green programs contain a substantial portion about the health of people, and pets are people too.

When you choose food for your animals, you want what is good for them, and unfortunately that can be very hard to determine. Every source of information seems to conflict, and most of the advice you get is downright bad. We trusted a pet store clerk who swore by one brand of dog food, and foolishly did not read the ingredients before leaving the store. When we got home and double checked, the second ingredient was corn, followed by wheat.

Although dogs are omnivorous by nature, a much larger portion of their diet is naturally meat, so if some kind of animal protein is not the first ingredient the food is not good. After that protein (usually chicken meal) fruits, vegetables and some grains are okay, but many dogs have difficulty digesting wheat and corn, so grains should be rice, barley, or some other alternative grain. Soy protein is also a big red flag, as soy is no part of a dogs natural diet, and usually it is used instead of some other meat protein.

Toys are a big issue too. We heard (unverified) that the squeaky part of squeak toys can come out if the dog destroys the toy, and they can choke on it (plus squeak toys are annoying). But trying to find a dog toy that doesn't squeak is like trying to find bread that doesn't contain wheat (possible, as anyone who knows us knows, but hard).

Then we came across someone on the web who wrote about making toys from random junk in your house (I think Courtney read that at the Bark). Instead of throwing away old socks, knot them up turn them into chew toys. If you have old water bottles you can stuff them in those old sock (without the cap) as a pit stop before recycling. Of course you have to make sure that you aren't giving your dog something toxic, or something that will break into pieces that she can choke on, but this is just part of the creative process of turning trash into toys. The maker in me loves this idea. Although the person who posted these ideas was talking about saving money, it is also a green practice for all the reasons that I love the make movement.

It seems in general that the more you control what you give your dog, the healthier it will be (kind of obvious, once you state it). For that reason, we have been thinking about making our own food for the dog, a practice that seems crazy at first but makes more sense the more you think about it. Dogs have been with us for thousands of years, and prepackaged dog food has been around for less than a century. So for the thousands of years minus a hundred before that? We fed our dogs similarly to how we fed ourselves, and it worked out fine. We haven't committed yet, but if we do I will be sure to keep everyone updated.

Complete Fail

Well, it is October 1st and I have obviously fallen far short of my goal of posting something every day for the month of September. There were plenty of distractions, other obligations, etc. I could blame the move, setting up the new house, trying to jump start a career in a new city with no contacts, but that would all just be excuses. The real reason, however, is Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile and everything within 18" of the floor.

That's her, the light and darkness of my increasingly small world. Courtney and I knew that getting a small puppy would be difficult, but as it turns out it is exactly halfway between adopting a full grown, well behaved cat (at a 2) and having a baby (an 11) on the scale of responsibility. At her age (8 weeks when we got her, just 10 and a half now) taking care of Cleo is a full time job. About a week ago I realized I had not posted anything for several days, and the pledge I made earlier in the month was hopelessly lost.

"Maybe I can make a deal with myself," I thought, "a post a day is gone, but maybe I can compromise, go for 30 posts by the end of the month. The pledge will be broken, but I will have accomplished the same goal. I will have to post two or three items every day for the rest of the month. It will be hard, but not impossible, right?"

It turns out that it was completely impossible.

Cleo requires constant supervision while awake. She must be taken outside every 30 minutes for a potty break or we run the risk of an accident, and every accident sets the training schedule back several days. She takes frequent naps, but the for the first few days all we did during the naps was sit, shell shocked, wondering why people get dogs.

After a few weeks of trying to train the puppy and retrain ourselves, we have wrangled her nap schedule into 3 two hour naps, at regular intervals throughout the day, and during those intermittent naps we do everything that people have to do to survive in the modern world. Grocery shopping, laundry, cooking, cleaning, going to the bank, paying our bills, reading dog training books and websites, everything must be done while Cleo sleeps, or else it will not get done. She is asleep right now, that is the only reason that I am writing.

But, hopefully, her regular schedule will allow me to use more and more of those two hour breaks every day, and finally I will be able to get back to this blog. So, with that in mind, I will attempt a few more posts today while Cleopatra, Queen of the floor sleeps.