The Naturale Yogi

I have been looking for a way to safely dispose or repurpose kitchen waste for a while now. First I got a worm bin and had ANC’s (African night crawlers) slowly eat the food scraps and turn them into worm castings that I now use for my vegetable and herb garden but the type of kitchen waste they eat does not include all kinds of kitchen waste. ANC’s have sensitive skin so they can’t be given citrus peels or anything too acidic which is why I also got the Bokashi system in place to help ferment the rest of the food scraps before placing them in new pots under potting soil at a 1:1 ratio. Still I felt that throwing away the good smelling citrus peels was a waste if I directly placed them into the Bokashi bucket so I found another way to use citrus peels!

I Googled “how to use citrus peels for cleaning” and I stumbled upon Youtube videos explaining how to soak the peels in vinegar to use it for cleaning. Based on the recipes I found I decided to use this method.

What you need are glass containers, citrus peels, vinegar (white, distilled, or coconut vinegar are some of the types that I have worked with) and spray bottles to contain the final cleaning liquid.

Step 1: Collect all citrus peels (oranges, lemons, grapefruit etc, thick ones are better that those of the kiat kiat or calamansi) and place inside glass jar or container and place them in the refrigerator until you have collected enough to fill 1 glass jar or container. Make sure to leave only the skin and not have any of the fruit meat on the skin as it will get sticky due to the sugar in the fruit fermenting it would come out slightly like alcohol instead of vinegar.

Step 2: Fill the container to the brim with the vinegar making sure to cover the peels completely. If you don’t cover all the peels with vinegar, you would find that it will start to rot and them you’d have to take the rotting peels out of the jar and if it gets really moldy you might have to throw away the entire jar, which is very wasteful.

Step 3: Keep it in the jar for at least 2 weeks to enable the oil to come out of the peel and infuse the vinegar. I leave the peels soaked in the vinegar until I need to use them so some of my infusion is already over 4 months and they still look good.

Step 4: Once you are ready to use the vinegar infusion, get your spray bottle and fill it with half vinegar infusion and half clean water. Shake the bottle and you are now ready to use it to clean most surfaces!

Note: I read that you cannot use this solution on stone countertops due to the acidic nature of the cleaner. I still use it but I don’t let it soak, I just quickly wipe it off with a wet towel and use water to wash the residue off the surface.

I leave my unused citrus vinegar infusion on the counter top as a decorative piece as well.

I hope you enjoy making this and using it.

Namaste!