Mrs. Homegrown here:
I’m trying to take a temperature reading on soap nuts. Have you used them? Did you like them? How do you use them–as laundry detergent, shampoo, soap? Do you use whole nuts or make a liquid? How long have you been using them? Do you find a big difference between brands?
If you could shoot me a comment, I’d really appreciate it.
On a more advanced level, I’m curious about their interactions with soil and compost, so if you have any thoughts on that, I’d love to hear them. I’m curious as to how they’re harvested, and if their growing popularity is impacting their local ecosystems.
If you’ve never heard of soap nuts, let me know that, too! I’m wondering where they sit in the general public awareness.
Soap nuts are saponin-rich fruits, usually of a tree called Sapindus mukorossi (though all Sapindus make soaping fruits), which can be used for laundry and other cleaning purposes. They’re usually sold only lightly processed: seeded and dried. A handful of these dried fruits, which look somewhat like small dates, are put into a cloth sack and thrown in with the laundry. The fruits release saponins, natural surfactants, which clean the clothes. Supposedly. I hear mixed things. I’m experimenting with Maggie’s Soap Nuts![]()
right now (and Erik is complaining about their…uh…rich organic smell…which doesn’t seem to linger after drying), but I’ve not used them long enough really judge how they work. The truth is, so much soap is embedded in the fibers of our clothing that you can wash the average garment a couple of times in nothing but water and it would still come out pretty clean. And, for better or worse, Erik and I don’t do that much wash. I feel like I need to adopt a Little League team or something to really test drive this stuff! So send your comments, or your ball teams, this way…
Updated 12/14:
I’ve continued to use soap nuts off and on– I also use
Oasis Laundry Detergent, which is a greywater safe detergent which I trust. Soap nuts are also safe for greywater, by the way. As far as use goes, I’ve come to the conclusion that soap nuts work fine for regular soil, but for tricky whites I always use the Oasis plus some kind of oxygen bleach (which I don’t send out via the greywater). Dirty whites just need more oomph than the soap nuts can provide.
Also, I mention Maggie’s soap nuts above–they used to be available by Amazon, but they are no longer. We’ve also sampled soap nuts from
Green Virgin Products and they worked well, and they are currently available via Amazon. You may find soap nuts in your local health food store, of course, though in some areas it can be hard to find them in stores.
