For one year, you can clean your house in a non-toxic, healthy way, with the recipes in this eBook and save $398.90 – and that includes heavy-duty cleaning of your carpets, furniture, and bathroom. If you use these formulas instead of store-bought products for a year, using the exact same amount of product, you would spend for only $23.67! Add on $6.95 for the eBook and the total is $30.63. That makes cleaning with DIY natural recipes 17x cheaper that using store-bought, toxic products – you save $368.28 per year. Plus, you, your family, and your house will be so much healthier!

While this eBook doesn’t replace Clean & Green or Better Basics for the Home, it offers you 41 formulas to clean just about everything and calculates how much you pay for each formula compared to storebought versions.

To learn more visit Green Chi Cafe’s eBooks or CleanForPennies.com

by Cait Johnson with Annie B. Bond.

What is your favorite scent of home? The aroma of freshly baked apple pie or the scent of warm cookies fresh out of the oven? Scent is the strongest of the five senses, often eliciting memories and feelings that you thought were long forgotten. Today the commercial market is full of air sanitizers and air fresheners that pollute the air and are detrimental to your health, but there are many natural, healthy, and appealing air freshening alternatives. In Natural Scents for the Home author Cait Johnson teaches you how to make a variety of mists, air fresheners, incenses, and sprays that will naturally freshen your home. These scents are not just appealing to your nose; they can also be used to ward off ants and mice, to disinfect any surface, and to calm and refresh your mind. With this easy-to-follow guide you can easily make your home the best smelling house on the block.

Learn more about this easy to download eBook.

We have all experienced red, dry, itchy skin in the winter, or red, achy, sunburnt skin in the summer and immediately we rush to the store to buy intensive lotions for ultra-dry skin or bright blue “aloe vera” gel to soothe the ache, but the easiest, healthiest, and most natural way to nourish, heal, and beautify your skin, the bath, is right in your home. In this book you will discover 40 easy-to-make baths including:
• Hydrating baths for the deep winter
• Baths that fight acne
• Soothing and healing baths for psoriasis and eczema
• Baths that will bring out the natural beauty of your skin whether it is dry/oily or young/old
Bestselling author Annie B. Bond, an expert on green living, not only teaches you how to make each bath, but also teaches you how to use each bath to care for your own skin type. This guide provides you with all you need to know to naturally beautify your skin and will leaving you wanting to slide into a warm healing bath of your own.

If you’d like to know more, or to buy the eBook, see www.skincarebath.com or Green Chi Cafe’s eBooks

I am thrilled to publish my daughter Lily’s eBook The Green Dorm Room.
Here is the back cover copy:
Nowadays, green is the word. You can’t take a walk around campus without seeing people wearing shirts or bags that command, “GO GREEN.” The Green Dorm Room, based on real-life experience and tested in a real college setting, shows you how to navigate the department store aisles for essential and affordable green items and gives you tips on living a healthy, clean and green life at college. Lily B. Bond, founder and writer of Adventures of Green Girl for care2.com and a recent freshman herself, guides you through the entire pre-college and freshman year process with:
- Witty stories about green failures and how to fix/avoid them.
- Green alternatives to toxic products.
- Energy efficient alternatives
- Ways to de-stress and stay both mentally and physically healthy

With The Green Dorm Room in hand, your freshman year, and packing for it, will be a snap.

Learn more or buy the eBook here!

I do love Aloe Vera. It’s gel, so easy to get from the succulent leaves, must be the world’s gift to skin. It just heals, heals, heals. Well known for healing the skin of burn victims, it is also wonderful for sun burns! And small burns, such as from touching the hot outdoor grill by mistake.

A friend was visiting for the weekend the day after she had just found out that she has a very severe dust mite allergy. Worried about what bedding to use for her I remembered that the lanolin in wool naturally repels dust mites, so I gave her an organic wool pillow to sleep on!

According to Science News, bisphenol A, the hard plastic found in water bottles and other food containers, is found to cause heart arrhythmias and reproductive damage in animals, according to new studies. The plastic is also found to last much longer in the body than previously thought.

It is very fun to float in the Dead Sea because it has so much salt –it has almost 34 percent salinity and one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet–it is incredibly buoyant.
People have also been flocking to the dead sea for its curative properties, including for the skin, since the beginning of time, or at least forever.

Dr. Zvi Even-Paz studied the effect of Dead Sea Bath Salts on patients with psoriasis, and found that 47 of the 50 patients tested had significant relief. The best results are found when soaking in Dead Sea salts three times a week for six weeks.

One wonders why. The Dead Sea, situated between Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan, is the lowest point on the surface of the Earth, and the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.

Its mineral content is very different from ocean water; only 12-18 percent of Dead Sea salt is sodium chloride, whereas the ocean’s water is 97 percent sodium chloride. It is also very high in bromide ions.

Dead Sea Soak for Psoriasis
While two pounds of Dead Sea salts may seem like a lot, compare it to those half-gallon size Epsom Salts boxes, which hold four pounds.

Ingredients
2 pounds Dead Sea salts

Add the Dead Sea salt to the hot bath as the tub is filling. Soak for 45 minutes. Repeat 3x a week for six weeks.

I’ve found some very inexpensive sources for Dead Sea salts online. You can buy it in bulk for only $2.99 a pound with free shipping from Cleopatras Choice, for example.

Annie B. Bond is the author of four books on green living, incluidng Home Enlightenment (Rodale, 2005), and Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999).

My teeth were X-rayed this morning, the full mouth, so lots of pictures were taken. It had been years since I had such a full dental X-ray set done, which is good, but I never like the idea of even these mild x-rays going through my brain and soft tissue. I am sure that in another 50 years or so X-rays will be considered barbaric, but here we are now, having to live with it (or let cavities and bone loss go unnoticed).

Cancer recovery sites on the Internet are full of recommendations for using baking soda and sea salt as a way to remediate radiation and X-rays. Hot baths open the pores of the skin, and the salts help them detox, by pulling the poisons out of the cell through osmosis. A macrobiotic diet rich in sea vegetables was further reportedly instrumental in helping one hospital have 100 percent success in helping their patients recover from radiation sickness after the bombing of Hiroshima.

I have heard the recommendation in so many places that I came home and made myself a hot bath with 1 cup of of sea salt with seaweed, and 1 cup of Epsom Salts! I had read that you can feel enervated after such a bath, and I certainly was. I had to sit down for about 15 minutes, but that was pleasant enough because I felt nice and relaxed.

I don’t know if I mitigated any of the damage from the X-rays, if there was any, but I felt by having such a bath that I was taking care of myself in a protective way. That is worth a lot to me, since I usually don’t take the time….

Note that those with high blood pressure, or are who pregnant, are advised against hot baths.

Hello Annie,
I am a new mother who is planning to puree and freeze foods for my infant. The most popular method of doing this is by using ice cube freezer trays. I have found some trays that are PVC, phthalate and BPA free. I am trying to decide between using this “safe” plastic or silicone. What do you recommend. Also someone just developed stainless steel ice cube trays that are due out this month. Do you know if that’s the best option? Thank you. —Jasmeen

Dear Jasmeen,
Awww, your question brings back memories! I remember making my own baby food and freezing it in freezer trays! Doing this is a great idea, and your questions about which ice cube trays to use are right on to protect your baby’s health. Your very best bet is to use the stainless steel ice cube trays. That being said, until they are available, I personally would choose the PVC, phthalate and BPA -free plastic over silicone. While plastics in general are under scrutiny for more endocrine disrupting chemicals than the ones you mention, in my opinion the jury is out regarding silicone. The chemical hazard database at Scorecard repeatedly reports that there isn’t enough research to determine the hazards for silicone.

The oil that makes silicone so malleable is the same oil that leaks from silicone breast implants and emerges, bit by bit, from silicone bakeware and bracelets, according to an engineer who works with it. Very small amounts of migrating silicone oil could get in food.

An FDA study found that women who had silicone breast implants that leaked had a statistically higher incidence of fibromyalgia and neurological symptoms.

I’m a firm believer in The Precautionary Principle, which recommends only using materials that have proven their safety over time. Especially for babies! I’d go for stainless steel. While not perfect (it can leach nickel), so far it is the safest food container besides glass. I envy you those baby years. They go by so fast!