The main ingredients of The Little Green flea clear up recipe are essential oils, water and a few drops of washing up liquid – eco friendly of course. Soap nuts have an insect repellent property so you could use soap nut solution instead of washing up liquid.

• put 2 tablespoons neem oil in a plant mister.
• Top up with warm water and a tiny squirt of eco friendly washing up liquid.
• Then add your essential oils. I used 5-10 drops of each of cedarwood, citronella, peppermint and eucalyptus. Label and store in a cool, dark place.

That mixture needs to be sprayed on your carpets, floors and soft furnishings – please test on a small area first as some essential oils can cause some staining on some fabrics!

You can also use regular kitchen salt on your carpets but make sure there’s no damp in the room or the salt will attract all the moisture and make a sticky mess that won’t hoover up.  To use your salt, first whizz it in the blender to make a fine powder and then sprinkle it evenly all over the carpet and leave it for at least 48 hours before hoovering up.

Any natural method here is going to need a couple of weeks of repeating the treatment because they rely on killing the adult fleas or preventing breeding but they don’t kill any eggs so you have to break the egg laying cycle. If you want something to penetrate the eggs and kill them then you need nasty chemicals, sorry.

The front page is now much cleaner, less busy and leads to only two places – this blog and the all new, all singing and dancing Shop! I haven’t worked out how to get it to make my tea yet…..

I will be loading more products into the shop over the next few days so do keep checking back in to see what’s new. There’s a regular Sale Rail in there for you to hunt through the bargains on offer and a new Health range offered in conjunction and consultation with Fiona Dilston of Moonlight Essence.

It’s looking a lot better now, don’t you think?

Ooops. Time to make up a batch of soap nut solution, add some nice essential oils and wipe everything down, including the windows. I may even get the kids to do the car. Then a fresh set of soap nut shells and bedding to be washed and dried outside – it’s a perfect drying day here; warm, dry and with a breeze. It’s all going to smell lovely!

Now, which scent do I fancy for freshening up the house today? Basil is energising, lavender is calming, peppermint would freshen……..

So, anyone waiting for orders – I’m back at the sewing machine making soap nut bags and will be posting over the next few days.  I do still have to take it easy but we’re gettig back to normal here.

Oh and it’s Spring again so I’ll be digging out my trusty paper potter, giving it a good oiling to refresh the wood and then startign on the serious business of sowing seeds and planting and growing lots of lovely things to either eat, smell or just to brighten my garden.  I’ll also be making up a fresh batch of soap nut solution and cleaning the shelves in my shed – it’s a mess in there.

Look out for news, growth and a running garden commentary!

Well it was until the clouds came over. Now it’s wafting about in the cold but it’ll still smell lovely when I get it in – but I’m watching for the rain starting now and then it’ll be a mad dash to go and get 2 machine loads in from the line and not get soaked in the process.

It’s also the time of year to break out my paper potter and start sowing the first seeds as well as sorting out the compost bins and digging over the various small veg patches in my garden.

At some point I will get on with the blog upgrade, but I haven’t sorted out the post re-integration file yet and that’s going to take ages.

First Ethics Trading got Janey’d at the beginning of February and then just as the rush from that was starting to fade Soapnuts got a prime time TV mention! I’m not sure which programme it was on because I was watching Star Trek at the time and I know we weren’t mentioned by name but the hits and sales have been fantastic as a result. I’m sure the same is true for other soap nut sellers.

So now we’re entering March, Spring is on the way and there is noticeable growth in the garden. The grass is starting to recover, I have the deep green of daffodil leaves showing in places and there are buds coming up with them. The trees are in bud full and about to burst into green, it’s my birthday this week and the acounts are looking healthy too.

It’s all good and looking to stay that way!

Janey Lee Grace was on The Wright Stuff, with matthew Wright, yesterday morning and she gave Ethics Trading  big plug! Thanks Janey!

As with many other first time soap nut users, they have come across the few drawbacks of soap nuts straight away.

The very lightly soiled clothes seemed to be fine, such as children’s clothes that had only had light wear. The adult clothes were not as fresh and the soap nuts did not remove the various smells they had picked up.

On their own, soap nuts don’t remove tough stains or get whites as dazzling blue-white as we’ve been taught to expect from media and supermarket washing powders laden with optical brighteners and bleaching agents. These are also laced with chemicals to make the white fabrics almost glow and they do fluoresce under UV lights! I don’t know about you but while that’s quite a cool effect I do worry about what, exactly, is on my clothes and therefore on my skin to make it do that.

So, you can add a scoop of Ecover laundry bleach to your white wash. (or another stain boosting agent or bleach if you want.) Then dry outside on a sunny day, spritz any lingering marks with lemon juice and your white will sparkle.

I can’t say I’ve noticed adult clothes smelling after washing unless they’ve been the result of a long, hard, sweaty day. But then, I rarely have those sorts of days… To address the smell issue I use a few drops of your favourite essential oil to the wash – I drop it onto the bag that the soap nuts are in.

Dawn – an Ethics Trading customer: “Use 1tbsp of vinegar for your softener and add your fav essential oil to make the washing smell nice!”

Jill – Another customer: “geranium or patchouli yummy smelling washing!”

Personal taste is important in choosing your essential oil for fragrance. I prefer tea tree or a light, citrus oil like lemon or lemongrass. I also love lavender, but what you use is entirely up to you. You can have a fragrance to suit your mood, a different scent with every wash if you want to.

It might also be worth looking at whose clothes are the ones with the lingering odours and why that might me. A teenager with rampaging hormones, or someone who does heavy, physical work might sweat more and therefore have that smell on their clothes. It might be worth looking at underlying skin care there too. Many people don’t realise that modern soaps dry out your skin and then it has to work that much harder to rebalance and the bacteria on your skin are constantly out of balance and they are what produces body odours.

I’ve been doing some search engine optimisation work and looking at rage rankings as well as search positioning for certain key words.

So, I’ve been tweaking the Ethics Trading website, blogging like crazy and posting in a few different places – all in an effort to raise my profile, for soap nuts in particular. Then I sit back and wait for a day or so as the various search engines, and Google in particular, process the new content and reassess it all.

In some areas it all seems to be working. But interestingly, google treats http://www.ethicstrading.com as a different website from http://ethicstrading.com (did you spot the difference?) Yes, those little www’s make such a difference. With them my page rank is 3 and without them it’s 4. (4 is better – the rank goes from 0 – unranked, to 10 and even the google home page doesn’t get a 10!)

However, I’m still not sure how page rank links to search results, as I’ve dropped to page 2 for “soap nuts”. I need to do more work on that.