Natural Cleaning Products That Actually Work in My Farmhouse

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I didn’t start using natural cleaning products because it was trendy. I started because I have an autoimmune disease, and because there was a baby about to be crawling on my floors, and because one afternoon I was wiping down the counter with a conventional spray and had to open a window to breathe. That was the moment. If the fumes were too much for me to stand over, I didn’t want them on the surfaces where Lochlan puts his hands and then his mouth.

So I spent the better part of a year figuring out what actually cleans and what just smells like it does. Some of it I make from scratch, which is how we do most things here in the farmhouse. Some of it I buy. And a few things I tried and quietly threw out. Here’s the honest version of the natural cleaning products that work in our house, and the ones that didn’t.

[NEEDS A SHOT: farmhouse kitchen counter with a glass spray bottle and a cloth, morning light]

The short list that does most of the work

I’ll say this plainly, because the internet makes natural cleaning feel complicated and expensive. It’s not. Almost everything I clean gets handled by four things: castile soap, white vinegar, baking soda, and a stack of good microfiber cloths. That’s the whole base. Everything else is a small add-on.

Castile soap’s the one that surprised me most. It’s a plant oil soap, and a few drops in water cuts grease better than I expected. I use it for dishes when I’m hand washing, for the floors, and watered way down as a general surface soap. A little goes a long way, which is why one bottle lasts me months.

Vinegar’s my glass and mirror cleaner, and it’s what I run through the coffee maker and the kettle to keep the mineral buildup down. It smells sharp for about a minute and then the smell’s gone completely, which is more than I can say for the fake-lemon sprays I used before. The one rule I follow is that vinegar doesn’t go on stone. We don’t have much of it, but if you’ve got granite or marble counters, keep vinegar off them because the acid can etch the finish.

The all-purpose spray I actually make

This is the one thing I mix myself every couple of weeks, and it’s the workhorse. I keep it in a glass spray bottle under the sink.

Into the bottle I put about two cups of warm water, a good squirt of castile soap, maybe a teaspoon, and ten or so drops of essential oil. I use lavender most of the time because I like how the kitchen smells after, and tea tree when I want a little more cleaning power in the bathroom. That’s it. I don’t add vinegar to this particular mix, because vinegar and castile soap cancel each other out and you end up with a curdled mess. I learned that the hard way, standing over a cloudy bottle wondering what I’d done wrong.

This spray handles the high chair after every meal, the counters, the table, the front of the cabinets where little hands leave prints. It’s gentle enough that I don’t think twice about spraying it near Lochlan or on the tray he eats off of.

[NEEDS A SHOT: hands mixing a spray bottle at the sink, or a lineup of simple cleaning supplies on the counter]

What I buy instead of make

I’m not precious about making every single thing. Some products are worth buying, and I’d rather be honest about that than pretend I churn my own everything.

I buy a natural dish soap for the sink because the from-scratch versions I tried never cut grease the way I wanted, and dishes aren’t the place I want to fight my cleaning supplies. I buy a good set of wool dryer balls instead of dryer sheets, which cut down on static without the coating and the smell, and they’ve lasted over a year. And for the actual toilet bowl, I keep a simple store-bought natural cleaner, because there are a few jobs where I want something made for exactly that and I’m not going to argue with it.

Baking soda covers more than people give it credit for. I use it to scrub the sink, to lift the stuck-on bits in the bottom of a pot, and to freshen the rug before I vacuum, especially where Dewey likes to lie. A little sprinkled in the bottom of the trash can keeps the kitchen from turning during the summer, which in an Illinois July matters more than you’d think.

The floors are where all of this matters most to me, because that’s where Lochlan spends his day. I mop with a few drops of castile soap in a bucket of warm water and nothing else, and I do it more often than I did before he was mobile. There’s something settling about knowing the surface he’s crawling across was cleaned with something I’d put on my own skin. It’s a small thing, but it’s the reason I started, and it’s the reason I keep going.

What didn’t work for me

I’ll save you some of the trial and error. Straight vinegar as an everything cleaner didn’t work for me. It’s great for glass and hard water, but it’s not a degreaser and it’s not a disinfectant, and I spent a few weeks wiping things that still felt greasy before I figured that out.

The DIY laundry detergent I tried, the kind made from grated bar soap and washing soda, left a film on our clothes and didn’t get Danny’s work things clean. I gave it a fair run and then went back to a store-bought natural detergent, and I have no regrets.

And the reusable “unpaper towels” I bought with such good intentions mostly live in a drawer. I keep meaning to use them and I keep reaching for a microfiber cloth instead. That’s not a failure of the product, it’s just honesty about what I actually pick up when the counter’s a mess and the baby’s fussing.

The point isn’t to do this perfectly. It’s to slowly trade the things that made me open a window for things I feel fine using with a baby underfoot. Some of it I make, some of it I buy, and all of it’s simpler than the cabinet full of sprays I used to have.

If you’re just starting, don’t buy everything at once. Grab a bottle of castile soap and a jar of baking soda and a few good cloths, and see how far that gets you. For me, it got me most of the way there.