Plastic-free washing up and knitted dishcloths

Like too many things, buying washing up liquid (dish washing detergent) is a constant balance between price, chemical content, packaging and manufacturer (all the eco companies seem to get bought up by less than ethical corporations). Life shouldn't be this complicated when all you want to do is clean some dishes.
Last week I saw some solid dishwashing bars for sale but they were £11 each! Surely I can do my bit for the planet without being fleeced in the process. I then recalled my season volunteering at a local Tudor farm (I was Mistress Maude!) where we washed up without detergent. Actually, I'm not even sure we used soap. Mistress Sarah told us that to clean things you need heat, chemicals and friction. If you are without one of them you need to increase the other two, which makes absolute sense.

Scrubbing wooden chopping boards with salt before drying in the sun

She also taught us to scrub wooden chopping boards with salt to disinfect them, which I still do at home from time to time. No bacteria can survive in a salty environment. They also need damp, so rinse then dry them thoroughly afterwards, preferably in sunlight which has disinfectant qualities of it's own. Who needs Dettol spray?! When I told my Mum about this she said that my Granny's first two cookery lessons at school were how to scrub the kitchen table (which she was really annoyed about because as the second youngest of 7 siblings it was already one of her jobs at home). We are trying to reclaim knowledge that we've lost over the last hundred years or so. There's plenty about the old days I wouldn't want to go back to- I quite like having the vote and antibiotics for a start- but we really did throw the baby out with the bath water.

Back to the washing up. The soap is the big change for us. The dishwashing bars are too expensive. I don't like the chemicals in the cheap washing up liquid. The ecologically friendly detergents are either very expensive, or owned by a company I'd rather not support, or both and they all come in plastic anyway. So I did a bit of research and found people washing up with soap. What did I say about reclaiming knowledge? It's still a bit of a minefield though. |Castille or olive oil soaps were recommended. They tend to be expensive. Savon de Marseille, a traditional French soap gets mentioned quite a lot but even the olive oil version contains 'mostly olive oil' and I discovered that the not-olive oil is palm oil which causes another dilemma. From a yield per acre point of view, palm oil is probably a better choice than olive oil. Neither grows locally to me and there are environmental concerns around both. Both could be used in food rather than washing dishes.  But I figure washing dishes is a necessity not a frivolity, I'm going to avoid palm oil until I can be sure of it's provenance and I don't have a better alternative so I looked for other olive oil soaps.
I found Aleppo soap on ebay and bought some that had been donated to a charity because it's past it's sell by date. I had no idea soap had a sell by date. Anyway, I bought 4 bars of soap for £8 that contain olive oil, lye and 4% bay laurel oil. I quite like the smell but apparently some bars contain up to 60% which frankly must blow your socks off. Teaching myself to make soap is on my long list of things I'd like to learn and perhaps then I can make some dishwashing soap with a more sustainable oil, but in the meantime, this is the lesser evil.

It's no harder to wash up with soap but I have adapted my method slightly. Adding the soap in the water as you would squirt in detergent doesn't work. Put some soap directly onto your brush/cloth/scrubber/loofah and clean then rinse. Do glasses first because they'll need to be rinsed in clean water to avoid soap spots. I have been filling the bowl with a small amount of water to start and then rinsing glassware under the tap as I continue to fill it, so I don't use any more water than usual. I cleaned roasting trays and frying pans yesterday by rubbing the brush on the soap and then rubbing the pan. Rinse in the bowl.

With regards to the utensils, I've been using a wooden brush with replaceable heads for years. When the head gets too worn it gets relegated to the utility sink and then it goes in the fire.

The scrubber is stainless steel so when it falls apart it can be recycled. I got a pack of 4 from the local supermarket and the first one has lasted for months. I  have just discovered that as well as being sold in a film packet, every other scrubby is in it's own film packet inside which seems unnecessary to say the least. Maybe it's to stop them tangling? I'm going to email Morrisons and ask them.

I knit dishcloths using mostly cotton yarn I've got from charity shops. I do buy some particular colours to make presents (my manager has a Christmas version of everything so I knitted her a Christmas dishcloth, a friend went to China for 2 years so I knitted her a red dishcloth with a dragon on it, my mum had one in the shape of a star, that sort of thing) but mostly they're whatever yarn I have left in whatever stitch I fancy doing. It's quite nice to experiment with stitches knowing it's only a small piece of knitting and it doesn't have to be perfect.  There are hundreds of dishcloth knitting patterns online if you'd rather not just wing it. I can't crochet (it's on the list) but there are lots of crochet cloth patterns too.
My mum was taught to knit by my Granny, who in between scrubbing wooden tables taught herself to knit using two sticks and some string because her mum was too busy to show her. Mum taught me dishcloth stitch which is very loopy. It means the cloth dries quickly but it's not as absorbent for wiping up so I often do a mixture of garter stitch with dishcloth stitch every couple of rows as a compromise.
To knit dishcloth stitch, take the yarn around both needles before wrapping it around the bottom needle. Knit the stitch as usual.

Knitted dishcloth using dishcloth stitch with occasional double rows of garter stitch.

Anybody have any other tips?