Who was it who said that pimples and acne are the exclusive preserve of teenagers? To be certain, adolescence is the time when pimples and acne first start appearing, and they do decrease in severity once you’re past your teen years, but adults get acne, too. Sometimes you get acne and wrinkles at the same time, just like the ad says. Pimples and blackheads affect everyone, male and female, dry skin and oily skin. Women in their reproductive years tend to get premenstrual acne, but some women seem to find that those annoying little spots turn up premenstrually, post-menstrually and during their periods, too. And you can guarantee that a whacking big spot will decide to develop on your forehead or right by your mouth smack before an important occasion.
And the big thing is trying to get it to go away.
When you try any new regimen for clearing up a dose of acne or those horrid little blackheads, don’t be surprised if at first you get worse acne temporarily. This is often because the infections that are causing deep-down acne are being drawn to a head and your skin is starting to purge out all the gunk. For your own sanity, start on an intensive new facial care regimen during a week you don’t have any interviews planned.
Acne can be attacked on two fronts. The first front is the prevention side of things. This involves cleaning and caring for the skin so that it doesn’t get breakouts in the first place. Masks, moisturisers, exfoliants and scrubs are the ideal here, and don’t forget the importance of good diet in getting clear skin. The second front is the treatment. This involves “spot” treatment to kill the bacteria in the pimple itself.
Good natural spot treatments include:
* tea tree oil (one of the best, but careful that you don’t get it in your mouth if you are treating those little spots that always seem to appear around the side of your lips – it makes your tongue go numb and tastes vile)
* slices of garlic applied to the spot
* vodka dabbed on with a cotton bud or the corner of a handkerchief
All these treatments sting when they work.
Any good scrub will work for helping prevent acne. The easiest skin care product that is the safest for sensitive skin simply uses hot water and an old-fashioned face flannel. Rub hard. Other scrubs (or ingredients to use when making your own scrubs) include:
* a paste using oatmeal – old cold porridge will do
* sea salt
* grainy sugar
* ground pumice
* ground nutshells (almond shells are the most popular)
You can also try chemical exfoliants that eat the dead skin off the top layer of the epidermis. Don’t panic if this sounds extreme. The natural methods that we have handy in our kitchen cupboards and as ferocious as the horror-story cosmetic surgery acids. Having said that, it doesn’t pay to overdo it with the stronger fruit acids such as kiwifruit, papaya and pineapple.
* apples and cider vinegar
* ordinary vinegar
* sugar (again)
* lemon juice (this also has the effect of lightening freckles and age spots – remember Anne of Green Gables tackling the freckles on her nose with lemon juice?)
The good news is that nearly anything you do with your skin to pamper it makes it look better and helps keep acne at bay. This may be because the act of caring for yourself helps you relax, and stress is a cause of pimples.
And don’t forget to eat right and get enough sleep! Your skin is a visible health indicator, so if you’ve suddenly broken out in spots (and you’re not fifteen), take a good hard look at your lifestyle and see how you can improve it.
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The very extensive list of natural ingredients used in cosmetics – both the sort you make for yourself and the sort you can buy at good shops or online – continues. There’s a lot of them!
Cocoa butter: A chocolate by-product that is thick, fragrant and solid at room temperature. If you’re very keen, it can be possible to make a body lotion out of white chocolate melted down, but although this writer has heard of this method, I can’t give you any guarantees that it will work. You can always eat it if things go wrong.
Coconut oil: A light oil that is very good for skin, hair, bath oil, etc.
Comfrey: While we were all raving about comfrey as a vegetable in the 1970s and early 1980s, it has fallen out of favour. However, a decoction or of comfrey roots (and the leaves, to a lesser extent) is a great skin soother.
Cucumber: Soothes sunburn and has a softening effect on the skin. Very cooling. Gentle enough for the eye area – it’s almost the stereotyped look for home spa face mask treatments.
Elder flower: Gentle enough to use as an eyewash and very soothing. Comfrey root decoction can be used as a substitute (and vice versa).
Epsom salt: Good for adding to the bath if you have aching, sore muscles. Be careful if you have dry skin, as it can dry it further. As it is a salt, it can sting if you have cuts and grazes.
Esssential oils: The volatile aromatic oils derived from plants. Hundreds of oils are available on the market, each having its own unique properties. They are often used for fragrance in home-made (and commercial) natural cosmetics. You can pick your favourite scent if all you want is a nice smell.
Glycerine: I bet you didn’t know this was natural – I didn’t until I read up about it. Glycerine is derived from vegetable fats. Glycerine is an excellent moisturiser (technically speaking, it’s a humectants – something that draws water from the air to the skin) and bath oil suitable for all home-made lotions and potions – and it’s used widely in commercially made cosmetics.
Honey: Obviously, you can sweeten lip balms with honey. Honey is also an excellent moisturiser and humectants. It makes a great face mask that brightens dull skin, and it soothes chapped lips (unless you lick it off). Avoid using it on the eye area.
Jojoba oil: A waxy plant oil that is very similar to the skin’s natural oils. It also has a long shelf life, a second factor that makes it widely used in commercial cosmetics. DIY cosmetic folk can use sunflower oil, but it’s not quite the same.
Lanolin: This is a sheep’s natural body oil that gets stripped off the wool after the sheep is shorn. It makes a fabulous moisturiser for human skin, too. Some folk are allergic to lanolin, but not many. Choose anhydrous lanolin. In New Zealand, where sheep are plentiful, it’s common for rugged farming types to have a tub of lanolin moisturiser beside the laundry sink where they wash hands after coming in from work.
Lavender: Dried lavender is used as well as the essential oil. Smells exquisite. The powdered flowers added to a mask are a gentle exfoliant.
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Even though a body brush is the main tool for grooming horses, this article is not about how to groom a horse. This is about a way of grooming you. Some people list body brushing as a means of detoxing. Other folk try a little body brushing just as a grooming ritual for themselves as a way of getting rid of dead skin and cellulite.
OK, no promises about the cellulite. I don’t think any power under the sun can remove cellulite. In this writer’s opinion, the only thing that causes cellulite is age – I didn’t see any on my thighs until I was over 30, even though I was plumper in my 20s.
But body brushing certainly feels good and is a good way of getting rid of dead skin. It’s the dead layer of skin that makes skin look dull and grey (and itchy). The dull, grey look is also caused by lack of sleep, dehydration and rotten diet, so if you are trying to improve your skin tone with a little body brushing, make sure you take care of these areas as well. And as a bonus, body brushing can get quite strenuous and require a fair bit of flexibility to do correctly, so you’ll get a wee workout at the same time.
So how do you do it? Body brushing is done on dry skin. Yes, any scrubbing you do in the shower or bath (or over the sink) with a loofah, a brush or a face flannel will help scrub off dead skin, but proper body brushing is done on dry skin. Do it before you have a bath or shower, and you’ll avoid that all-too-common problem (which is absolutely repugnant to other cultures) of soaking and relaxing in scented water full of dead skin and grime.
You can, however, use the loofah for body brushing. Better still, though, is a long-handled brush with medium-soft natural bristles. Don’t use a scrubbing brush or a hairbrush –they are too harsh, even though a natural bristle hairbrush does do a job similar to body brushing on the skin of your scalp. And definitely don’t use a body brush meant for a horse. If you really must, artificial bristles can be used.
The operative word is body brushing rather than body scrubbing (scrubbing should be kept for doing with water, soap or some other lubricant to stop you flaying yourself alive). Just brush lightly. You should avoid sensitive areas such as the face, the breasts and the genitals, but give it heaps on the back (this is why you need a long-handled brush) and on the limbs. Brush until the skin gets a faint pink flush. Follow by a bath or shower, or just your body moisturiser. It should take about five minutes.
Some folk recommend adding this into your morning routine before you get dressed, and find that it’s quite a good wake-up ritual that gets the blood going. It would be the perfect thing to do while waiting for the shower to run warm.
One thing to bear in mind, however, is that brushing off extra dead skin into the air and onto the floor will mean more dusting and vacuuming – dust is mostly dead skin – so it may be best to confine your body brushing to one room only. Doing it outside would be best of all, but this could be a bit chilly and create a stir in your neighbourhood, as body brushing has to be done naked.
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Garlic must be one of the best foodstuffs known to humanity. There’s so much that you can do with it! Many people are put off by its pungent aroma and avoid it wherever possible. But, for the life of me, I just can’t see why.
Garlic is most famous as flavouring for savoury dishes. Garlic can bring its particular tang to many otherwise bland foods, whether you use it cooked or raw. Mashed potato can be greatly improved by adding raw crushed garlic just before mashing along with butter, salt and milk (and cheese is great, too). Sprinkle it raw on lasagne or into a salad. Add it to stews and mince during the initial stages. Use it generously in curries. Put it into a cheese sandwich. You can also use it to add flavour to roast meat – a whole head can be used as a quick, easy stuffing for chicken. Alternatively, brush it with olive oil and roast the cloves to use as a side dish – it’s delicious. And don’t forget the many uses of garlic butter…
If you’re worried about the resulting bad breath after eating garlic, then eating parsley, using a mouthwash or chewing cloves can help. Failing that, you can remember the French and Italian rule for consuming garlic: if one person eats garlic, then everyone in the house must eat garlic. You don’t notice garlic breath on someone else if you have also got garlic breath.
If you do use garlic, then you are going to get the other benefits of garlic. Garlic contains many antioxidants and disease fighting compounds. In fact, garlic is listed by many dieticians and nutritionists as the one of the top “superfoods” for fighting off cancer and cardiovascular disease. Garlic boosts the immune system (put it raw into chicken soup if you’re in bed with the flu or a bad cold) like nothing else – in some ways, it’s right up there with vitamin C for its health giving properties.
The strong disease fighting and antibacterial properties of garlic make it excellent as a topical treatment for acne. Crush a bit of a clove and apply the juice directly to the skin. It will sting and it will smell strong, but it really does help clean up spots and could be used as a skin care product. It can also be used to disinfect wounds – this was one treatment used by field surgeons in battlefields of the past.
Garlic is great for you, but it’s not so good for other creatures. This means that garlic can be used in a number of ways for organic pest control. If you have your own garden and want to grow garlic, then garlic can be planted around roses or tomatoes. The smell from the leaves is undetectable by you but the aphids can smell it and they hate it! The rule of thumb for planting garlic is to plant it at midwinter and harvest it at midsummer (“Plant on the shortest day; harvest on the longest” is the old gardening adage for many alliums (onions and garlic).
If you don’t want to grow your own garlic, then it’s easy to make a spray with it. Boil a generous amount (a whole head or so) of chopped or crushed garlic in a litre or so of water. For extra potency, add cayenne pepper or dried chillies. Strain and bottle, then use as a spray once it has cooled. Aphids hate it and will begin scurrying off the roses immediately. However, unlike commercial sprays the spray won’t harm you at all. If you spray this on aphid-prone vegetables, you don’t have to worry about the spray residue harming you. If anything, a little bit of garlic and chilli on your broccoli will do you good.
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To keep myself awake during a long and boring speech at a meeting the other day, I amused myself by looking at the hair colour of the people in the rows in front of me and trying to guess who dyed their hair and who didn’t. I noticed something rather odd: only about three of the women at the meeting had grey or white hair, but about half of the men did (or else they had no hair!). Now unless all but one of the grey-haired men were cradle-snatchers or in a May-December romance (two of the grey-haired women were widows), this means that an awful lot of the older women were dying their hair. A quick glance around the younger women and a close look at their roots and their eyebrow colour (a natural redhead does not usually have black eyebrows) gave me the impression that many of them were dying their hair, too (sometimes it’s obvious – Asian and African women never have blonde or red hair naturally!).
This is all a bit of a worry. Hair dyes are linked with an increased incidence of breast cancer. The longer you use hair dye, the greater the risk of a woman developing breast cancer is. When you consider that most of the women are past the menopause and have an increased risk of breast cancer for that reason, this is quite alarming.
Some people may shrug this off. “Of course the stuff’s poisonous,” they’ll say. “I certainly wouldn’t swallow the stuff, but how can it affect me if all I’m doing is putting it on my hair?” However, you can and do absorb chemicals through the skin. You can prove this easily by rubbing a clove of garlic on the soles of your feet. Several hours later, you will have garlic breath, and it’s not because you’ve eaten the garlic – it has been absorbed through your skin. And when you dye your hair with chemical dyes, the stuff will be in contact with your scalp for 30 minutes, if you’re following the directions on the packet.
So what’s the best solution? First of all, you could learn to like your hair its natural colour. It’s only cultural conditioning that makes us believe that grey hair is ugly and undesirable. Yes, grey hair makes you look older, but when you consider that most people start getting a few greys in their early 30s, how aging is it really? In many cultures, grey hair is a badge of honour and a sign of respect (people who have read the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series may remember one of the heroines, Nynaeve, was always longing for grey hair so that she would be respected). A few touches of grey at the temples are considered distinguished and sophisticated on men – so why not on women? It’s condition and upkeep that makes hair look good – or bad – rather than the colour. Even if you like to wear your hair long, you don’t have to choose between cutting it off or dyeing – long silver hair looks stylish, sensual and seductive, as long as it is maintained in good condition. Even streaky hair can look striking and dignified – think of Indira Ghandi’s trademark grey streak.
If you aren’t trying to cover up the greys and merely want to make your natural colour more striking, then think about this: if everyone has peroxide blonde or red hair, then it’s the ones with nut brown or caramel hair who will stand out. Or else experiment with different styles and accessories to change your look.
Still want to change your hair colour? There’s always the natural dyes and lighteners, which are much lower in carcinogens, although they take a lot longer to work. Mousey or light brown hair turns golden blonde or even baby-blonde if you pour lemon juice over it and expose it to sunlight, as lemon juice is a natural bleach (it only works on hair exposed to sunlight. Sunlight itself is also a natural bleach and the longer your hair is, the lighter it will become with exposure to sunlight). To go darker, walnut juice gives a nice dark brown colour, but it does wash out. Another natural hair care product is henna used for dyeing, which gives tones ranging from a bright brassy red to a deep mahogany, depending on how long you leave it on for.
Still not happy and you feel like you can’t possibly learn to like your greys and the natural dyes won’t give you the colour you want? If you absolutely have to dye your hair with artificial chemical dyes, then your best bet is to leave the product on for the minimum amount of time rather than the maximum amount and to make the interval between dyeing sessions as long as you possibly can to reduce the amount of exposure to carcinogens you get.
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About a hundred years ago, scientists discovered the importance of vitamins and minerals in the human diet. The results were astonishing. Yes, sailors had already been taking limes with them on long journeys to prevent scurvy, but now everyone knew that it was the vitamin C in the limes that stopped them losing their teeth. Children were dosed with cod liver oil to prevent rickets, and iodine was added to table salt to reduce the incidence of goitre.
What is a vitamin? Briefly, it is a substance that is needed by the body for certain biological processes but which the body cannot synthesise for itself (some amino acids fall into this category – they are known as the essential amino acids).
Minerals are a bit simpler: they are elements that the body needs in order to grow, repair itself and function properly. Now, while it is possible to down multivitamin and mineral supplements all over the show, it’s easier and simpler (and tastier) to get the nutrients you need through your food.
* Vitamin A: Found in liver (lambs’ fry), eggs and butter, and also in bright coloured vegetables such as carrots, spinach and other green leafy vegetables, apricots and capiscums.
* Vitamin B1: Found in brown rice, wheat germ, potatoes, yeast and molasses, Brazil nuts, sunflower seeds.
* Vitamin B2: Found in brewer’s yeast, eggs, beans, almonds, Brussels sprouts and molasses.
* Vitamin B3: Found in brewer’s yeast (again), fish, peanuts, milk and sunflower seeds.
* Vitamin B5: Found in brewer’s yeast (come to think of it, beer, especially dark ale like Guiness, is a good source of the Vitamin B complex), salmon, oranges, wholegrain bread, beans and cabbages.
* Vitamin B6: Found in brewer’s yeast (surprise, surprise), wholegrain bread, beans, bananas, prunes, molasses, peas, meat and brown rice.
* Vitamin B8: Found in (you guessed it) brewer’s yeast, eggs, liver, sardines, beans and wholegrain bread.
* Vitamin B9 (folic acid): Found in green leafy vegetables like silver beet and spinach, tuna, salmon, cheese, asparagus, wholegrain bread and (just in case you thought it was left out) brewer’s yeast.
* Vitamin B12: Found in eggs, milk, cheese, beef liver and spirulina (the last is one of the few vegan sources of Vitamin B12 – deficiency in this vitamin can be a problem for vegans, as most of the dietary sources of this vitamin are from animals).
* Vitamin B15: Found in brewer’s yeast, liver, wholegrain bread, beans, brown rice and sunflower seeds – all the usual suspects for the Vitamin B complex.
* Vitamin C: Found in blackcurrants (the fruit that’s richest in Vitamin C), red peppers (capsicum), tomatoes, kiwifruit, citrus fruit, broccoli and parsley.
* Vitamin D: Found in oily cold water fish like salmon, tuna, sardines and herring, and also in eggs and butter. But the best source of Vitamin D is direct sunlight (without sunscreen) – 15 minutes a day minimum.
* Vitamin E: Found in most vegetable oils, especially olive oil; nuts, especially almonds and walnuts; sunflower seeds and avocado.
* Vitamin F (not often talked about or seen in multivitamin tablets but still important): Found in wheat germ, sunflower seeds and pecans.
* Vitamin K: Found in green leafy vegetables, molasses, liver, yoghurt, eggs, fish and tomatoes.
* Iron: Found in red meat, white meat, beans, eggs and lentils (sorry, Popeye – a misplaced decimal point led to the belief that spinach is particularly high in iron).
* Potassium: Found in sweet potato, bananas and potatoes (skin on), apricots and bran.
* Magnesium: Found in green leafy vegetables, Brazil nuts and almonds, soya beans and some fish, especially halibut.
* Calcium: Found in dairy foods of all types: milk, yoghurt, cheese and even ice cream (in moderation, of course).
* Iodine: Found in iodized table salt, kelp and sea salt.
* Selenium: Found in Brazil nuts, organ meat and dark (70% cocoa solids) chocolate.
* Zinc: Found in red meat and in seafood, especially oysters.
If you need vitamins for your skin, you can always buy skin care products which will refresh your skin.
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Some things you should definitely take to the doctor to be checked out. Strange lumps and bumps with no obvious explanation, odd rashes, extreme weight loss, constant raging thirst or lethargy that just doesn’t go away – these should all be taken to a doctor.
However, you can treat some things yourself. In fact, the writer that this doctor consults is quite happy for patients to treat themselves for minor ailments. To put it in a more practical way, being able to treat yourself for some things will save you the doctor’s bill. In the past, home remedies were used quite widely and reasonably effectively. Modern pharmaceuticals and lab-made medicines are excellent, but natural ones as well as natural cleaners can be just as good sometimes.
For all the remedies in this article, the old advice applies: if symptoms persist, please see your doctor.
Sore throats: keeping your fluid levels up and sipping warm drinks is as good as any patent medicine. Any warm drink will do, but for an extra boost to your immune system, fresh lemon juice and honey stirred into hot water tastes nice. If you have a particularly miserable and painful cold that isn’t just painful in the throat but in the nose and sinuses, too, the time-honoured method of soothing the pain is strong alcohol mixed with the hot water, lemon and honey. However, one that also works quite well but is better for your overall health than strong spirits is cayenne pepper or dried chillis. This is not for everyone, but the capiscain in the chilli or cayenne releases endorphins – natural pain killers – around the mouth and throat area. It’s like detonating a bomb in your mouth, but it seems to blast away the pain – besides, if you’re feeling miserable enough with a cold, you’ll try it even if you don’t like spicy foods. Another sore throat remedy is to make a syrup by mixing raw onions with honey, leaving it for an hour or so and straining the liquid off.
Acne & athletes’ foot: Tea tree oil dabbed onto the site neat with a cotton bud works as a powerful antiseptic to clear up little spots.
Stings: First of all, if you have been stung by a bee, remove the sting. Do not grip it with tweezers or fingernails, as this will squeeze more venom into the system. Scrape it out instead. For beestings, dab on a paste of baking soda and water. For wasp stings, vinegar is widely recommended, as the acid in the vinegar neutralizes the alkaline venom. Watch out for allergies – if someone is allergic to stings, see a doctor as soon as possible.
Yeast infections (thrush or candida): This is caused by an imbalance of bacteria, and often flares up after a course of antibiotics, or by overuse of douching. The best treatment is to replace the good bacteria by topical application of live yoghurt to the site, although eating live yoghurt helps, too. If itching is extreme, an ice cube can help numb the area and relieve this.
Urinary tract infections/bladder infections: Keep your fluids up to flush out the bacteria and don’t “hang on” when you need to urinate but get to the toilet as soon as possible. Cranberry juice is the best remedy, as it contains a principle that kills the bacteria causing the infection. However, if the infection starts to track its way up the renal tubes to your kidneys – you will feel this as persistent lower back pain – then see your doctor.
Persistent dry coughs: Most of the patent medicines for this used to contain strong alcohol – I’m certain that the cough medicine my mother gave me was cherry liqueur. Don’t take more than a spoonful, and this will cause drowsiness.
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No, don’t you even think about it! Stop that right now! I saw you trying to squeeze that pimple. Yes, it seems almost instinctive to try squeezing the wretched things that always seem to pop up right when you don’t need them to. But this is the worst thing that you can do, as it can lead to scarring and/or driving the infection deeper into the skin.
The first question you need to ask – and it’s important to know the answer if you want to beat acne before it starts – is why you have acne. A number of causes can cause breakouts:
- Adolescence (not much you can do to prevent this one. Grow up as fast as you can)
- Having oily skin (You can’t prevent this one, either, so you will need to treat this rather than prevent this)
- Poor diet (contrary to the myth, chocolate doesn’t cause acne. Lack of fresh fruit and veggies does, as does a zinc deficiency)
- Hormonal fluctuations (the dreaded premenstrual spots – not much you can do to avoid this, either)
- Stress (preventable – but do we do it?)
- Not cleaning skin properly (preventable with soap and water and/or some other cleansing regime)
Whatever the cause is, you probably want to get rid of that pimple right now. What you don’t want to do is squeeze it. (Well, you do want to squeeze it, but you shouldn’t). The classic pimple with its white head and red base is caused by bacteria – the red is the inflamed part where the battle is raging, while the white part is the mix of dead bacteria and white blood cells. To get rid of this sort of blemish, you will need to help the “good guys” (i.e. your own immune system) to win. Use an anti-bacterial spot treatment (if you have dry skin like me, then antibacterial washes on a too-frequent basis make your skin dry and itchy, especially in winter). Essential oil of tea-tree (manuka) dabbed on with a cotton bud works a treat, but a cheaper and easier method is to rub a slice of raw garlic over the pimple. This will sting. Alcohol-based perfumes (which include aftershave) are a more pleasantly scented option than garlic. Fight the infection from the inside too, by making sure you eat plenty of good immune-boosting fruit and vegetables, including that garlic. (all this garlic may seem off-putting and antisocial, but if you have a bad case of acne, you probably don’t feel like making too many public appearances or getting intimate with anyone).
Before pimples become pimples, they often start life as blackheads. Blackheads are pores that are clogged with gunk, either your own secretions and/or dirt in the form of dead skin cells, old makeup and other general grime. If these pores get infected, pimples result. Regular face cleaning is, of course a must. Steam cleaning is particularly beneficial – you can do this at home with a bowl full of boiling water and a towel over your head to trap the steam. Don’t be a mug and stick your face in the boiling water, of course. However, if you’ve been guilty of neglecting your skin, the initial result is that your acne may get worse at first. This is because your system will purge out all the undesirable muck that has been sitting there for so long. Persevere.
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Home grown fruit has many advantages. It’s cheaper. It’s fresher. And you know for certain that it won’t have any nasty sprays on it, or any waxes popped on to enhance its shelf-life and/or appearance. Yes, sometimes your own fruit can have the odd blemish here and there, but the advantages usually outweigh this factor. Tree-ripened fruit is often tastier, too.
You do not need a massive amount of space to grow your own fruit. Many small fruit trees and shrubs are quite attractive and can take the place of bushes grown for mere aesthetics. If you live in an area where you can grow feijoas or citrus fruits (especially lemons) outside, these make excellent hedges – and citrus fruits are very attractive. If you have a little more space, plum trees and apple trees make good feature trees (so do plums, peaches and apricots), and they have exquisite blossoms in springtime. Cane-grown berryfruit (currants and raspberries) can easily tuck into a corner or along a fenceline.
All fruit trees will need to be fed to produce good fruit – compost works wonders, and so does blood and bone, or manure. For small trees and bushes, this should be placed around the “drip line” rather than close to the trunk. With larger trees, this can look revolting, so put it in a nice neat ring about a foot away from the trunk. It can be closer to the stem with cane fruit, but take care not to let it touch the trunk.
Birds will be a bit of a problem, as they like fresh fruit as much as you do. Keeping cats helps, but isn’t perfect. Sometimes, you will need to beat the birds by picking the fruit when it is underripe and sun-ripening it on a sunny windowsill. Other bird-scaring methods include hanging old CDs in trees, or other shiny objects that resemble predators. Nets can be placed over bushes and trees, but this is harder with larger ones. Some people try tying plastic bags over the fruit-bearing branches, but this looks a bit unpleasant. Commercial orchards using natural methods often use a device that emits a sound like a bird in distress at regular intervals, but this can be very, very irritating around the home.
Pick up windfalls promptly to deter wasps.
Resist the temptation to spray chemicals to fix a problem, as sometimes you can kill off the good bacteria and insects that will fix your problem as well.
Apricots: These seem to have a good crop one year, followed by a not-so-good year. Birds like these, so try the bird-beating methods.
Apples: Fairly trouble free if you don’t mind the odd blemish. To reduce these, keep the trunk clear from grass, and grow chives, garlic and/or foxgloves around them. Codling moths are a pain – as a first step, tie corrugated cardboard around the trunk in mid to late spring. Kill any larvae you find. If you find quite a few, use a pyrethrum-based spray on the blossoms if you have to. They can also be deterred by growing nasturtiums around the base of the tree.
Blackcurrants (also redcurrants): These grow from cuttings pretty easily and seem to crop well consistently. Birds don’t seem to attack these, as they are hard to perch on. Prune back over winter, but remember that fruit grows on second-year wood (i.e. the stuff that grew last year).
Cherries: Beautiful blossoms, but you will need to work hard to beat the birds if you want any fruit.
Citrus: Birds don’t seem to go for these, as the skins are tough. They can be frost-tender, so if you live in a colder area, keep them indoors in pots. Dry fruit can be a problem – chicken manure works well to fix this, as does fresh urine (or as someone discreetly put it, a gentleman standing in front of it). They are worth growing for aesthetic reasons, even if you don’t like the fruit much.
Raspberries: Prune out old canes after fruiting to give the younger ones a chance.
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So you’ve already tried using vinegar to clean the mirror. But don’t just stop there. You can also use vinegar to improve the looks of what looks out of the mirror back at you. Vinegar is also a handy cosmetic, as well as being a cleaner and a culinary ingredient. In fact, some of the acids found in vinegar are used, in a more concentrated form, in some chemical peels and fancy face creams.
The best-known cosmetic use for vinegar is as a hair care product. After washing (which, if you’re doing things the natural way, should involve soap rather than shampoo), pour a vinegar rinse through your hair. A vinegar rinse is simply a splash of vinegar (up to about a cup) in about a litre or so of water. Pour this through your hair as a final rinse. Vinegar that has been scented with herbs or with essential oils puts a subtle scent through your hair. This method also works for animal hair as well as humans, so you can try it on your dog, or even (so I am told) on a horse. Add peppermint oil to a vinegar rinse for dogs as a flea deterrent.
While on the topic of hair, the best way to clean a scungy hairbrush is to soak it in a bowl of vinegar and hot water for a few hours or overnight. Before you soak it, use a comb (or some other handy implement – I’ve used a compass (of the circle drawing kind)) to get rid of the larger clumps of hair and fluff.
Say goodbye to expensive facial toners and just use dilute vinegar instead. Cider vinegar is your best choice, but any sort will do.
White vinegar also makes a reasonable deodorant. Of course, it won’t act as an anti-perspirant and you will still sweat. But do you really want to use a product that works by clogging up your sweat glands. The vinegar will help to kill the bacteria that live in wet, warm armpits eating sweat and causing a stink. Fresh sweat, incidentally, doesn’t smell bad, but contains a few sexy pheromones. It only starts to reek if it’s not washed off regularly.
Vinegar is widely used in the domestic cleaning London service, mainly as a mould killer around the home, and it can help to kill the fungi responsible for athletes’ foot. Dab neat vinegar onto your toes with cotton wool or a soft cloth to help treat it. Sunshine and fresh air will also help get rid of the conditions that cause athletes’ foot, so go barefoot a bit more often.
You’re not really supposed to use nail polish if you’re trying to cut down on environmental toxins, but a number of us have this little weakness. If you do, wiping the nails down with vinegar before applying the polish. This is supposed to make the polish last longer. Presumably it works for toenails as well as for fingernails.
Vinegar also makes an excellent addition to a steam bath for the face or to a hot tub. The acid helps to loosen and soften the outer layer of dead skin cells so you can wash them off more easily.
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