I've been meaning to post this recipe since it was given to me by a dairy farmer in 2017. Today is the day, just in time for dirty hands season.
I just love a recipe that involves a hammer, don't you? They're always the simplest and best. For example, lobster: boil lobster, melt butter, smash with hammer.
In the case of this gardening scrub recipe you grate some soap, hammer some pumice stones, mix them with Borax and you're done.
There's just enough scrubby pumice to get rid of stains and what the pumice doesn't get the Borax does.
My hands are more sensitive than the blocky clumps at the end of my arms would suggest. Because of that I only use the garden scrub when my hands need it, not as an everyday hand washing soap.
However in summer my hands need it every day so I only use it once, in the evening, after I've finished digging trenches and working on our neighbourhood's Fight Club "the musical" choreography .
A word about containers. Mason jars are fine, but raise your dirty hand if you're sick of everything being presented, served and stored in mason jars. Even I am sick of mason jars, but being the canner that I am, I always have them.
Now that I am a newly organized person who is not buying cluttery things to replace the cluttery things I got rid of, I used my mason jars.
BUT I LET OUT A BIG, SIGH and eye roll as I did it.
I almost bought this set for my kitchen. I wanted to put my scrub on one side & hand lotion in the other and I would have loved it from the bottom of my heart until I got sick of it.
Let's make pumice scrub.
Gardener's Hand Scrub
Made with pumice, bar soap and Borax.
Grate 1 ½ bars of your favourite soap.
Put 2 pumice stones into a heavy duty plastic bag.
Hammer the crap out of them until they're a powder. It'll take about 10 minutes.
In a bowl, combine the powdered pumice with the grated soap.
Add 1 cup of Borax to the bowl & mix.
Pour in ½ cup of water, mix, then put in storage jars. You're done!
Adding that little bit of water makes the scrub more manageable and keeps the dust down. Once you mix it it won't look or feel wet. It will just be sticky enough to hold together.
This works especially well in conjunction with a nail brush. Follow up with hand cream. My favourite hand cream is and will probably always be The Naked Bee's Orange Blossom Honey hand lotion but use what you have.
Gardener's Hand Scrub
An easy to make hand scrub for anyone who likes to do dirty stuff.
Ingredients
- 2 pumice stones
- 1 ½ bars of soap, grated
- 1 cup Borax
- 4, 8oz canning jars
- ½ water
Instructions
- Grate 1 ½ bars of your favourite soap.
- Put 2 pumice stones into a heavy plastic bag and whack them with a hammer until a fine powder.
- Mix the grated soap & pumice stone together.
- Add 1 cup Borax and mix.
- Add ½ cup water and mix.
- Divide equally among your jars and call it a day.
And yes, that's French on the box parce que je suis Canadien. One side is English, the other side French. I usually flip the packaging around so the English side is showing, but this time I didn't.
So you'll have to excuse my French.
I don't garden enough to use the soap, but I definitely want that hand cream. Orange blossom honey...oh my gosh!
It smells really nice. AND as an added bonus, it's a good cream. It doesn't feel sticky or icky. ~ karen!
I would recommend using distilled water over just water. Water as a rule contains bacteria which can multiply and eventually contaminate your product. Distilled water has gone through a process to remove the bacteria among other things and will help keep your product from being compromised. Of course if you are dipping dirty fingers in it, or even wet ones, it will already be compromised. However if you intend to seal and store it for later use, distilled water is the way to go.
Good point! ~ karen
Borax is a main ingredient in my homemade laundry soap, it is very useful stuff.
Have you never heard of CRAZY SOAP? It is a bar hand cleaner which uses nut shells as a grit. It is non- toxic and bio- degradable and removes grease and dirt like nobody’s business, leaving your hands smooth and soft. I’ve also used it as a stain remover on carpets and upholstery. We love the stuff and it’s a permanent fixture at our work sink.
Nope, never heard of it, I'll have a look! ~ karen
My go to for grimy hands is LAVA soap (which has pumice). Doesn't require shredding bar soap or pounding the crap out of pumice (although that may be therapeutic).
I feel like that kid on the box is a major selling point (boy? girl? who cares?). There’s something about a happy kid in cowboy boots with a stuffed goat, a MASSIVE hat and a whip that makes me say… Hunhh I should buy that.
I know. It's the best packaging ever because you just want to have the box in your house. Doesn't even really matter what's in it. In fact I'd buy the empty box. ~ karen!
You need to get some gardening gloves - Your poor hands! That stuff would be good for dirty Summer feet though.
It's O.K. I wear gloves when I feel like I can work in them. And believe it or not I used a tiny bit of the scrub to clean my wood countertop where an Iris flower arrangement had dripped purple stains on it. And it worked! ~ karen
Hey Karen, unless there's something you haven't told us, tu es canadienne, pas canadien!
LOL, oui. ~ karen!
Just wondering out loud, if plain store bought Lava soap didn't do the trick, perhaps a bar of that could be grated and mixed with some Borax and water?
" One side is Wnglish, the other side French."
I like the sound of Wnglish! 😆
I HATE TO SKIP TO THIS MOST SHOCKING IMAGE - BUT NEED TO ASK
ARE THOSE YOUR HANDS? Get thee to a spa, lets find a healing hand cream recipe for you!
They are indeed my hands, lol. That particular image however is from when I was forming my cob pizza oven. ~ karen!
Thanks, Karen! I was scrubbing my gardener's knees with soap yesterday, wishing I had a proper scrub to get rid of the dirt. This looks ideal. I've got the ingredients; I'll give it a go. :)
Down here in the US, Lava bar Soap from the hardware store or Amazon is available w/o smashing pumice stones or using Mason jars…fyi 😉
Yes, but it's all in the name of the blog ... The art of *doing* stuff. ;) ~ karen!
Indeed & thank you for the reminder clever diy gal!
Off topic - when you say to use your Amazon link when ordering, do I just click on that statement and then do my regular browsing/shopping? Unfortunately I'm not terribly computer savvy but this sounds like a really good plan!
Hi Chris. Yes. :) That's exactly what you do. ~ karen!
Oh dear.
At the risk of sounding like el creepo deluxe, I ask a question.
May I send you a jar of what I call Gardener's Pal?
I'm studying aromatherapy and have also created a scrub for post digging in the dirt. It's made with Jojoba, Himalayan Salt and a coupla essential oils. I'm in Massachusetts so I could also just drive it over the border.
Ha! Promise I'm not creepy.
That doesn't sound creepy. Sure you can send it along if you like. At the bottom of all of my emails there's a P.O. Box address. ~ karen!
Great idea Karen! but where does one get Pumice stone here in the Hammer?
Just look at any store with nail polish, manicure/ pedicure kits /stuff, foot files, etc, or sometimes near the bath stuff. Sometimes they are sold in kits with nail brushes or the like. Stores that sell salon equipment should have them too (like Sally's if you're in the US.)
I got these ones at Fortinos, but you should be able to find them almost anywhere in the manicure section of any drugstore like Shoppers or Walmart. ~ karen!
Dollar Store
I love the little girl on the Borax box! But I'm always afraid of encountering brown recluse spiders when I'm gardening, so I rarely go barehanded. I now wear heavy (6 mil) nitrile surgical gloves-- the purple ones that are used by nurses who give chemo (poison) infusions-- when I garden. I can dig with my hands for hours, the gloves don't tear, and my hands stay clean.
Hi Carol! I wear a variety of gloves too depending on what I'm doing - including surgical gloves - but with the amount of gardening I do there's just no stopping dirt from finding its way to my hands and fingernails. ~ karen!