WINNIPEG – With all her household hints, you’d expect Reena Nerbas to be a grey-haired grandmother.
Instead, the youthful mother of four pre-teen children jumped around during her presentation to the recent Manitoba Farm Women’s Conference, unable to contain her enthusiasm for cleaning solutions.
Nerbas grabbed a box of Borax and extolled its ability to wash walls and whiten laundry.
A jug of vinegar was held aloft and praised for its ability to whiten, deodorize, clean toilets and walls and attract and kill fruit flies.
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Peanut butter can clean silver, take gum out of kids’ hair, lift off sticky labels and remove scratches from CDs.
Head and Shoulders shampoo lifts out old bloodstains.
Newspaper eats up odours when crumpled into a pair of boots, an old suitcase or in a freezer where meat has rotted inside.
Nerbas collected these and other solutions to cleaning problems around the house and garage and packaged them in a book along with 500 cooking substitutions. The book is now a best- seller.
Nerbas threw away all her commercial cleaners and now uses ingredients commonly found in the kitchen.
Here is her all-purpose cleaning recipe:
2 tbsp. Borax 25 mL
1/2 cup bleach 125 mL
1/4 cup baking soda 60 mL
8 cups water 2 L
