Knock, Knock...Who's There? Dishes...Dishes Who?

Dishes the police! or Dishes a nice place! Two of my kids’ favorite knock, knock jokes which I have heard way too many times. But on the topic of dishes….

Finding a favorite scrubber for hand-washing dishes has been a bit of a journey for me over the years. Of note, I didn’t have a dishwasher for most of my adult life until the past 5ish years, so hand-washing was all I did and having a good (meaning effective and long-lasting) scrubber was relatively important. Before being as mindful about waste as I became, I often used those sponges with a scouring pad on one side, you know, those standard yellow and green ones. In my thrifty ways, I would often cut them in half and I actually came to prefer the smaller size. Then I liked the fancy scrubber brushes (e.g. Oxo) which you could fill with liquid soap and the soap would automatically dispense as you washed or you could push a sort of button. I vacillated between using various sponges and brushes and generally came back to sponges of some sort. As I started to care more about being ‘green,’ I went through a phase of using loofah, which sort of worked but I found myself using WAY more soap because it didn’t really hold water or soap very well. Then there was the period where I saved those plastic produce net bags and made scrubbers out of those, fashioned around an eco-friendly sponge. It did it’s job and I really liked the idea of re-purposing those bags, although I would prefer to avoid those now, I still succumb to them when there is a great deal on a bag of avocados or oranges or lemons (hoping the extinction of those will be a future post when I am ready to commit). However, they weren’t ideal and fell apart more than I wouldn’ve liked. I’ve also used ‘natural’ sponges that are similar to the green and yellow ones—part regular sponge and part scouring pad—but the ones I have found, I haven’t loved, and the scouring side seems to fall apart easily.

In the past several months, I have been using a combination of loofah and wooden scrubbing brushes with natural bristles. I’m ok with my set-up but I am not sure this will be a forever situation. I found a set of scrubbing brushes with bristles of different levels of coarseness and the dish wand brush has a replaceable head. These scrubbers work well with the Dish Washing Block. The loofah I found was designed specifically for washing dishing and it seems to hold water and soap much better than when I had tried to use loofah in the past. I’m not sure if it’s a different part of the plant or at a different level of maturity but it works better and also works well with the bar soap. Part of finding new dish scrubbing products was also influenced by switching to a solid bar soap for dishwashing. I didn’t need something that could hold liquid soap and instead I needed something that could kind of scrub the bar soap to get the soap off more effectively.

As I said, I’m not sure that I am completely sold on this set-up but it works and I would rather keep this up than return to buying any plastic or synthetic sponge or brush to wash my dishes.