"I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble, if there were only one in the world." - Mark Twain
We finally used soap nuts (berries) to do our laundry and we love them. Our clothes come out clean and soft and we aren't using petrochemicals to wash them, so that makes us happy. We're still machine washing for now so we don't know how well laundry will go making a liquid soap from the soap nuts, but tossing them in the wash in little cotton sacks has been great so far. Added bonus: we also got my parents using them! For anyone that knows my parents, this is a really big deal. We left them a whole box after they tried them in a couple of loads and we'll get another for ourselves before our next load of wash. We've found that in the machines at the laundromat we can use five per load and use them two or three times before swapping the nuts in the sack. We also wash exclusively in cold as it seems to make the soap nuts last longer.
It's not all success, though. We followed the instructions for stain treatment and found that it was rather wasteful and not very effective to use the soap nuts for stain removal. We'll need to find a natural stain removal technique that's more effective and not nearly as wasteful.
Word of warning on the smell: soap nuts don't really smell great. I think they smell a little disgusting myself. That said, we don't smell them at all in our clothes. Our clothes come out not smelling like anything, which really is quite refreshing. We even had a load of musty clothes and towels that got wet when our water heater leaked and sat for a few days before washing. They were really stinky going into the wash and came out smelling like... nothing, clean in the truest sense.
It should be noted that we use soap berries, which we refer to as soap nuts because the terminology seems to be that both soap berries and soap nuts are referred to more generally as soap nuts. We looked into growing our own and what we learned is that actual soap nuts contain more soapanin but the trees that produce them aren't very hardy and take seven years to produce, meaning we're not likely to be able to grow them ourselves. Soap berries on the other hand come from a more hardy tree that produces in only two or three years, but the berries contain less soapanin and thus we'd need to use more. Even still, it seems more likely we could grow soap berries for ourselves.
