Fume-Free Cleaning (If You Don't Count Cussing)

I don't know what the water quality is like where you live, but here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we have exceedingly HARD water. In fact, I never fully appreciated the very definition of hard water until I moved here. Calcified water deposits get all over everything and never come off. As in never. As in, every couple of years, I simply THROW OUT my steam iron because it gets so clogged with hard water chunks it randomly spews them onto my husband's shirts, and no amount of country wisdom seems to be adequate to clean it.
This being said, today I walked into our family bathroom and decided (mostly since I'm getting over a cold and can't smell the fumes) I would clean the stains from the sink and toilet. To give you an idea of what I started out with, here's my less-than-a-year-old toilet:

New toilet: A whole 'nother DIY adventure I shan't trouble you with.

As well as my old-as-the-house-itself (about 35 years old) marble/something bathroom sink:

Yikes.

 No, really, the stains on the sink just look like a little grubby dirt, but they are, in actual fact, now part of the rock itself:

Oh, and I took these pictures after scrubbing it with steel wool and Comet powder for 20 minutes.

 So because I had already tried traditional cleansers and elbow grease, I thought I'd take a step back and consult that repository of all human knowledge (no, not Wikipedia; the other repository of all human knowledge) Pinterest. Now, for anyone out there reading this who is not a bored homemaker or gay man, Pinterest is a highly addictive social media site where one can go to find clever snapshots with links to recipes, pictures of other people's pets, cat memes, helpful hints, and pretty much anything one can imagine to enable the reader to waste time in the guise of compiling useful information.  Among the multitudes of helpful posts about how to clean everything in the world using common household goods are more than a few variations on the wonders of baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, and white vinegar. I started out with the simplest suggestion, mixing a paste of baking soda and peroxide and slathered this all over my target areas:

Mmmmm...pasty.

For the toilet, I got all the water out of the bowl first. If you've never had to fix your own toilet, how you do that is to turn off the water behind the tank, flush a couple of times until the tank is mostly empty, then scoop, bail, or sponge out the water in the bowl.  I needed that icky brown ring to be dryish, so the paste wouldn't all just slide down to Goldfish Heaven.  I let it sit (read, went back to look at pictures of dogs on Pinterest) then went back and started scrubbing, first, with a scrubby sponge, then with damn steel wool (the chemist in me saw this part as folly, as steel wool is probably pretty reactive with peroxide and/or bicarbonate), and after about ten more minutes of hard scrubbing, started to see the tiniest little bits of toilet ring coming off.

F**K THIS, I thought to myself, and also out loud, but without the asterisks. Then I figured out what the missing element from all of these helpful hints was. 

THIS IS THE CLEVER BIT. IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, FEEL FREE TO GO BACK TO PINTEREST.

But seriously, it worked, so, there's that. 

Once you've got your paste all soaked in and scrubbed up to no avail, get out your reading glasses and an X-Acto knife, and scrape it off by hand. 

The clever bit.

Here's my breathtaking before and after pic; I bet you can hardly believe it's the same potty:

It has been five minutes, so it undoubtedly no longer looks like this.

Now the sink seemed to be another, wholly less satisfying matter. I pasted, I scrubbed, and I X-Acto-scraped, but that nonsense just wasn't coming off of there.  Plus, if you compare before and after (below), you'll notice that the rim around the sink isn't just dark because it's in shadows, but because it is the most stained of any of it. So one last internet tip to go--I doused it all (enough to wet the paste, but not wash it away) in white vinegar. For those of you who have forgotten, here's what I just did (excluding the peroxide, which I figured called it quits a while ago):

CH3COOH + NaHCO3 ===> NaCH₃COO + H2CO3

Sodium bicarbonate and acetic acid react to form sodium acetate salt and carbonic acid. Carbonic acid is the weak acid in soda pop, which quickly breaks down into carbon dioxide and water.

H2CO3 ===> CO2 + H2O

Sorry, the chemist in me had to share that part with you. Just pretend like you already knew it.  

So, as much as I'd like to say that this reaction enabled me to simply wipe off the hard water stains with the side of my hand, there was still some more X-Acto knife action, plus a little bit of paint-scraper work after that, but at least it came off. 

Still not good as new, but certainly much better.  Don't know what that stain is in the drain, but it should be the part of the house that survives the nuclear apocalypse (are we still having that?).

 I hope that all three of my blog readers found that helpful, and I certainly feel as if I've gotten it off of my chest, which is, after all, the primary purpose of having a blog.
Not to let you think that my efforts went unnoticed, I was under the constant supervision and unwavering moral support of my entire family.

Not shown: Actual unwavering support.

Companion Planting: I Sure Don't Know Much About Plants

Dandelions attract pollinating insects and
promote fruit ripening. Mwah!

For someone with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, or really, anyone with a degree that has "Bio" in the name, you would think I would know something about plant biology. However, I went to graduate school in a medical school, so my education might have been a little heavy on the animal part.  I basically know about plants what the dudes at Home Depot and Ace Hardware tell me, so that puts me up there with pretty much any adult who knows how to ask a question.

When I told my husband I'd gone out and bought seeds and some seedlings to plant this year, he gave me quite an earful on all the stuff I might do wrong, and how you can't plant some plants next to each other, or else they'll try and kill each other, or plot against you in a bid for global domination, or some shit. Once I felt thoroughly schooled in what I didn't know, I figured I'd seek out some knowledge about what to plant together and what not.

As it turns out, what he was mostly talking about was a concept called Companion Planting. The principles of companion planting have to do with how different plant species can help each other in different ways, including nutrient uptake, pest control, and pollination.   Some plants planted next to each other will cause both species to thrive, while other combinations of plants can be detrimental to one side or the other. Some plants repel specific pests (onions and other alliums repel aphids and slugs), so they should be planted next to other species that are vulnerable to those pests. For some reason I cannot seem to discover, you should not plant brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages) near nightshades (tomatoes, peppers and potatoes), as they universally hate each other.  Since I am planting two relatively small plots in separate sections of my yard, and not planting a zillion different things across the vast farmland of America, I was able to divide and conquer, based on plant compatibility.

Some excellent resources I found were at Wikipedia (of course!), where there is a general discussion of companion planting, as well as a rather detailed list of plant compatibility, broken down into categories and giving the specifics of each type of harm or benefit (although no one seems to have an explanation as to why broccoli and tomatoes hate each other--bad phloem, I guess). 

The tension down here is palpable. Someone's about to get cut.

There's more handy information about companion gardening at How To Garden Advice.com, and they have their own groovy chart, as well as a graphic example of why you shouldn't plant chard and potatoes next to each other (if you have baby potatoes in the house, you might not want to let them look).
So, in case you're wondering what sorts of yumminess I have planned for the growing season, here's the plan for my two planting areas. In the smaller of the two beds, I'll plant the broccoli and cauliflower, along with sage and rosemary. That bed might fit some yellow beans as well, if they ever decide to germinate.  Then, all the way on the other side of the yard (are you hearing me, broccoli?) I'm planting TONS of tomatoes, along with Serrano chili peppers, basil, oregano, and flat-leaf parsley. For tomatoes, I got traditional Romas, some Super Sweet 100 cherries, and an heirloom called Black Krim. The Black Krim variety is from the Isle of Krim on the Black Sea, which I'm totally hoping is just like the land-locked desert of the Southwestern U.S.

Image from veggiegardener.com, click to read their article about the Black Krim!

If my peas germinate, they go in that box as well, though I may have to build some sort of wall of herbs between them and the tomatoes (I can't seem to get an honest answer from any of these sites as to the compatibility of tomatoes and peas.). Oh, and apparently, I need to plant those marigold seeds I got around both planters, as they give off all sorts of bad bug mojo. I will try and keep my readers apprised of how things are going over the course of the summer, with lots of pictures of the Doberman trying to steal tomatoes off the vine and getting zapped by the electric fence.
Tell me what your favorite homegrown vegetables and fruits are!  Are you planning on growing any this year?