This is one of those recipes that may seem like a cheat but it works great and saves time and money. We like to use vinegar to clean just about everything as it is safe, gentle, and has great cleaning properties. We found a way to make our own citrus vinegar cleaner and we love it. It is also maybe the quickest and easiest thing you will ever do.

Here is where the possible cheat comes in. We buy the generic vinegar from the store, you know, the one in the big store brand bottle. Yes, we do make our own vinegar from fruit scraps, but that is a different talk. We use a lot of vinegar cleaner and waiting for our homemade vinegar to get ready is just not feasible. So we buy the big, cheap bottle from the local store. You can, of course, use this vinegar straight but we like the citrus scent we get with ours.

You can also do this over time, so there is no getting materials together for a project. You just open the new vinegar bottle that you bought and leave it sitting somewhere close at hand.

When someone in the family eats an orange, grapefruit, or tangerine, keep the peels and the seeds. Everyone in our house knows to set the peels and seeds aside for later use. On the journey to self-sufficiency, going green, and recycling, this is the one thing that they can all remember to do, go figure.

Every time peels and seeds are set aside, just drop them into the store-bought vinegar bottle. We normally will have 2 bottles, one used or empty and the new one. We fill the 2nd bottle halfway up from the new bottle, that way you now have 2 bottles to put peels in. You can try to stuff peels in a full bottle. We can tell you from experience, it does not work as well as you might think, it will get to full and overflow.

Just keep putting peels into the vinegar bottle and give it a shake. Over a few weeks or months, the citrus oils will leach into the vinegar. You will get all the cleaning power of vinegar and a lovely citrus scent. You can leave the peels in the vinegar when you are ready to use it. As a matter of fact, we have not found a good way to get the soggy peels out of the small bottle top. If you want, you can strain the vinegar out of the original bottle and leave the peels in for the next round of vinegar.  The strained cleaner can be put into a sprayer bottle for easier use.  We keep several bottles of vinegar open and ready to receive peels in the kitchen so everyone can easily find them when they are ready to eat citrus. We have quite a few “revolving” vinegar bottles that we keep just for this. We use citrus vinegar and refill with vinegar when the bottle is low.

When making citrus vinegar, you can use whichever citrus you like best or just whatever you have on hand. You can use orange, lemon, lime, or tangerine, pretty much any citrus fruit.

As we do with most of our projects just use what comes in or what is on hand. You can also be happy in knowing you have used everything and had nothing to throw away. If we have some peels that are not clean enough to go into the vinegar, we add them to the mulch bucket or give them to the mealworms.

We save the seeds to either use in essential oils, like the “agent orange” ant killer recipe, or add to the seed vault for later planting. We did a talk on how to DIY agent orange ant killer, here is the link if you have to fight ants as we do. You might want to try out making your own agent orange ant killer.

So there you have it, a simple way to use leftover peelings and make a nice scented cleaner at the same time.

We hope you have enjoyed this talk and will try making your own DIY citrus vinegar cleaner.

Thank you for visiting and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.