Turn conkers into laundry detergent

As we bid farewell to autumn and all of its beautiful colours (or hello, depending on when you're reading this!), I wanted to share a super handy tip to make the very most from your foraging.

Conkers, or horse chestnuts, are in abundance throughout autumn. If you're fortunate enough to stumble upon a horse chestnut tree and see how its bounty decorates the forest floor below, try and gather as many fallen conkers as you can bear to carry home for this nifty little sustainable living trick (but leave some for the animals, of course!).

How on earth do conkers make a good cleaning product?

Conkers contain a high concentration of saponins, a natural compound that acts in the same way as soap. The saponins will lift dirt from your clothes just like your usual laundry detergent would, only in a 100% natural and organic way!

Here's how to do it!

For your first batch, take 6-10 conkers (or approximately 50g) and roughly chop them up. Or smash them with a clean hammer/mallet, this proved far easier for us - conkers aren't exactly the easiest things to slice through!

Place them in a large jug and fill with boiling water (approximately 500ml of water to 50g of conkers). If you find that your jug isn't big enough to allow all of your chopped conkers to be covered by the water, just half your conker batch. You can use the other half another time, there's no strict rules to it!

Leave them to soak for at least an hour. For a more concentrated solution, feel free to leave longer. We actually left ours to soak overnight, but we did use a huge jug and quite a lot of conkers in one go.

Then, strain the liquid into a fresh jug or container. The removed conkers can go on to be used again 2 or 3 more times, but you will need to leave them to soak for longer with each turn. If you have a nice, healthy batch of conkers, you should be able to see some small bubbles or foam in your newly strained liquid!

Your liquid is now ready to use! With each laundry load, simply pour in approximately half a cup into the detergent segment of your washing machine (about the same or a tad more of what you'd usually use of fabric conditioner). Or, if you have a particularly large or dirty load, feel free to use the whole 500ml.

The remaining liquid can be stored in the fridge for up to a week. Alternatively, you can even pop it into an ice cube tray and pop it in your freezer if you want to make it last even longer.

The results? Does it lift stains?

As new parents, we were probably pretty good volunteers for trial running this detergent. It's not uncommon for our clothes to bear a lovely variety of stains nowadays.

Anyway, after one single wash using the conker solution, our laundry came out dazzling clean. It'd even managed to lift some pretty stubborn stains too, to our surprise!

With that in mind, I'd highly recommend giving this a try. Not only is it a fun activity for the whole family to do in the weeks leading up (we went foraging for a small handful of conkers on each of our daily autumn walks with the baby so had a fabulous collection by the time autumn had drawn to a close), but it has also proved just as successful at removing stains as our normal laundry detergent so we've avoided having to buy any new detergent for weeks now. It's nice to have another natural, organic home product that we can produce ourselves in our arsenal. One less thing for the shopping list, and one less thing going to landfill!

If you decide to give conker laundry detergent a try, I'd love to know how you get on! Good luck!