The beauty of your home will be ruined if you fail to clean it properly. House-cleaning agents, however, can be expensive, especially if you are allergic to a dirty environment and have to clean all the time. Worry no more as we show you how you can use food items from your kitchen to clean surfaces, polish leather, remove stains, or even clean sticky windows. 

1. Lemon

   This is a staple cleaning agent and one of our favourites. Its purposes cannot be emphasized enough. With its strong acidic properties, lemon is good for bleaching or whitening any material. To remove grass, tea, coffee or grease stains from a piece of cloth, simply soak the stained area in lemon juice.

2. Banana
   
   Potassium found in bananas is a key ingredient in commercial shoe polishes. Rub the inside of a banana peel on a leather shoe, chair or anything leather to remove scuff marks and restore its shine. You can use banana peels to polish silverware.

3. Cucumber
   
   Cucumber peels can act as an eraser to clean pen/crayon marks made on walls and tables. Simply scrub the area you want to clean with the cucumber peel and that’s it! You can also use cucumber to remove tarnish from stainless steel.

4. Onions
   
   Crush onions and add water to form a paste, this can be used to remove rust on metal containers. You can remove stubborn stains on your gas cooker by rubbing a piece of onion over it. The purging qualities of onions soften the hard crust at the bottom of a burnt pot for easy removal. Wipe sticky windows with onion and water to clean the grime.

5. Salt
   
   This is the most versatile mineral in the kitchen. You can use salt to absorb wine stains off your clothing. To remove perspiration stains and blood stains from your cloth, you can soak it in water mixed with salt. You can also use salt to prevent the dye on your new cloth from running, by soaking the cloth in water mixed with vinegar and salt.

Nancy Ewurum is a young and ambitious lady with a passion for creative writing and social entrepreneurship through software development. Currently enrolled in the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, Accra, she writes in her spare time. You can connect with her on Twitter.