Leslie Reichert, “The Cleaning Coach”, is a nationally-recognized green homekeeping expert dedicated to educating people on keeping their homes, schools and work areas “green”. From obvious dangers like toxic chemicals under the sink to hidden hazards that can be found in the office, Leslie helps teach simple steps to keeping families and pets safe from hidden toxins and health risks.

Leslie Reichert’s mission is to teach and encourage others in the “art” of green home keeping. She has a book called the “Joy of Green Cleaning” I quickly ordered on amazon for my kindle easy peasy!

Well probably all of your gardening people are listening going what why are we gonna be talking about cleaning?! This is a little weird. but I’ve been in the business for about 24 years, a lot of speaking, most of what I do locally is with garden clubs. It’s fascinating to see when we talk, you’re gonna see how we can marry gardening and cleaning into one really fabulous healthy way of doing things! So I’ve been doing that for 24 years.

I started with my own housekeeping service long ago, I grew it to be too big. The reason I got into the green aspect is I became the guru of shower cleaning. I became the Expert shower cleaner. I used what was then allowed to be used called Boraxo. That was the  cleaner that they used on Fiberglass boats. After years and years of using that, I ended up getting very very sick. We found out it was the chemicals in cleaning products that we’re using. I started researching things and I found out that there is an easier better way to do things. Most of what I learned is it’s the same stuff that our great grandmothers used to use. And so that’s why I wrote my book!

Joy of Green Cleaning

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Gardening for me, was interesting, ’cause my dad had a big old vegetable garden in Western Pennsylvania and he loved to sit and watch while we weeded. As kids that was our job! He’d sit in the lawn chair!

When I first think of gardening. I always thought ugh I hate gardening, I think of the weeding aspect of it. I grew up in Pennsylvania. Everyone in our neighborhood had great big gardens. Noone ever thought of organic gardenign at all back in that day.

Since I’ve had my own home

Clean Green Living, we talk about clean living, clean green eating, clean gardening, and when we talk about clean gardening it’s about using less of the things people are selling you in the store and getting back to what is natural. I’m getting better at becoming an organic gardener! I’m excited to connect with you.

I originally thought this would be a topic based podcast that Mike would just teach people, but this has worked out better, it’s been so interesting and I’ve met so many cool friends! 

What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you?

Well, like I said what it means to me, organic gardening is basically going back to, again my great grandmother grew up on a farm in Western PA. It’s so interesting if you look at some of the pictures she’s wearing back then, she’s wearing an old cotton long dress, it’s so sweet, that’s basic gardening, you’re just out there with a hoe. They never used a lot of fertilizers, it was just using what was in the ground, and a little bit of water, and using their heirloom seeds that they would keep in jars and in trunks.

It’s interesting what we have basically conformed to what we see what is in the grocery store is what we think of that big red tomato.

Then you learn about the different heirloom tomatoes and think they’re not all perfectly red or round, they all taste great!

Having the podcast it’s been forcing me to go to more farmer’s markets then I would usually attend. I bought a cauliflower from the Lower Valley Farm and it was sooooo good!

We get brain washed into thinking those bland, low vitamin, low taste food, think

I don’t know what the word is we just want that pretty apple, but you taste it and its like uck that’s the worst apple I ever had, but it looks good!

Who or what inspired you to start using organic techniques?

It was actually a combination of a lot of things. It was a perfect storm of the cleaning because we’ve been using essential oils, we’ve been talking about bringing things outside inside to use. It was also talking to a lot of different people on my podcast who are gardeners. We have Clean Green Living Magazine and we have a Gardening Guru, her name is Cloud, and she is walking me through the basic steps of organic gardening, sharing with all of my listeners as well, take them for granted that people know how to do those things. so it’s kind of a perfect storm of a little bit of cleaning, wanting to be outside and the rewards what you get,once you do the gardening! I mean I love a nice tomato!

Do you want to talk about your garden or the essential oils? 

I talk to a lot of gardeners when I, do my talks, my son calls it standup!

a lot of the gardening groups, enjoy that, you can make your own cleaning products, and bring what you grow in your garden.

For example, you have the essential oils, pressed out of your different flowers you have

Take something like lemon balm, press it or oil it, and put it into a product your now gonna use in your house. It give you such a sense of fulfilment,

not just a flower now your bringing it into the home and using it.

Do you bring the flowers in and make essential oils out of them?

No! But I’m excited to learn how to!

It’s simple

it is a very long drawn out process. Even if you go to your natural food store, you can buy some of the basic essential oils, you can put them in your cleaning products!

I usually end up buying the product in the health food store. Like I love Lavender and Nature Gate Shampoo and then I’ve also been using Mrs. Meyer’s, a friend of mine gave me some of that.

don’t have to make yourself

The reason Mrs. Meyer’s has done so well these last few years, is when she stared that company she saw the writing on the wall

People were gonna steer away

She went with a natural base in all of her cleaners, then she got the perfect formula for the scents. So she’ll take the ccent of geranium and she mixes it with something else.

Her lemon is not just lemon it’s lemon verbena. Or the germanium is mixed with something else. Now she’s gotten really fancy, into a blueberry, or I just got a Sunflower dish soap I just got! But the basics of them when she started were very pure.

You can make those, up it’s not rocket science.

There are simple things in your pantry that work really well for cleaning!

Vinegar and baking soda, those are 2 of the four basics.

4 Basic Supplies for making your own soap

• Vinegar


• Baking Soda


• Borax, or oxygen bleach


• Soap Flakes

Borax is like Comet right?

Borax or oxygen bleach is a great booster

Borax developed in the late 1800s is a very powerful salt.

So what happens back in my great grandmother’s day it’s a booster. You may or may not remember that box, it used to be green, with a picture of a mule team on the front.

Now it has clouds. And some clothes line hanging and the word Borax is still on the top. And a little teeny tiny picture of a mule teem in the top corner, but it doesn’t look any thing like the old box. You can get it at Walmart, or any box store. Any hardware store. Laundry area. Down where you find oxycleans… not like a Comet. It’s a laundry booster. Mined out of Death Valley, go to the desert. Basically it’s just run off of years and years of water coming out of the mountains. Just a really powerful salt. It just boosts the power of it.

Even if you don’t want to make your own laundry soap you can putt a teaspoon of laundry soap. It will extend your laundry soap out two fold. It just boosts the power!

You need 4 basic ingredients. You can buy or find soap flakes. Sometimes they are hard to find. Right now I import them from London. Dried up soap flakes back in the fifties. Used to use it for snow at Christmas time. Teacher would use it for hand soap, kids would make soap for moms for mother’s day.

4 Basic Ingredients for Laundry Soap

• 2 cups soap flakes


• 1 cup of Baking soda


• 1 cup of Washing soda


• 20-25 drops