Ellen McCallie's Colorado video diary: Clean

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This will be an interesting programme to see people’s reactions. I’d be curious on your reaction because in terms of my part I wasn’t using plants to make these deodorants and soaps that have been scientifically proven to be good for these uses. What I was using instead is the precursor to science. It’s a traditional knowledge, the observation that people have made without going through the rigorous trial process that science requires. And I think that’s really important to show people because acknowledging that we all do science on a daily basis, we all have experience, or we do the precursor to science, maybe that’s a better way to say it, we make observations and then we make hypotheses and draw conclusions based on our experience with these plants or whatever it is, I think that's important to show. There is a real value for everyone talking about what their experience is with products, with natural products, with materials, with life, because a lot of times it’s the serendipitous that leads to greater understanding.

In terms of making soap, I never realised there was a difference between soap and detergent and that soaps typically don’t work well in hard water and they’re not synthetic, they’re typically natural. At least that’s my understanding at this point. I’ve known that yucca’s a great plant for washing things, and I must say I was really impressed at how clean the shirt got at the end. I didn’t realise it but once Kate squirted all the stuff on it, she’d laid it down on the car and it baked in the sun for like two hours, so even though we didn’t get the shirt very clean it was pretty darn clean.

And in fact they actually did two t-shirts, so at the end of the programme I snagged the second one, took it home, washed it twice, it looked about the same as ours did. So hey, kudos to Jonathan and the yucca plant because I think it worked pretty well.