One more frugal tip for the day before I’m off to the dentist with my oldest daughter. Well, the rest of the family is coming too – grocery shopping ho!

Over the past year we’ve gone from a no pets indoors family to having 1 mamma cat, a 4 month old kitten and three fuzzy little baby fatty kittens. Needless to say – there’s a lot of action underfoot these days. More than that, the baby fatties have just started eating solids, meaning they’ve needed to be litter trained. Our litter box has been bulging at the seams and very aromatic. We use the scoopable litter so that we don’t have to throw out so much everytime, but it does become odourous.

The other day we were at the Princess Auto and I spotted a HUGE bag of chunk diatomaceous earth. Ever heard of it? We use it in it’s finely ground form to dust the cows and dog down for bugs, and it can be given internally for parasites as well. This bag was full of the chunky stuff, never seen it before. Marketed mainly for oil spills, it also touted it’s odour absorbing abilities, only $13.99/big bag, 15 K I think – approx. 33 lbs for my US friends. I think it’s called Ultrasorb, look for it where automotive supplies are sold, their main marketing thrust is cleaning up toxic liquids, throw this stuff on, watch it suck up, sweep and throw away.

We’d been sprinkling baking soda in the litter to keep odours down (Yes, we do change it regularly! That doesn’t eliminate all of the odors though!), but you can’t get 20 K of baking soda for $13.99, well I can’t anyway. This stuff works GREAT! I can’t believe the difference, and I’m very thankful. It’s actually a bit cheaper than the scoopable kitty litter per weight, and it’s not very heavy for the volume of it – absorbing rock must be pretty porous, no?

Anyways, thought this hint might be helpful to other families with stinky kitties in the house! Life can now be a little less stinky.