I recently moved to a home with a garden for the first time, which means that I’ve got a little patch of patio in the back. I’m looking forward to getting the patio furniture out and enjoying al fresco dining this summer — but my new patio needed a bit of work before it was ready for hosting.

As we moved in, my father-in-law kindly cleared all the weeds for us, but the actual patio paving stones were still coated in moss and algae. After a little internet research, I discovered that you can use soda crystals to clean up a patio, which I already had in my pantry and are a lot cheaper than patio cleaning fluid.

Soda crystals are also more environmentally friendly than harsh cleaning chemicals and are non-toxic to people, which is very important for someone like me, with a baby who is just learning to crawl. If you have pets, though, you may want to keep them indoors while using soda crystals to clean your patio, as they can be toxic to animals.

Soda crystals (also known as washing soda, sodium carbonate, or soda ash) are similar to baking soda, but with a higher pH. If you don’t already have some at home, you should! They’re cheap and versatile. 

As well as cleaning your patio, soda crystals can be used to strip laundry and towels, unclog drains, and make an all-purpose spray. The other benefit to using soda crystals to clean the patio is that it can kill any weeds that are growing between paving stones, too.

So I decided to give cleaning my patio with soda crystals a go — and it actually worked surprisingly well. I tested the method out on one stone slab first, and now that I can see how well it worked, I’m going to clean up the whole patio using soda crystals.

Here’s how you can clean your patio with soda crystals, step by step, so it’ll be clean this summer.