Washing Dishes at the Campground
We brought a dish sponge and a 4-ounce bottle of Dr. Bronner's Pure-Castile Soap for washing dishes. This soap is good for everything and has been around for years. It is safe for the environment, so we don't have to worry as much about our dishwater if there's not a designated dishwashing sink at the campground.
Some campgrounds will have a dishwashing station in front of the bathrooms, which is amazing because they usually get hot water, but this is not often the reality.
If you have a large group and a lot of dishes, you'll want to find a different method, but for our small family this works well. Usually we only have silverware, between one and three pots depending on how elaborate the meal was, cooking utensils, and possibly cups and marshmallow sticks to wash.
First I heat some water on the stove or over the fire in the largest pot, then put some soap on the sponge. I wash all the other dishes, then pour the water from the pot over them to rinse. If there is a water spigot at my campsite, I'll either do it there if there is good drainage or try to spread it around a bit off the edge of the campsite, rather than dumping a bunch of water in one spot.
If food is sticking to the pot, I add a little soap and some water and put it on the stove to heat up and scrape it with a metal spoon before trying again with the sponge. These few dishes didn't take very long to wash. Even adding plates for everyone wouldn't have been too much.
It's important to wash the dishes immediately after your meal, because leaving them has two drawbacks. First, the food hardens, sticks, and becomes difficult to wash off later. Second, if you leave dirty dishes around your campsite, you will attract animals that you don't want to have nosing around your things.
Most of the RVers seem to do their dishes inside their RVs, as they have water there and can dump their wastewater when they leave the campground, so the dishwashing area is really only shared by the tent campers, who are often very few, depending on how the campground is organized.
The things to remember when washing dishes at a campground are:
1. don’t attract wild animals by leaving dirty dishes sit out
2. be conscious of how much water you use and where you dump it
3. use an environmentally- friendly soap.
