Quote Originally Posted by devoidapop View Post
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Gotta say though, no chance I'm scrubbing with a pine cone. That's one step up from a wood rasp
Sorry, make that an European Spruce, the most common tree in the Alps.
Cones are smooth.

Regarding germs, we had a very interesting experiment at school 40yrs back:
The Biology professor setup a bunch of AgarAgar dishes and we were free to stick every nasty thing into them we could find. The nastiest we found was an old drinking straw stuck in a floors gap.
One mate right coming back from the toilet (and he confirmed he had washed his hands with water and soap) we asked to print his fingers onto the Agar (several others stuck their thumb in there, too)
Next week we were ready to look at the developed germ cultures:
The drinking straw hadn't provided any germs.
Most other dishes were so-so.
But by far the worst was the one from the toilet-user.
Obviously the towel the guy had used after washing had brought the worst germs.