WHAT IS WHITEWASHING, ANYWAY?
You probably know what whitewashing is if you grew up on a farm and can remember the yearly visits of the whitewasher, whose job it was to chase the spiders out of the barn and make the inside of the building look good as new again. In case you don’t know what it is, however, whitewashing is simply an age-old, low-cost way of beautifying and sanitizing fences. outbuildings, and other structures that often need to be beautified and sanitized. Until not many years ago, the principal ingredient of most whitewashes vas lime (calcium oxide) . . . which is still used that way by many folks. Unfortunately, lime has one serious drawback: It’s highly corrosive. Which means it’s harmful to machinery, bad for animals (calves, lick everything around them, including whitewashed walls), and irritating to the skin and lungs of the person spraying it.
