Archive for the ‘The 3 R's’ Category

Finally we are getting some rain. Oh, I know some parts of the country are getting way more than they need but for those of us in parts of the country where rain is scarce, we welcome every drop.

It’s time to think about how to capture this precious water any way we can, so that we can reuse it and disperse it in our gardens when the rain is not so forthcoming. The best way to do this I found is to use a Rain Barrel. I found this really attractive one over at the Garden Supermart, it has a Crown Planter that allows you to put a plant on top for a more attractive look than an average planter, it comes in two versions a 50 gal one and a 65 gallon one, with a spigot at the bottom, a connector with shut-off valve and a 6′ garden hose. Many more tips on Living Green can be found at the Garden Supermart.

Another way to save water during the rainy season is to have a rain sensor on your sprinkler system. So many times do I see sprinklers going on in the middle of a rain shower, what a waste. If you are not home to monitor when your sprinklers go off, a rain sensor will do that for you, so you don’t have to watch water and money go down the drain.

Collected rain water can not only be used for watering plants but also for washing driveways, cars, walkways, dogs, gardening tools. Use your imagination and I am sure you can come up with many other uses recycling rain water.

gardensupermart.com rain barrel recycling rain water water conservation

bibi

Comments (3)

In honor of Earth Day: Take a few Green Steps…

Give the Earth Some Love…

Walk to work or play. With the price of gas these days, taking this step won’t be as difficult as it seemed before. Take a walk on the wild side, walk to work, the grocery store, the library, the kids school. Who knows maybe you will like it, and will continue the trend, it’s not only good for the environment, but also good for your health.

Earth Day Footprint : Want to know what kind of a footprint you are leaving on this earth? Check out the Ecological Footprint Quiz over at Earthday.net, and here is a version of a Ecological Footprint Quiz for Kids over at Kidsfootprint.org

Buy Local but watching what you buy is just as important: If your food comes from afar, you can be sure that energy was spent to get it to you, but also the type of food you eat can make a difference… Check out this article over at GreensSAHM.com ” it’s not so much where your food comes from, it’s what you’re eating.”

Read Green and Make Some Money while your at it: Intriguing book by author David Bach discussed over at TheGoodeLife.com covers 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth (and Get Rich Trying)!

Save Gas: Don’t Turn Left: Huh????? Groovy Green has a story on how UPS saves gas…UPS-No Left Turns Allowed

It’s not all about “Good Energy Policy” : Follow the reasoning of the “No Impact Man” for whether Individual Lifestyle Changes will make a difference.

Get rid of those water bottles: give up convenience for the environment. Here are 5 good reasons to give them up on Earth Day… from LighterFootstep.com

Lose those Hazardous Chemicals : Learn to identify hazardous chemicals and replace them with greener, healthier ones that do the job just as well. Clean Green to Stay Healthy and Save Money

Earthday is the perfect day to start a garden, an Organic Garden at that. Here are some great tips for doing just that.

Put the Three R’s to work: How about Reduce,Reuse, and Recycle. Salvage Yard finds are a great place to start putting some Green Style in your home…

Noise Pollution: Imagine a world without noise. GreenLivingTips.com makes some great points on the effects of Noise on the Environment. Make Earth Day your No Noise Day…

Anything you and I can do, will help…

earth day environment green day

bibi

Post a Comment

 

 

This Earth Day Live Lighter, Live Happier.

This spring in honor of Earth Month, why not adopt some new habits to help to lighten your impact on the environment?Try our tips to cut down on your paper, plastic and water consumption - we promise you won’t miss it. Plus, you’ll do a world of good!

Celebrate National Reusable Bag Day with Earth Share on April 21!
Help Earth Share and Earthwise Bag Company promote the use of reusable bags in honor of the second annual National Reusable Bag Day!Many grocery stores have implemented bag recycling programs, but transportation of these bags to and from stores requires valuable resources. And 99% of the 100 billion plastic shopping bags used in the U.S. are never recycled, with a single bag taking up to 1,000 years to fully break down. What can you do?
Bring your own cloth or fabric bags when you shop! If you grocery shop once a week, in five years you’ll have kept about 250 to 1,000 grocery bags out of our landfills. When one ton of plastic bags is reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil is saved! Look for Earthwise reusable bags in more than 2,000 retail locations across the country throughout the month of April - your purchase of these bags will help support Earth Share. Learn more: www.reusablebagday.org
Re-use the plastic bags you already have: - Old bags make great in-car trash containers. - Use them as shoe protectors in the garden. - Re-use them to clean up kitty litter, or to pick up dog droppings when walking your pet. - Use them in your smaller waste bins around the house. - Fill a few with shredded paper and tie them off for cheap, reusable packing materials. They’re also a handy way to maintain the shape of your favorite tote. - Cut a slit in your bags and use them to protect clothes from dust, moths, and other pests. - Take them with you for easy disposal of diapers.

Don’t Wallow in Water Waste
	Try implementing these handy water-related energy tips at home. These quick fixes take little to no time at all!In the shower - If you have to mix your hot water with cold, your thermostat is up too high and you are wasting energy. Why heat up water just to cool it down? Simply adjust the thermostat in your water heater to your perfect temperature. In the washing machine - Using cold water instead of warm cuts down on energy use by 90%! In fact, using cold water is often better for your clothes.
In the bottle - Buy a water filter and drink water from the tap in a reusable bottle — that’s where 40 percent of all bottled water comes from anyway. The average American drinks 22.6 gallons of bottled water a year. Making all that plastic releases over four pounds of carbon dioxide per person and consumes a surprising amount of petroleum (.005 barrels, or nearly a quart of oil per person).

 

Organic & ‘Eco-Chic’ Gifts for Mother’s Day or Any Day!
			Tulips bring lasting joy to that special someone! Reflecting the vibrancy of nature, our tulips are also certified organic. With each purchase of any tulip bouquet Organic Bouquet will include a FREE vase plus give a 10% donation to Earth Share when you visit through this link: www.organicbouquet.com/earthsharetulips Rarity within Reach.Renaissance Diamonds offers a beautiful and earth-friendly alternative to traditionally mined diamonds and is a proud supporter of Earth Share! Find out about jewelry made with lab-grown Gemesis Cultured DiamondsTM. www.earthshare.org/marketplace.html

Earth Share, a federation of America’s leading non-profit environmental and conservation charities, promotes environmental education and charitable giving in workplace employee giving campaigns. For more tips and to find out how your workplace can help the earth, visit www.earthshare.org or call 1.800.875.3863″

earth day reuseable bags water conservation

bibi

Post a Comment

I was watching today a show on the DIY channel called From Junky to Funky. What they do on the show is find what some would consider junk and repurpose those items into something useful. Like in the picture above from MyGreenGarden.ca What a great idea to recycle old items and wouldn’t it be great if we all did that, it would sure keep a lot out of the landfill. So this is the first of the Junky To Funky Series and we will start in the garden.

When you think about redesigning your Garden, start with the 3R’s of the environment. Reduce/Reuse/Recycle. Go around the house, the garden and all the sheds you have and look at everything with a fresh eye. Look at all the “stuff” you have and ponder what you could use it for that maybe it was not designed for.

• An old pile of bricks, could be turned into a new patio/dining area or maybe a path.
• An extra piece of wood fencing could be turned into a table top.
• Old chipped flower pots that are no longer pleasing to the eye, could still be used as planters, but bury them in the ground instead for easy planting and removal of annuals.
• Old pressure treated fence posts could be used to mark the perimeter of planting beds, or used as steps in an incline.
• Old Patio furniture can be revamped with new Garden Furniture Cushions and a little paint.
• Old wrought iron fencing can be used as a trellis to train vines or as decoration on an outside wall.
• Old tires can be reused as planters.
• Turn an old hose into a soaker hose, simply use a whole punch to punch wholes in it at different intervals, lay it in a planting bed around the flowers, then turn the water on, on a timer.
• Broken up concrete can be used as stepping stones.
• If you hand your clothes out to dry, use an old bleach bottle with a handle and cut a big opening opposite the handle. Place your clips in there and before you put up your line, thread the line through the handle of the bottle , and now you have the clips handy as you are hanging the laundry.
• Another use for used plastic water bottles, is to cut the bottoms off, leave the cap off and bury upside down next to water thirsty plants, that way the water goes straight to their roots and you wont need to water so often.
• Spare wood can be turned into bird houses.
• Hang an old mirror on the side of a shed, it will give the garden a new perspective.
• Old paint cans can be decorated,, filled with sand and used for keeping your small gardening tools in so that they don’t get rusty.
• Create a Compost bin out of some old wood, anything organic can be thrown into the compost pile.
• Save old sheets for those freezing winter nights to protect you more delicate plants.
• An old wooden ladder can be used to decorate the side of a raised planting bed or hung up on a wall for architectural interest.
• Large pieces of broken colored glass can be used as a rain chain. Just wrap thin wire around the glass at different intervals then hang from a corner of the house of shed. Don’t forget to put something under it to collect the rain.
• Use old wine barrels to collect rain.

Put your noodle to work and you will find uses for all those old things, and make your garden more interesting to look at while helping out the environment at the same time.

If you have any other ideas please share them with us, in the comments…

http://www.customcushions.net/chair.aspx

environment garden recycle recycled art reduce reuse the 3rs

bibi

Comments (9)

Everyone loves to spend time outside and living green. And when our experience is in line with nature, it is all the more enjoyable. Even in our own little haven, our garden, we must conduct ourselves in a way that preserves and reduces any impact we have on our resources and our little environment.

When gardening , the predominant thought should be, if it didn’t come from the earth, it shouldn’t be going in the earth. In other words, pesticides and fertilizers are really poison to the earth and the ground water. They are manufactured chemicals that, yes, might make your grass greener or makes those pesky pests go away, but what are they doing to the earth under your feet and do you realize that all those chemicals eventually end up in the ground water.

The same goes for the hardscapes that we use in our gardens. Using products that have a minimal effect on the environment, like Sunbrella Outdoor Cushions on your patio furniture, choosing the right decking that uses recycled materials, and finding different uses for objects that would otherwise end up in the landfill is important.

Here are some steps we can all take to get closer to Living Green in our Garden:

• Reduce the area that you use for a lawn, lawns are water hogs.
• Plant more native and drought tolerant plants.
• Collect rain water.
• Learn to Compost, and use that to enrich and fertilize your soil.
• Use Mulch to help maintain moisture in your plant beds.
• Group plants together with the same water needs.
• Learn about using Beneficial Insects, instead of Pesticides
• Put old objects to new uses in the garden.
• Remember the 3R’s, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, also apply to gardening.
• Use recycled and environmentally materials in your hardscapes.

http://www.cushion.com/

green gardening organic gardening sunbrella water conservation

bibi

Post a Comment

Composting is not only a great way to fertilize your garden, save money by making your own natural fertilizer, but most importantly you are keeping all this stuff out of the landfills, which is becoming a problem in cities all over. It is in our best interest to learn how to composts, it’s part of the Three R’s of recycling.

If you are an avid gardener you understand the value of composting. But most of us regular folks who just dabble in gardening once a week, haven’t taken the time to fully understand what composting can add to the environment and keep away from the landfills.

Here are some of the benefits of composting:

• Using composting helps improve the structure, texture and aeration of soil, and helps in improving water retention in the soil.
  • Clay Soil : If you have Clay soil you know very well how hard it is to handle. It’s is extremely hard soil composting can help break up clay soil.
  • Sandy Soil: With sandy soil you know that the water just slips through, composting can help retain some of that water.
• Composting provides food for the microorganisms which help keep soil healthy and balanced.
• Nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus are produced by composting which eliminates the need to be adding other amendments to the soil, especially keeping out chemicals.
• Almost any organic material is food for the compost pile.
• Easy, just takes a little time investment.

For more information on how to start your own composting bin check out these resources:

• Compost Guide: A complete guide to composting
• U.S. EPA- Basic Information on Composting

composting recycling

bibi

Comments (5)

Start when they are small and you will create good recyclers. Teach them the three R’s of the Environment. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle… and our world will be the better for it…

1. Start a recycling program at pre-school or grade school with the participation of the school.
2. At home: Make Garbage/Recycling day a fun Family thing to do.
3. Find ways to recycle old things into new things, make projects out of them.
   • Recycle plastic bags into crotchet projects: Check out Myrecycledbags.com
   • Go around the house and discover things that are not being used and re-purpose them, and make a contest out of it. Who can find the most things to re-purpose.
4. Create a poster illustrating the recycling symbols and post it in the garage or wherever you keep your recycles and make it a game with rewards for the kids, to see who knows the symbols best.
5. Create art day at the house, challenge the kids to make art out of something old instead of throwing it away.
6. As a fundraising project for school, collect old cell phones with the kids and then sell them to a reseller. Check out : Greenphone
7. Next time you buy new electronics, start a neighborhood Recycle Your Electronics Drive. Check myGreenElectronics they can help you find an electronics recyclers in your area.
8. Have them count how many paper towels are used in a day at home, challenge them to find ways to reduce the consumption.
9. Start a compost bin in the garden, teach them the benefits of composting. Here’s a Composting Guide
10. Start a new Habit: “Cross the door, Flick the Switch” Meaning if your leaving the room, turn off the lights…

Waste not, want not…(grandma)
For more ideas: Green To Do List

conservation recycle reuse/reduce/Recycle

bibi

Comments (4)

As the old adage goes, one person’s junk is another’s treasure. You can turn your junk into a valuable commodity by “recycling” it in innovative and useful ways:

Share appliances with your neighbors. How often do you really use that steam carpet cleaner, shop vac, leaf or snow blower, circular saw or sewing machine? Chances are, many of your household appliances lie dormant until that time once or twice a year you pull them out for some special project. Why not start an appliance sharing program with some of your neighbors? You’ll save money, stretch scarce storage space and promote good will. Hold a yard sale. You’ll find plenty of relics that need a good home (yours not being one of them). Invite neighbors to bring along their vintage items, make it a community event and get ready to barter the day away! Give proceeds to your favorite charity or buy tree saplings to plant in your yard. Donate to your local non-profit thrift shop. Someone, somewhere will always find use for what you no longer need or want. Many local governments have created partnerships with Good Will, the Salvation Army, Purple Heart and other charities that encourage community residents to bag their donated goods and leave them for easy pick-up.   Earth Share, a federation of America’s leading non-profit environmental and conservation charities, promotes environmental education and charitable giving in employee workplace campaigns. For more tips or to find out how your workplace can help the earth, visit the “Get Involved” section of our website, or call (800) 875-3863.

environment recycle reduce reuse the 3 rs

bibi

Comments (1)