Category Archives: Green Ideas

Chillin’ out

Are you paying to heat an empty building during the day?

When we leave for work in the morning on cold winter days, we push our thermostat down to 55° F, if not a little lower (depending on where you live and how cold it gets, turning the heat off entirely could lead to frozen pipes).  Since I don’t work on Fridays anymore, I experimented and discovered that 55° F works when I’m home during the day, too!  It’s best when I’m moving around cleaning and such, but I’m okay for medium-length periods sitting at the computer, too.

Think 55° F is extreme?  Check out this NYTimes article about people choosing to live with NO heat.  They inspire me to stick with the low temps around here.

However,  I take issue with the woman who lets her faucets continually drip to keep the pipes from freezing — saving energy by not heating, but wasting water.  Is the energy saved greater than the water wasted?  Is it more important to conserve one than the other?  How do you make that comparison?

Snotty

Cheery
Cheery

Fortunately, I rarely succumb to illness, but I’ll make the best of my current head cold by posting about the color and quantity of my snot handkerchiefs (if you were curious about the other, you’ll just have to stay that way).  I married into a wonderful handkerchief collection, most of them homemade.

Before I discovered handkerchiefs, I used toilet paper, not because it was greener, but because it was cheaper than tissue/Kleenex.  Handkerchiefs achieve the dual goals of being green environmentally and economically — save the paper from the trees and the paper in your wallet!

As a side note, for the majority of the time, I use handkerchiefs for the little sniffles here and there, usually allergy related.  I launder them in cold water, as I do most everything.  Cold water works for most laundry, and you don’t even need to buy that special laundry soap they sell!

To make sure that my current germ-infested handkerchiefs get nice and clean, without using extra resources, I’m trying a little trick that I read about for cleaning cloth diapers.  Soak the diapers, or handkerchiefs, in this case, in the bathtub after you finish bathing.  You reuse the warm, slightly soapy bathwater to jump-start the cleaning process.  I’m not sure how I would feel about doing this with actual diapers, with poop residue and such on them, but it’s a great idea for the handkerchiefs.

Carbon pawprint – link correction

Howdy.  According to the little fairies that live inside the internet, someone tried to access the article that I linked to in my “Carbon Pawprint” posts, and the link was bad.  Here is a link to the same article on another website for your reading pleasure!  My apologies for the bad link — rest assured that I will punish it accordingly.

Locavore in winter

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about food, but have no fear — we’re still eating!  All of the work cleaning, cutting, blanching, and packaging vegetables and fruit really pays off during the winter.  We have frozen fruit and basil (oh, the basil!) to last until late spring (and we’re still getting local apples!).  We’re rapidly eating our way through the frozen vegetables (we knew we would not have enough to get us through the winter), but we still have a lot of butternut squash.

I highly recommend the butternut squash because it requires approximately zero effort to store — just hang it in mesh bags in the basement (to reduce the bruising that would occur if you just placed it on a shelf), and you’re good to go!  Locally grown dried beans, local eggs, and our canned pasta sauce round out the stock piles.  Oh, and the potatoes, I almost forgot the potatoes.  We have made a big dent in the 200 pounds of potatoes we harvested, but we still have some left.  At this point, we’ll be able to plant some of them as seed potatoes for this year’s crop.

Obviously, we’re not eating everything local.  I shop at the regular old grocery store for grain (including flours, pasta, etc.) and soy milk.  We finished our local onions, so those are a grocery store purchase, also.  We’re looking into a source for local, organic, pastured cow’s milk.

We continue to enjoy the monthly winter farmers’ markets.  At the January markets, we found unexpected windfalls of fresh spinach (thanks to tunnels, hoop houses, or something of the sort) — this has to be some of the best spinach ever!  Anything fresh, green, and local in the middle of January qualifies as special — bring on the salad!

Foiled

I spent a good bit of the weekend preparing to have worms.  Two weekends ago, I finished my homework (reading Worms Eat my Garbage), and this past weekend was action time.  Finding newspaper without colored ink proved to be the biggest challenge.  I thought black ink would predominate in newspapers, because colored ink is more expensive, and newspapers are struggling financially, right?  Think again!  I hunted through a lot of newspaper to get 4-5 pounds of black and white pages.  After wasting some time, and diminishing the life of my scissors, by cutting the paper into strips, I brilliantly discovered that newspaper easily tears into nice, uniform strips.

When I looked into buying worms, the prices surprised me, and not in a good way.  The best price I found was $27/pound through an online supplier.  I feared that ordering them in the dead of winter would result in a pound of worms that were, well, dead (and crunchy), so I pursued a closer to home option — getting a start from someone’s worm bin.  I was skeptical that the coffee can or bucket of “stuff” they offered would contain a sufficient number of worms, but hey, the price was right (free), so I decided to give it a try.

By late Sunday afternoon, the worm home I lovingly prepared was ready to go, and I biked over to pick up my new friends . . . only to be greeted by a worm bin that improperly maintained.  I wanted to yell, “You’re doing it all wrong!” because it was obvious that they hadn’t read The Book.  Now, I was getting these worms from complete strangers that I met through a neighborhood listserv, so I politely accepted a small-ish container of the “contents” of their bin and mentioned that I read the book Worms Eat my Garbage, which I found quite helpful.  I returned home with a smelly container — vermicomposting done correctly should be odor free, or nearly so — with perhaps five worms, or about 0.5% of the worms I wanted to start my project.

So, I return to the drawing board as far as acquiring my starter worms.  Meanwhile, I hope that all of those soggy newspaper strips will dry so that I don’t have to start that process from scratch!