Day 28 of our Green Year: Dandelion Tea

Now I know what a lot of you must be thinking. How is drinking Dandelion tea a way to go green?
Well, first of all we aren't going out to our yard and ripping them out of the lawn (from the roots), we are not preventing them from seeding and we certainly are not using herbicide to kill them. So, why not use something from the Earth to get something beneficial in your body?

The truth is that Dandelions are far from a weed, they are one of the best plants you can have for your body and they have been cultivated for literally thousands of years. Just a few of the benefits of Dandelion tea include:

• They are a source of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C and E
• They are rich in calcium, chromium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, selenium, silicon and zinc
• They are a laxative, cholertic, tonic antioxidant and an anti-inflammatory
• It is one of the best herbs you can have for gall, spleen and liver problems, and it can relieve symptoms of menstruation in women.
• They keep the liver at peak efficiency and they can purify and build blood when ingested and will even cleanse and regenerate cells. They help the pancreas and they absorb toxins in the bowel.
• Some even say it can help relieve diabetes when consumed as a tea or food on a regular basis.

So, we have decided to use it in tea instead of getting rid of it with herbicide or ripping it out by the roots.
To make dandelion tea, just follow these easy steps:

1. Pick five or six dandelions
2. Cut off the stems
3. Wash the heads slightly
4. Place the the heads in a cup
5. Pour boiling water on them
6. Let sit for 10 to 15 minutes
7. Enjoy!

That is all there is too it! Tea from your yard, free and very healthy!

If you are not into tea, then you can use young dandelion leaves in salad, you can steam them or you can add them to stir-fries.

You can even use the roots of the dandelion to make non-caffeine coffee by waiting until the plants are nine to twelve months old (growing inside). Then you roast them in the oven until they are a coffee colour, grind them and use them!

It is a plant we think of as a weed that actually has many uses and can be very green and beneficial to you. Give it a try and let us know what you think! Send us photos of you with your dandelion tea and we will post them on the blog!

Day 27 of our Green Year: Drinking Coffee The Green Way

With coffee, I am an addict. I will drink one to two pots per day and I simply love everything about coffee. However, despite this I am going green with it, as Layla is with her tea. How do you go green with coffee? Well, it is actually quite easy.

First of all, you want to buy local brews. These are brews that are roasted and made in your area. Talk to your local coffee shop to find out if they brew it locally and roast it locally. If they don't, try and find one that does.
Second, instead of going into Starbucks, with their oddly named cup sizes, to get a coffee, why don't you go in with a reusable mug. When you think about the waste that is generated by those mugs, it is quite amazing. You have the lid, container and safety wrap (keeps your hands from burning), which all contribute to waste.
Third, try and get organically grown and fair-trade grown coffee. We have decided to do that here by buying coffee from Kicking Horse Coffee Company, which is located in B.C., so we can kill three birds with one stone on that one.
Lastly, you want to compost your coffee grounds, as well as get a reusable coffee filter. There is no need to constantly buy coffee filters when you do not need to, and coffee grounds make a great compost material for the garden.

Also, in terms of coffee grounds, here are some great uses for it:

1. You can use it as plant food for rosebushes, azaleas, rhododendrons, evergreens and camellias that like acidic soil.
   
2. If you are having a problem with ants in the yard or house, then sprinkle some of the grounds in the areas you do not want them and they will not go anywhere near the grounds.
3. If you would like to make your own paper (an upcoming blog ;) ), then you can use coffee grounds as brown dye for paper, as well as fabric and Easter eggs.
4. Cats hate coffee grounds, so mix it with some orange peels and put it around your plants.
5. Mix some of the coffee grounds with some shampoo when you are giving your dog a bath, it will not only get rid of fleas, but it will make the dog's hair feel softer.

I would also like to give a shout out to a new affiliate of our blog, Eco-Libris. The people here are an environmental leader in that they will plant a tree for every book that you buy through them. As a book lover and a writer, this provides a wonderful solution to me as the books I buy end up costing a tree its life. Check out their website at: http://www.ecolibris.net/

Here is a list of coffee companies that practice the principles of fair trade and organically grown, courtesy of Treehugger.com:

Birds and Beans
Blue Smoke Coffee
Bodum
Cafe Bis
Cameron's Coffee
Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
The Groovy Mind
Grounds For Change
Kicking Horse Coffee
Merchants of Green Coffee
Newman's Own Organics
Simple Coffee
Solar Roast Coffee
Sweetwater Organic Coffee Roasters
Today Was Fun
Oso Negro

Day 26 of our Green Year: Limiting Our Showers

Wow, only a few days before we hit our first month of Our Green Year. Things are going well, we have our story in The Province (the largest paper in British Columbia) tomorrow, and we have been getting a lot of hits from Treehugger.com, so it is nice to be mentioned there as well.

Today, we decided to save some water, and the best way to do that is by limiting your showers. Typically, people will take a 10 to 15 min shower, and this wastes about 150 to 250 liters of water each time. Now, it is entirely feasible to have a shower, get yourself clean and wash your hair in five minutes, and when you do this you save 75 to 175 liters of water as a result. That may not seem like much, but here is a quick little lesson on water wasting:

• If you have a 20 min shower, you waste 300 liters of water. Multiply that over a week and you waste 2,100 liters of water. Multiply that over one year, and you waste 100,800 liters of water!
• If you have a 10 min shower, you waste 150 liters of water. Multiply that over a week and you have 1,050 liters of water. Multiply that over one year and you waste 50,400 liters of water.
• Now, if you have a five minute shower, then you use 75 liters of water. Multiply that over a week and you get 525 liters of water. Multiply that over one year and you will only use 25,200 liters. In fact, a five minute shower per day for a MONTH will use the same amount of water used in a 20 minute shower per day for a WEEK.
  

The water savings, which translate into money savings for you, amounts to 75,600 liters of water saved a year if you switch from a 20 minute shower to a five minute shower.
In our own house, we averaged 15 min showers, which came to 225 liters of water. Each day that meant we used 450 liters of water for the shower, which comes to 151,200 liters of water. Switching to five minute showers will save 145,800 liters of water each year here.

To ensure we follow this, we have bought an egg timer that will allow us to know when our five minutes is up.

Some more tips for saving water in the shower is to put a bucket in the shower with you. Let it fill up, then use that bucket to water your garden. Do not leave it in the shower if you are washing your hair or using soap.
You can also only shower a few times a week, like every second day. If you do that, you cut as much as 57 percent on your water.
Don't forget about showering together, that can save water too!

Day 25 of our Green Year: Building A Solar Cooker

Hey everyone,

Day 25 has come and it was a big one. To start, we took to task to build a solar cooker that would allow us to barbecue outside during the summer by using free and renewable energy; the sun. The solar cooker was built mostly by Layla who has a knack for these kinds of things. She was able to put it together using just reflective material, electrical tape and cardboard.
We tested it outside and within about 20 min it was over 200 degrees so we hope it works all right.
We will be posting up the steps to build the cooker soon and they will be displayed on a link to the side. Then you will be able to make the cooker yourself.
To build the whole thing, we did not spend over $20 so it is very affordable. We will post pics soon of how well it worked cooking. It may need fine tuning but overall it looks like it will work pretty well.

Also, thank you to Kate Webb from The Province newspaper here in B.C. This is a big paper and they were nice enough to do a story on us, which will appear on Tuesday. Kate also provided me with some links to other individuals who are living the green life:
No Impact Man - http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
Green As A Thistle - http://greenasathistle.com/

We should be using some ideas from those sites as well for our green initiative.

Stay tuned everyone as we begin to go more and more in-depth with the things you can build and use to help you go greener. We are hoping to make this an all encompassing year and want to cover everything, so thank you all for visiting.

Day 24 of our Green Year: Spreading Wellness

For Day 24 of our Green Year, Layla and I decided to do something simple by setting up a booth for a local environmental organization we volunteer for, Natural Control Alternatives, at the Trail Wellness Fair. This fair is put on to help promote wellness in body, mind and environment and Layla and I manned the booth for 5 hours and brought on two more volunteers!

Later on we did an interview with the local paper regarding the group and we did a tour of a ground squirrel mound that has been built to keep ground squirrels out of the cemetery area.

Thank you to everyone who has been providing tips and tricks to us, we will be using them in the future to help us in our Green Year. For all of you who have told others, thanks so much! The message is spreading!

Day 23 of our Green Year: Going Green On The Lawn

Well, with spring comes the time to mow our lawn, and since Layla and I have a large front yard and backyard, there is a lot of lawn to mow. That being said, we have decided we will not be mowing our lawn with a gas or electric mower, and have instead decided to go old school with our mower.

We will be using a Reel Mower, which is a mower that cuts grass as you push it around. The motor is you and they have been designed to be lightweight and easy to push around.
So now not only do we get great exercise pushing the mower around, but we also don't deal with gas at all, which means we do not put any CO2 into the atmosphere just so we can cut our grass.

We were quite surprised by prices for the mower, we thought they would be expensive but the one we are purchasing one for only $99 at Canadian Tire. These mowers have been proven to last longer than other mowers, if they are cared for properly, and they are even better for your lawn.
When most people cut their lawn, they cut it too short for one thing, but they also collect all the grass in bags and then dump it elsewhere. When you let the Reel Mower cut up the grass and leave it on the lawn, it creates a great natural mulching system that will actually help your lawn.

This is just the start of going green with our lawn. You can check back in the future as we use a rain barrel to deal with watering, we use natural fertilizers and more!

A traditional gas lawnmower puts 22 pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere for one hour use. This means, that if we mow the lawn, one hour every two weeks from April to September, that puts 264 pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is exactly what we are taking out of the atmosphere with our Reel Mower.

Some good news! We were awarded the Blog of the Day award from http://blogofthedayawards.blogspot.com/ so that is great! Word is getting out! Thanks everyone!

Day 22 of our Green Year: Cooling Down In A Green Way

Where we live, southern British Columbia, we deal with a lot of heat. While we are on top of a mountain, we enjoy not having hot nights but the days can get pretty hot and that presents a problem when you want to fight the heat. Down the road from us, there is a town where it gets to 40 degrees and where people leave the AC cranked all day long.

Nonetheless, where we are there are some air conditioners but not many, and for this day of our Green Year, we have decided to offer some tips we will be using to help beat the heat without the air conditioner.

Air conditions are horrible for the environment, and they cost you a lot of money on your energy bill. Instead, there are a few things you can do to beat the heat:

1. Insulate Your Home: Insulating your home helps keep it warm, but it can also keep it cool. Put in the right caulking and weather stripping and you will be able to keep the heat out during the summer time. You can also put trees up to shade your home, which can lower the temperature in your home by as much as 40 percent.
2. Open the windows on the ground floor of you house on one side only, then go to the top floor and open the windows on the opposite side. This will bring cool air into the bottom of your house and push the warm air out the top (hot air rises remember). Put some fans pointing inward on the window sill downstairs and outward upstairs to help make things work a bit better. (See diagram above)
   
3. Close blinds on your large picture windows. This will prevent a lot of heat from coming into your home, it will get dark but it is not the end of the world.
4. Keep anything that generates heat off, throughout your home. This is everything from lights, clothes dryer and more. These things will actually increase the heat in your home and make things a lot hotter.
5. Drinking water will cool you down because your body will feel cooler and refreshed. Having hot clam chowder and hot tea is only going to make you feel, well, hot.
6. Heat is a state of mind. If you simply try and ignore it, you will but if you focus on it and whine about it, the heat will bother you all that much more.
7. It is going to get cold in the winter and you will wish it was hot, so just enjoy the heat while it is there. It is going to be hot, that is what summer is.

You can be assured Layla and I will be implementing all these measures in our house and in no way will there be a air conditioner running inside of it.

Day 21 of our Green Year: Recycling Package Material

Three weeks! That is the point we have hit now and we are happy to be continuing on this amazing journey of environmental discovery, meeting new people and helping new people learn about the many things we can all do to help Mother Nature.

As professional writers, Layla and I will often receive books in the mail for which we are supposed to use for research on certain projects. As well, we love books and we often order a few every few months from Amazon.com to help fuel our creative and literary juices.
However, we have begun to think, as part of our green year, about the problem these can create for the environment, when we waste a lot of packaging to hold a few items.

So, for Day 21, we are going to start recycling our packaging material.
First, you can reuse the packaging material to send a package you may need to send to someone. This will save you money from not having to get packaging, and it helps the environment by reusing the item. Of course, you can't just hold onto all these boxes and package material for months on end, unless you want your house to look like a pigsty.

You can also find out if any of your friends, co-workers or family need any boxes or packaging material. If they do, then you simply need to provide some of your excess to them. This may not happen often, as no one wants a bunch of packaging material in their office, but you never know. It is better than putting it in the landfills where it can pile up and become a growing problem.

Now, you can recycle everything in the packaging material, including the bubble wrap and foam inside. You simply need to find a recycling center in your area that will accept it and then you can drop it off. This is by far the best option because you are not contributing at all to waste and you are not adding bubble wrap, boxes and foam filler to your office closet.

This may seem like a rather small thing to focus on when we have talked about saving trees and more, but the truth is that we have to alter everything about our lives in order to help the environment, and everything from recycling bubble wrap to driving less play into making the environment healthy and saving our civilization from an ecological disaster.

Day 20 of our Green Year: Greening Up Mother's Day

One of the most important days of the year is here and with Mother's Day arriving we have decided to try green methods to getting mom a Mother's Day present. While you could get her perfume that contains harmful chemicals, jewelry that is taken from the ground in massive holes that look like scars on the surface of the Earth, or any number of environmentally-unfriendly gift ideas, you could instead go green for Mother's Day, as we have.

Both Layla and my mothers live in Edmonton, but both are coming to visit us at the end of the month and that is when we will be presenting them with their green gifts. What green gifts can you use? Well, there are actually plenty.

1. Flowers are a great gift because they are green, beautiful and they smell nice. Try and buy locally to support your local retailers, but if you can, grow them yourself and transplant them to a pot for your mom. If you can, buy your mom some potted plants. As we have discussed in the blog, this is a great way to clean up the air and green up the Earth.
2. Plant a tree for her. This is one of those special kinds of gifts that few people seem to think about. When you plant a tree for your mom, you are not only helping take CO2 out of the air and putting out oxygen instead, you are also putting up a living reminder of your mother. Four decades down the road after she is passed on, you can go to that tree and remember the day you planted it for her.
3. Try and make her something by using things you have in your own home. Using some arts and craft supplies, you can make a great picture frame out of branches on the ground, or you can make her a wonderful wind chime using tin, wood or other supplies.
4. Candles are a great choice because moms love candles. Get ones that are earth-safe, usually made of soy or beeswax. These are great gifts for your mom because they are green, they look good and if they are scented, they smell good.
5. Birdhouses are also a good choice. Not only do you give her something to help add life to the yard, you are providing a home for birds who may have lost their home to urban sprawl.

Day 19 of our Green Year: Vinegar For The House

We are nearly to our twentieth day of our Green Year, and for this day we are going to talk about vinegar and how it really is one of the best environmental things you can buy for your house. The number of uses it has is really amazing when you think about all that it can do, and by using vinegar you can actually stop using many of the other cleaning products that carry harmful chemicals.

Now, when you buy vinegar, be sure to find out what brand you are buying because some come from fossil fuel products, which negates using it as an environmentally friendly solution in the house. To find out how to make your own vinegar, visit this site: http://www.vinegarman.com/VinegarMaking.shtml

So, what are the uses of vinegar around the house?

• Instead of using paint thiner, use vinegar as it is much better than turpentine and is safer for both your hands and the environment.
• Mix it with water as we did earlier this week and you have a product that is much better than most cleaning products bought at the store.
• If you burn yourself, or have a bit of pain, you can use vinegar by soaking it on a cotton ball and putting that on the bruise or burn to quicken the healing.
• Fido pee on the carpet? Use vinegar to deal with it.
• If you have a stain, you can put vinegar on the stain before washing it, which is better than using the expensive and environmentally-harmful stain removal products on the market.
• It serves as a better fabric softener and uses about half the amount needed.
• In the kitchen and bathroom, you can use vinegar to deal with mold, stains and soap scum.
• If you have clogs in the drain, boil white vinegar and pour it down the drain to remove clogs without the need for Drain-O.
• If you want to cleanse your face or deal with dandruff, you can use vinegar instead of other expensive products.
• One of the most toxic items you will use is oven cleaner, but vinegar can actually work better in the stove simply by soaking stains in vinegar and then scrubbing them off.
• If you have a stinky room, put a bowl of vinegar in there to deodorize it. Both the vinegar smell and the bad odor will disappear in no time.

There are so many uses for vinegar, that many people really do not realize it. Give a try to some of these uses for vinegar and let us know how they work for you.

Thanks to AboutMyPlanet.Com for all these helpful tips!

Day 18 of our Green Year: Cooking Green

We have come to Day 18 of our Green Year and we move to the kitchen for our next bit of green change in the Baird household.
We know that the fridge and stove are big power consumers in the household. There is not much we can do about the fridge right now except upgrade it to an Energy Star appliance, but with the stove Layla and I have endeavored to use it as little as we can; instead, choosing to use a hot plate grill that allows us to cook nearly anything we need without ever using the stove. It uses much less power than the stove and in some ways, does a much better job.

Another thing we are doing is cutting down on the energy waste of our cookware. When we are cooking a little bit food, we won't use a large pot because the water takes longer to heat up and that means more work on the stove to do it. Instead, we are going to be using pots that are sized perfectly for what we need. We will also be upgrading our cookware so that it has a flat bottom, which provides more contact with the burner and allows it to cook the contents faster. We also will not be cooking anything on a burner that is larger than the pot; this is just a huge waste of energy.

We mentioned yesterday about solar cookers, which we will be building on our own and displaying, that will help us cut down on the use of the stove. Coupled with our reliance on the small grill, we will save quite a bit of energy in the kitchen simply by cooking smart and with the environment in mind.

Day 17 of our Green Year: Solar BBQing

For Day 17 of our Green Year, Layla and I are going to change our BBQing habits. While the barbecue is better than the stove in that it uses less energy and causes less pollution, it still is not the perfect option. This is why we have begun to look at solar cookers for our BBQing options. We do not have one yet, but we will be getting one soon to help use the most powerful form of energy we have at our disposal; the sun.

With charcoal, you get cheap fuel but it is very dirty. Each time you start cooking with charcoal, you are releasing soot and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. This may not seem like a lot from a BBQ on your deck, but multiply it by the millions who barbecue each day in North America and it becomes a problem.
As well, lump coal which is made from unprocessed charred wood is a big time cause of deforestation and greenhouse gases, while briquettes have a lot of wood scraps in them, which contain chemicals that were in the wood before it was chopped down. These carcinogenic fumes then go up to the closest thing to them; your nose.

Propane isn't as bad as charcoal, but it is not perfect by any means. It is more efficient than your stove, so if you can, use propane or natural gas.

The best option by far, and the option Layla and I will be going with, is a solar cooker. These amazing devices can cook with temperatures up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and they can be used to deep fry French fries, grill meat or bake items. You can bake, broil, boil or roast with these wonderful devices.
With a solar cooker, no fuel is burned and all it uses is the free solar energy we all have. It is perfectly environmentally friendly because no greenhouse gases are emitted, as well it uses less materials in its construction than barbecues do. They also last longer, roughly five times as long as a gas or charcoal barbecue.

There are two options for your solar cooker needs. You can buy one from www.solarcooking.ca, or you can make one using the plans and many of the recycled materials you have at home, from this website: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-and-Use-a-Solar-Oven

Layla and I will be making our own, so check out a future blog.

If you make a solar cooker from scratch through the plans in the website we provided, let us know and we will post a picture of you with it on our blog!

Day 16 of our Green Year: Recylcing E-Waste

As a former Information Technology graduate and network administrator, I have a few bits of electronics around my home. Old computers, old printers and the like. In the past, I have sadly simply thrown these items out. However, as part of our Green Year, both Layla and I have chosen not to do this anymore.
From this point on, we will be recycling our e-waste in an effort to take harmful items and chemicals out of the environment, and put old computers and other electronics to use as something else.

Currently, e-waste represents two percent of the trash in the landfills of the United States, however they represent 70 percent of all the toxic waste in America's landfills. As well, since China, India, Kenya and other third world countries don't have stringent environmental standards, e-waste is sent to them to process, often illegally. With the burning, disassembly and disposal of these items there, huge environmental and health problems result. The reason for this is that e-waste has large amounts of toxic items in them, including lead, mercury and cadmium. For example, a typical computer monitor is made up of six percent lead, usually in the glass. The lead and mercury can often leak into the soil and groundwater of these countries that handle e-waste.

On top of all this, e-waste is the fastest growing source of waste in North America, where only 11 percent of all e-waste is recycled. In one landfill in Vancouver, over 12,000 tonnes of computer equipment was dumped in 2004. E-waste does not decompose, so centuries after it was used, computers will still sit, with their chemicals seeping into the ground and air around them.

From now on, in our household we will recycle all our old electronics to eliminate this problem and we hope you do too.

Day 15 of our Green Year: No more bottled water

We have hit our two-week mark and are very happy with the progress we are making with our Green Year. For today, we have decided to rid ourselves of bottled water. Why have we chosen to do this for our fifteenth day? Well, bottled water is a huge environmental problem for the world right now, yet people prefer to have bottled water instead of tap water. Thirty years ago if you told people we would buy bottled water, they would call you nuts, now it is the norm. So, what does bottled water do to our environment?

Every single year, 1.5 million tons of plastic is used to bottle 89 billion liters of water. This is an immense amount. This amounts to the same amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls over the course of two entire days. When you have seen Niagara Falls and the 500,000 liters of water that flow over it every second, you realize just how much water that is.

In the United States, the Earth Policy Institute has estimated that the process to make the plastic for water bottles, burns 1.5 million barrels of oil, which could power 100,000 cars for a year. This is made even worse when you realize that 90 percent of the plastic bottles are not recycled, and sit in landfills where they will slowly decay for centuries.

Instead of using bottled water over and over again, you can simply have one bottle that you clean out, which you fill with water when you need it. There is no reason to have so many water bottles being thrown out over the course of a year, it is the utmost in waste and a huge problem for the environment.

No more water bottles will be entering this house.

Day 14 of our Green Year: Washing Windows The Eco-Way

For our 14th day of our Green Year, we decided to take the suggestion of one of our readers, which was to wash your windows without using paper towels. It is hard to say how many trees are cut down each year to make paper towels, but it probably numbers in the millions. Like toilet paper, it is something we use briefly before we get rid of it and it is a huge waste. Most people do not recycle their paper towels and only a few buy recycled paper towel. Here are some statistics of what can be saved, simply by replacing your current paper towel and toilet paper with recycled paper from Seventh Generation.

• One million trees would be saved if every U.S. household replaced just one 250-count package of virgin fiber napkins with 100 percent recycled ones.
• 544,000 trees would be saved by replacing a 70-sheet roll of virgin fiber paper towels with recycled.
• 424,000 trees would be spared by replacing a 500-sheet roll of virgin fiber toilet paper with recycled.
• 170,000 trees would be saved by replacing one 175-count box of virgin fiber facial tissue recycled.

You can also use a very eco-friendly solution, which is to use a clean sock to clean the window as one of our readers suggested. It will work great, and when you use a mixture of vinegar and water it creates a wonderful clear window (the smell will go away if you open the windows). Windex, while it has improved greatly for the environment, is still laden with some chemicals.

Have more suggestions for us? Let us know so we can implement them in future blog posts!

Day 13 of our Green Year: Controlling Pests Naturally

As you have read in previous entries, Layla and I are going natural with a garden in our backyard. We are doing it to help the environment, as well as save costs for ourselves with rising fuel and food costs.
As we grow the garden, we are beginning to find ways to get rid of pests, without worrying about hurting the environment. We have chosen not to use pesticides or anything else chemical, and are choosing natural ways to protect our garden plants.

As a result, we have a list of the things you can do to keep pests out of your garden and keep your garden looking lush.

1. If you have cats going in your garden and using it as a litter box, you can circle the garden in lemon peels, or you can put together an orange peel/coffee ground mixture and scatter it around the garden. Can't will not go in as a result.
2. Fill some grocery sacks with air and tie them shut. Afterwards, place stakes around your garden and tie the bags to them. The rustling sound it creates will scare rodents and birds away.
3. If you have birds taking your strawberries, then simply get some small stones and paint them red and put them around the plants. The birds will eventually tire with trying to eat the 'hard strawberries' and will move on.
4. Insects cause a lot of problems in the garden, and if you have spider mites, just spray leftover coffee where they are and they should leave. You can also create a mixture that will get spider mites off your plants. The mixture is 1/2 cup buttermilk, 4 cups of wheat flour and five gallons of water (try to use rain water). Spray it on your garden and you should be able to keep spider mites out, as well as ants, caterpillars and cabbage worms.
5. You can mix up black pepper and flour and sprinkle it around your plants to keep the insects out.
   
6. If slugs are moving into your garden, simply take an old recycled sandpaper disk, cut it open and put it around the plant. Slugs won't cross the sandpaper.
7. Plant garlic throughout your garden. Doing this will keep insects out of it because they do not like the smell or taste.
8. While some bugs are bad for the garden, others help. Spiders eat insects that destroy plants, so to encourage them, lay some mulch at the beginning of the year. This will attract them and they will eat the aphids that come into the garden.
9. Are dogs digging in your garden? If they are, you just have to mix a clove of garlic, onion, Tabasco sauce and cayenne pepper in a bucket of water. Let it steep, then let it dribble into the garden where you don't want the dogs. If you have cats digging in your garden, then use powdered mustard and flour instead of garlic and onions to deter them. Mice will keep out of the garden, as will squirrels because the sauce, powder and pepper will stick to the bottom of their feet, which will frustrate them and keep them away.
10. Spray vinegar at the base of trees and walls to keep cats away and hide the scent of tomcats who have been in the area.
    

These are just a few of the natural ways you can keep your garden safe without killing anything, or resorting to chemicals.

Day 12 of our Green Year: Planting Trees

Well, the day finally came when we could go out and plant some trees, so we took the time to go off into the mountains around our town and plant some pine trees in the forest.
We wanted to make sure they survived, so we picked areas that were away from trails, but were also open so that the pine trees would not be choked out by the larger trees.

These pine trees will help to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, put more oxygen into it and assist the environment by providing a habitat for everything from insects and squirrels to chipmunks and birds.
In all there was seven trees planted, over a wide area.

Planting trees is one of the best things you can do for the environment because every day, too many trees to count are cut down to be used for everything from houses to toilet paper in our society.
You may want to plant a tree yourself. It can be done to signify a marriage, birthday, birth or death, and it helps the environment immensely. Think of how cool it will be to come see the tree you planted on the 1st birthday of your son, when your son is 31 years old!

Do the world a favour, plant a tree. We did seven times and that is seven more trees helping to fight global warming.

Day 11 of our Green Year: Tin Can Uses

Everyone know that you should recycle your tin, aluminum and glass containers, but surprisingly very few people do it.
As part of our Green Year, Layla and I are making the effort to recycle everything that we can, including tin cans, aluminum cans and glass jars. However, the whole point of this blog is to show ways that things can be done that help the environment, and there is nothing better for the environment that recycling items into new items for your home.

So, Layla is making pen jars that can be sold through request to us through the blog (quite cheaply) and through a local farmer's market. By taking the cans we have and converting them into something else, that is a little bit less energy used to create containers for pens, knick-knacks, junk and more. The one on the left is made from a tin can, the one on the right, a Pen Monster, is made from a glass jar.

Recycling your tin cans, either through a recycling program or by turning them into things you can use in your home, is incredibly important. Each year, 15 billion cans are simply thrown away. This is very unfortunate because recycling one tin can can save enough energy to power a TV for three hours, while the average American throws away six pounds worth of tin cans every single month!
Make sure to recycle the tin, aluminum and glass in your home and try to be creative to create things out of those cans that can be of use to you in your house. The Earth will thank you.

Here are just a few of the uses you can get out of cans and jars:

1. Plant Pot
2. Candle Holder
3. Pencil Holder
4. Portable Compost Container
5. Edge your garden with tin cans to create a unique marker
6. Gift Box
7. Soap Container

Here are a few uses for cans and jars from the Home and Garden Network:

1. Tomato juice cans covered in pretty fabric or ribbon make great wine holders for gifts.
2. Make a picnic holder from two coffee cans and four soup cans. Spray paint them in fun colors and hot glue them together. Place paper plates and napkins in the large cans and flatware in the small ones. The wind won't blow them away.
3. Make a decorative umbrella holder from four coffee cans. Open both ends, hot glue them together end-to-end, and cover them with adhesive-backed paper. Leave the end on the bottom can for a base.
4. Use a large coffee can to make "round" bread. Remove both ends and lay on the side while baking.

As well, here is a great sight for creating tin can lanterns, great for Halloween or other holidays:
http://www.crafty-moms.com/tin-can-luminary.shtml

Day 10 of our Green Year: Starting the Garden

As part of our Green Year, Layla and I have decided to put in a garden. We are doing this for a variety of environmental reasons, as well as to help save some money on the rising costs of food.
When you put in a garden in your backyard, on a windowsill or on your deck, you are actually giving Mother Nature a helping hand.

It may not be hard to see why a garden is something good for the environment, but here are just some of the reasons Layla and I have decided to put a garden in the back and in the front of our house:

1. When you grow a garden, you are helping take CO2 out of the atmosphere through the plants that grow in the garden. As well, you reduce food miles because now the effort to transport food to your home is zero.
2. We will not be using pesticides in our garden and it will all be organic, which means less pesticides in our bodies and the air of our planet.
3. Gardens are habitats for a wide variety of insect species. Instead of trying to get rid of them with chemicals, we are going to try to use natural messages to deal with them.

To deal with our garden, we will be watering minimally, using rain water to water the garden, and we will be composting certain food scraps and other compostable items and using that in the garden instead of buying fertilizers. This will help the soil and the plants, while recycling waste products such as used vegetables and fruits.

If you have any area in your yard, deck or window sill, build yourself a garden. It can be a flower garden to help pollinating insects, it can be vegetables that will put organic food in your diet, or it can be a mixture.
Gardens are easy to make, fun to maintain, the rewards are beautiful and the garden produce tastes great.

Day 9 of our Green Year: Milk Jug Flower Pots

Nearly every home buys milk, and many often buy them in the 4 Liter milk jug size. However, these milk jugs are often not recycled. Sadly, they often end up in landfills, or simply thrown away to sit for decades as they slowly decay. It does not have to be this way, and Layla and I have already committed to recycling our milk jugs. However, we thought we would also go one step further and starting turning our milk jugs into something useful.
There are really countless things that you can use a milk jug for if you don't recycle it, but here are a fraction of the ones Layla and I have initiated in our house.

1. You can poke holes in them and turn them into a great watering can for the garden. Leave them sitting outside (securely so they don't blow away) and let rain water fall in them. This then gives a double-whammy for the environment because you are using rain water and recycling a jug.
2. You can cut them in half and use them as flowers pots. As you can see, we have done this with three of our milk jugs already. You may be asking about the tops, well you can even use those as flower pots if you keep the lid on them, or you can use them as funnels.
3. The tops of the milk can also be turned into bird feeders and watering sieves, simply by poking holes in the top.
4. They also make great mini-compost containers. You can use them to transport compost from dinner or other meals to the compost bin. Just remember to keep it clean, and it will work great sitting under the sink for you until you can go out to your compost bin.

We are using three of our jugs to grow some flowers, one for watering the garden and one for composting transportation. Layla is also working on a great set of birdhouses and flower pots made from milk jugs that will be decorated and look wonderful, which will be available through our blog.

Waste Reduced: Several milk jugs worth and growing.