Posts for category ‘Living Green’

So, eco freaks have been trying to tell everybody about the problems with plastic for awhile now and before moving back to the high desert I was admittedly a bit slow on the subject. In my city life, plastic was a way of life. Oh, sure, I’ve always been a bit thrifty and hated waste, but moving out here to the ranch, where there is no curbside recycling, has taught me a few things about plastic. It’s ugly. It lasts forever. It’s toxic. Did I mention that it’s ugly?

Let’s get real, okay? Plastic is a serious problem. We’re not talking a little mess here, we’re talking mountains of waste, we’re talking more ugly than has any right to exist. And the price tag on this ugly?? The cost to our planet, our Mama Earth, is pretty steep. And we sold out cheap- a twinkie here, a bread bag there, a trip to the market.

According to various sources around the web:

Here in Thorne’s World we:

We use reusable bags for our groceries, and I’m still working on convincing my bulk foods market to allow me to use cloth bags for the food products, but it’s an uphill battle out here in the boonies.

San Francisco, (smarties that they are) has actually outlawed the use of plastic shopping bags in supermarkets and pharmacies.

In Ireland an extremely successful plastic bag consumption tax, or PlasTax, introduced in 2002 reduced consumption by 90%. Approximately 18,000,000 liters of oil have been saved due to this reduced production. Governments around the world are considering implementing similar measures.

Move over Ireland! Thanks to Congressman Jim Moran, a Northern Virginia Democrat, the “Plastic Bag Reduction Act of 2009″, an earth friendly piece of legislation if ever there were one, was introduced on Earth Day this year. Since voluntary eco awareness and responsibility are not the strong suit of a consumer driven society, this legislation would hit folks where they will actually feel it. Their wallets! The bill proposes a 5 Cent per bag charge to hopefully encourage reusable bag use. The legislation would allocate the funding generated to land and water conservation programs, to lower the national debt, and to cover the costs businesses to implement the program.

So what can you do to reduce your
dependence on those pesky toxic plastic single use shopping bags now, so you won’t get caught short and have to pay real cash money when this legislation goes through in 2010??

Remember:

PRECYCLE

RECYCLE

REUSE

UPCYCLE

What do you do to reduce the amount of plastic you consume? How do you recycle or reuse it? Have you ever made any of the upcycled crafts at the link, or have projects of your own to share? Tell me about it, or leave the link to your own plastic post or
tip in comments and I’ll visit and comment at your blog.

Peace, out!

Okay, I’m seriously liking this new place I just found. It’s called Greenzer. I don’t know about the rest of you, but with “green” being the “IN” thing this year, it’s actually gotten more instead of less confusing. I’ve been trying to make earth friendly choices forever, based on… well, the best I could do to understand my choices! Nowadays, when you’d think it might be easier, there are so many fake greenies out there it’s daunting. What is the green choice when shopping? “Biodegradable” is a term that doesn’t tell us much, when we really think about it. So “it”, (whatever it may be) “bio” degrades. So what? What are the environmental cost of the item’s degrading process? What kind of toxins and pollutants does it leave behind as it breaks down? “Recyclable” is only good if the means of recycling are reasonably convenient and if the recycling process doesn’t make more of a mess than the garbage! “Recycled” materials can be a misnomer as well, meaning only leftovers from the manufacture of other products…
What is a consumer to do?
Over at Greenzer I found a full line of organic and eco friendly products for my home, office (that would be home office in my case, but you get the idea) and garden and just as importantly (if not more so, if you are as confused by all the green hype and claims as I am), a veritable wealth of information on comparing products and making the green choices best suited to my lifestyle and needs! They even have a Green Blog!
I like it a lot. To me, this is a seriously green endeavor. Check it out.
Peace, out!

Despite the absolutely crazy weather here on Pair o – Dykes ranch this week I managed to get out in the garden a bit. I Loooove my garden. It’s really slow goin’ this year. The nights are still chilly here in the desert, so my little tomatoes and peppers and squash are growing slowly, but they’re growing! No doubt it’ll get hot – BAM – and then my green babies will shoot up and out and flower all at once! (See the one on the far left? There’s one lil Roma growing there!)

Let’s talk compost, today. You know I loves me some magical transformation of trash into treasure- art, all that’s green is gold in Thorne’s World, ya know. It’s Only the Good Friday, and I can’t help but share a little Green Goodness! Compost. Black gold, (we don’t need no stinkin’ oil!) baybee!

There are about a million different ways to make compost, it seems. if you Google it you may soon be overwhelmed by the variety of opinion and the types of composting set-ups; barrels and bins and cages; above or below ground. To turn or not to turn? To add newspaper? To layer or not to layer? They even have worm bins for your kitchen! (I reeeeally want one! We can’t have worms in the garden here, our soil gets too hot, but I sure could use some of those lil squirmers to help me compost the kitchen waste!)

You might, like me, find yourself lost in a sea of terms; anaerobic, biologic factors, microbial activity…

But it’s really not that difficult.

Left to her own devices Mama Nature will make her own compost anywhere a pile of leaves or bracken rests long enough. I think we tend to make things too difficult sometimes. It’s true that the way you do your compost and the materials you add will affect the temperature and amount of time it takes to degrade and become good for your garden, but when it comes to compost a little common sense goes a long way.

Out here on the ranch, We have a variety of compost areas and methods, but since we have plenty of space and lots of time, I don’t worry too much about my compost. I have BIG piles of weeds and bracken that are patiently awaiting the lawnmower to chop them down to size, but they are composting all on their own while they wait.

I have the heap in the corner of the pumpkin yard of wild mustard, green tumbleweeds, tamarisk rakings and the mess of newspapers and bird seed, food and droppings that I clean from the bottoms of my 6 rescued parrot cages.

Then there is the load of wood chips that is slowly turning to compost, and the horse manure that my partner brings home from the dude ranch where she works as a builder. These large piles will be mixed and mashed and shredded and mown and watered and turned eventually to compost.

Then there’s my two raised beds that I discovered don’t work well in our summer heat: I’ve turned them into my fine compost bins. I don’t dump the big stuff in these, but since my devil grass fiasco a couple of years ago, I’m not putting any horse poop in my beds that I don’t know for sure has composted hot enough to kill any seeds. So these beds are gor devil grass clippings, bird cage waste from now on, sifted wood chips from the front yard pile, and the horse manure the GirlyBoi brings home. All smallish stuuf that should compost fairly quickly- I’ll use it next spring.

I can almost hear you all yelling,

“But we don’t have that much space, (or time, or patience)!”

It’s okay. It’s all good!

The biggest problem most folks seem to have tends to happen when their compost piles get too big to deal with. My advice is to start small and take what you learn with you as you and your composting skill “grows up”! Probably the easiest and most quickly efficient method is what I call my bag method.

I start with a plastic or vinyl feed or potting soil bag, but a heavy duty lawn bag or two works just as well. Start with a few inches of soil in the bag. I generally use the worn out potting soil from when I’m re-potting in the spring and throughout the year.

First I toss in all the brown clippings and trimmings from the potted plants I’m sprucing up. Then the weeds I pull walking back and forth to the mailbox or taking the dogs for a run.

Coffee grounds and kitchen waste (I tend to avoid meat products in all of my compost, although that is another matter for much controversy. I’d just as soon skip the flies, and maggots are just gross) When there’s a sloppy bunch of kitchen scraps- coffee grounds, tea bags, potato or other vegetable peels and fruit trimmings I usually toss in some more soil to keep the smell and flies down. This does sort of follow the “layered” technique, but not because I really work at it, it just seems to happen that way. It usually takes me only a few days to a week at most to fill the bag. I water it a bit and then tie the top up tight and set the bag in the garden in the sun.

As soon as one bag is done, I start another. If you run the kitchen waste through a food processor each bag becomes pretty much fully composted in 2 weeks or so. If you toss larger pieces of kitchen waste in your compost bag give it a month. If there are any large chunks of plant matter that haven’t fully broken down when I open the bags, I sift them into a working bag and let them go another round!

This quick and easy compost method makes great potting soil, compost for flower beds, raised vegetable beds; just about any small gardening area you can think of.

Once you have mastered the compost bag technique, it is pretty simple to move to larger quantities as space permits. Just keep the same balance going that works for the bags.

Here are a few really good information links to get you started!

Veg Web has a super easy to read site with step by step instructions, types of compost bins and loads of info as does Avant Gardening along with videos.

Got a special method that works for you? I’d love to hear your experiences with composting so don’t be shy, leave me a comment! And if you just can’t get enough of gardening today, stop by my list of Green Garden Tips.

But no matter what you do today, find a way to get your good on for Only the Good Friday, and if you want to enjoy a whole lot more good, head over to This Eclectic Life and let Shelly set you good, then hit up the OtGF blogroll and comments, and have a GOOD day!

Peace, out!