In Honor of Earth Day: 10 Tips to Green Your Home

Image By: Simon Howden

We all try to be as responsible as we can, when it comes to living a green, and eco-friendly life. But the reality is when people get home at the end of the day, their tired, and being responsible isn’t always the easiest choice to make. So here are some eco-friendly tips, that will help you save time, money, and energy.

1. Shut off your electronics completely, by plugging them into a UL-certified power strip. Not only does it make turning off your electronics easier, you can turn multiple items off with one button, but by turning off the power strip at night, you prevent electricity from being used for stand by power. Also called vampire draw, it is the power consumed by an appliance while they are switched off, or in standby mode. It can make up to 10% of the total residential power consumption.

2. Items like cell phones and laptops don’t take all night to charge, and continue to draw energy as long as there plugged in. Instead of charging your electronics while you sleep, plug them in as soon as you get home. That way, they can be fully charged, and ready to go for the next day without wasting any energy.

3. Recycle your old CD’s,  DVD’s, DVD cases, electronics, cables, cell phones, TV’s and more, easily at Best Buy. They have a wonderful new recycling program that not only accepts almost every electronic device that you can think of, but is at no cost to you. Simply check their e-cycle list of accepted products, and then bring your recyclables into your nearest store!

4. Finally a recycling program for all those #5 plastics that you would love to recycle, but can’t since most recycling programs simply don’t accept them. The website Preserve, My Gimme 5, has set up drop off locations all over the country where you can bring in all of your number 5 plastics, otherwise they would be going straight to a landfill. With the Gimme 5 program, plastics are recycled in this country, and turned into the wonderful eco-friendly products you can purchase through Preserve.

Repelling Bugs With The Essence Of Grapefruit

From NPR’s Richard Knox

It’s bug season again. And once again, most people won’t bother spraying or slathering on repellents.

That bugs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because biting insects are more than an itchy annoyance. Tick bites cause 30,000 Lyme disease infections every year. Mosquito-borne West Nile virus causes 600 potentially fatal brain infections a year.

People’s lackadaisical attitude is due to two things, says Marc Dolan of the CDC’s vector-borne infectious diseases laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo.

“It’s hard for people to remember to use a repellent,” Dolan says. “You know, they don’t put a repellent on every time they leave the house.”

Beyond that, most repellents area hard sell. That’s because they contain a 60-year-old chemical called DEET.

“People really dislike a lot of the repellents available now,” Dolan says. “They don’t like the odor they have, they don’t like the greasy feel they give. And a lot of people are just concerned about putting man-made chemicals on their skin.”

Safe Enough To Drink

That’s why the CDC is pushing hard to develop a completely natural insect repellent made from a chemical called nootkatone, which is found in Alaska yellow cedar trees and citrus fruit.

Mini Flower Arrangement: Columbines

One of the many flowers growing in our garden right now, are these deep indigo Columbines. The flowers are extremely showy, with layers of ruffled petals surrounding the brightly colored center; which forms into a beautifully twisting seed pods. I’ve been really wanting to use these flowers, in an arrangement for a while but wasn’t sure what to do, until I put them next to my Lemon Teapot from Anthropologie.

Here’s how I did it:

1.To create this arrangement, start by measuring your vase to estimate how many flowers you will need. For example my vase, the teapot is only about 3.5 inches tall, so I don’t need very many flowers to achieve this design, only 3 small branches of Columbines, about 15 quarter sized flowers.  Make sure the branches you pick have buds, blooming flowers, and seed pods the variety adds richness, and texture to this simple arrangement.

2. Then trim each flower off the main branch, while leaving it with a stem long enough to reach almost to the bottom of the vase. For my teapot the stems are between 1-3 inches long.

3. Next I cut a piece of Oasis floral foam just small enough to fit inside the teapot, the tighter the foam fits the more stable it will be, which is important since it’s used to hold  your flowers in place.

4. The stems of the Columbine plant are to soft to go into the Oasis foam on their own, so use a skewer to make the holes for the flowers. I arranged the flowers by starting in the center, then carefully placed the larger flowers to fill in as much space as possible, finishing up by placing the delicate buds, and twisting seed pods.

6. Last but not least, remember to keep the flowers well watered. That way they last as long as possible, and don’t get droopy.

Come, and take a walk through my garden.