Eco Lassie sees you’ve been scratching your head to find something neat for those last few people on your list. She’s searched for these unusual gifts for you:
Posted in eco holidays, food, gardening
The Green Queen and her husband love to recycle, reuse and re…do. The Green King (TGK) – or would that be Prince by virtue of marriage…? Well whatever the title may be, he likes to grab old wood that’s been thrown away. If he sees sticks, and slabs of old wood at the side of the road, or in dumpsters and even discarded in landfills… that’s not garbage to him. He can’t leave it laying in waste, he grabs it and smiles like he’s just rubbed the side of an old lamp and found an old treasure…or a genie in a bottle. Then, with a schoolboy giggle he’ll load that wood in the back of his car and drive off into the sunset with visions of how he’s going to put that piece of lumber to use.
And old electrical wire spools are no different than beautiful pieces of unutilized wood to him.
He found this broken spool outside an electrical supply company and asked if they were throwing it away. They were. So he asked if he could have it. Just like in Beauty and the Beast, they said, “Be my guest.” 
He took the spool home and went to work repairing and repurposing that old drab oversized spool.
Now it’s a beautiful garden table and chairs. 
Think what you might be able to do with garbage you find laying on the side of the road, who knows, it might be a beautiful piece of garden furniture in your future.
You’ve planted a bountiful garden and enjoyed an abundant harvest. Now what? If you’re keen on saving some money next spring, now’s the perfect time to harvest some seeds for winter storage. Harvesting seeds is easy work, all you need is a dry, sunny day, some envelopes, a sieve and a pen.
1. Identify seeds ripe for the harvest. Mature seeds come from mature fruit or flowers–pick good ones, not small or damaged ones. In flowering plants, you’ll find the flower turns brown and the petals curl back, revealing the seeds. The seeds are just waiting to drop out into your hands if you brush across their surface. To harvest seeds from fruits or vegetables, remove seeds from ripe fruit and let them dry on newspaper in a cool, dark spot. Pumpkins, squash, zucchini, peppers, really ripe cucumbers, tomatoes and eggplants require splitting the fruit/vegetables apart and prying or squeezing the seeds onto clean newspaper. Rinsing with water will not hurt the seeds, but it’s not a necessary step. Lettuce, spinach, carrots and beets are plants that “go to seed” which means they’ll flower and release mature seeds. Peas and beans require drying while in the pod before you can remove the seeds for future use. A good seed has a plump body and tough shell.
2. Drying out the seeds is the first step. After you’ve harvested your seeds, lay them on clean newspaper and let them dry for a few days in a cool, well-ventilated, dark spot. When the seeds are adequately dried, the “chaff” can get blown away or sifted out using a sieve. If seeds get moldy at any time during the drying or storage process, throw them in the compost pile, they’ll do you no good. Trust Enviro Girl on this–she had a lot of sunflowers come to no good end a couple winters ago.
3. You need to store the seeds in paper–any type of envelope will do. Label the envelopes, then put the seeds in a refrigerator. Enviro Girl likes to store her seed envelopes in glass jars for extra protection against moisture.
Heirloom or heritage varieties will result in the best seeds to save. Unfortunately, many hybrid varieties have been genetically altered so they cannot replicate themselves–the seeds are “duds” mainly so that customers have to return again and again to buy new seeds each season.
To test seeds after you’ve dried them, just to check on your success, place a few inside a damp paper towel and place the works inside a plastic baggie for a week. Most viable seeds will sprout in this situation.
Enviro Girl recommends flowers and sunflowers as the easiest seeds to save. She got started with some Cosmos about 7 years ago and never looked back–now she saves all sorts of prairie seeds in addition to carrots, lettuce, spinach, herbs, tomatoes, pumpkins and sunflowers.
Some really useful links for further reading include:
Harvesting Seeds: You Grow Girl (great photos alongside basic explanations)
Seed Saving Tips: Planet Green.com (good general information)
Seed Harvesting (lots of super little tips, charming British site)
University of Illinois Extension (excellent advice & instructions on the ‘wet method’ of seed saving)
If you can set aside a sunny afternoon, you can get that fall clean-up done in a snap. In many parts of the country it’s the end of the garden season — soon the days will be blustery and blizzardy and bitterly chilly. The tomatoes dangle helplessly from blackened vines, eggplants lie shriveled on the dirt, flowers turn crisp and brown. How does the eco-friendly gardener tidy up the garden and best prepare for next spring? Here’s a handy checklist for you to post next to your potting bench:
___ Move & divide plants Fall is an excellent time to move spring & summer-blooming perennials like daisies, lilies and phlox. Your plants will grow healthier when you divide them every 4 years and you can fill in the bare spots in your garden bed, too. Fall weather is wet enough to make the move easy on the root systems and allow the plant to get comfortable before the cold weather hits. Grab a shovel, dig them up, split them in half using the sharp edge of a shovel, and replant.
___ DO NOT TILL Unless you’re adding lime or breaking up ground for a new bed, tilling in the fall kills valuable microorganisms and worms and hurts your soil’s health. Walk away from the tiller. Go do something else. Exception: vegetable beds where you’ve encountered squash bugs. Those nasty buggers require fall tilling if you don’t want to find them again next spring.
___ Plant Bulbs It takes minutes in the fall to enjoy weeks of colorful blooms in the spring. Grab a trowel, dig a hole 3 times the bulb’s height, drop them in pointy side up. You can buy your bulbs from mail order catalogs, online, or at most lawn and garden centers. If you’ve planted bulbs that aren’t blooming well anymore, chances are they need dividing. Dig up your bulbs, break them apart, replant the extra bulbs in new spots.
___ Wrap Tender Trees & Shrubs Use burlap or wire cages to protect your fruit trees, tree seedlings and tender shrubs from rabbits and deer. These toothy critters nibble without rhyme or reason, so Enviro Girl cannot provide you with a definitive list of what to protect–you simply have to protect what the animals in your neighborhood enjoy eating.
___ Aerate If needed, aerate your lawn to improve its health and resistance against weeds & disease. You can borrow a lawn aerator from a friendly neighbor, rent a lawn aerator for under $30, or buy an aerator attachment for $180.
___ Mulch Your Leaves Rake them into your garden beds (you should cover perennials with 3-5 inches of mulch for winter protection). Compost the leaves in your vegetable garden. DO NOT leave them by the curb for city workers to collect. Shame on you who do! And double-shame on those of you using a leaf blower! Rakes are cheap and cost nothing to operate–and the upper body exercise you get from raking is unparalleled.
___ Fertilize the Lawn Late fall is the best time to fertilize grass, but test your soil first to find out what your lawn needs. Plenty of established lawns do just fine without fertilizing if the soil is healthy.
___ Prep New Beds A 5-page thick layer of wet newspapers and few inches of mulch will kill everything beneath and prepare a garden bed for spring planting.
____Skip the Deadheading Leaving flower seed heads alone will provide a winter food source for the birds and an interesting view when the garden is snow-covered. Most eco-gardeners prefer to cut back and clean up in the springtime. By leaving plants alone in the fall, you also provide a layer of insulation to protect roots from cold winter weather. The only time Enviro Girl deadheads is when she’s gathering seeds for spring planting.
_____Gather Seeds Especially if you’ve planted heirloom varieties. Enviro Girl will post more about this topic next week.
___ Empty Pots & Containers Scrub them with bleach and water to kill any fungus/mold and store.
___ Compost Dig up those veggie vines, spent pepper plants, frostbitten bush beans and toss them in the compost bin.
When you’ve dusted off your hands and kicked the mud off your boots, head inside for a cup of hot cider and a rest — you and your garden deserve it!
A crispy brown lawn in the middle of a hot summer is normal. Yes, you read that correctly. That’s exactly what happens to Kentucky Bluegrass, the lawn of choice for most American homes. What’s unnatural is a lush, weed-free expanse of green in the middle of August–that’s about as natural as Pamela Anderson’s curves.
When the temperatures rise and rains cease, Kentucky Bluegrass and most other grasses go into a natural dormant state. A lawn can safely go into a dormant state for 3-4 weeks without any concern. Here are some ways to tend to your dormant lawn:
* Keep off the grass–don’t mow it, resist allowing heavy traffic on it. In a dormant state the roots are at risk of damage.
* Leave it a little long. The shade created by a longer lawn will keep moisture near the roots and provide better competition against weeds.
* Do not fertilize it. Dormant grasses are not taking in any nutrients, adding more can even kill your lawn.
* Ignore the weeds. If you’re bent on applying broad-spectrum herbicides, spring and fall are the time to do it. Applying herbicides in summer when your lawn is in its weakest state is not terribly smart.
* Water sparingly. A lawn only needs 1 inch of water a week to stay green. You can conserve your water resources by allowing your lawn to go dormant. If you feel it’s necessary to water, you can protect your lawn’s health with .5 inches of water a week through the dormant state. Watering after the sun goes down at night will prevent evaporation and maximize the effects of watering. A sprinkler usually puts out 1 inch of water every 1-2 hours. Overwatering your yard will mean a shorter root system resulting in grass that is less tolerant to dry conditions. Over watering will also result in needing to mow more.
If you don’t like the look of a brown crispy yard, alternatives include planting drought-tolerant grasses or planting something else entirely–like a perennial garden with a root system that will defy summer heat better than Kentucky Bluegrass.
Curious to learn more? The Lawn Institute, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Ohio State University are great resources.
Now that it’s July and the days are hothothot, the basil in Recycla’s garden is growing like crazy. This makes her very happy, as she loves adding fresh basil to pasta dishes and other Mediterranean-influenced foods.
Recycla is growing more than a dozen basil plants this year, most sweet and Genovese basils. That might like a lot, but she preserves most of her basil for the cold months and thus needs to harvest and preserve as much as she can in the next two months, when the nights start to get cooler and basil stops growing.
Oh sure, Recycla could buy basil at the grocery store, but she thinks that dried basil is an inferior substitute and she flat-out refuses to spend $5 or more on a small bunch of fresh basil when she grows it herself with almost no effort. So every year she plants basil and literally reaps the benefits.
How does Recycla preserve her basil? By making basil paste — here’s how:
See? It couldn’t be any easier.
Tell the Eco Women: What is your favorite recipe with basil?
Eco Lassie has been following the garden exploits of the rest of you with great interest. We’ve done a bang up garden this year, with sixteen raised beds, a first, that is giving us a huge bounty. That led to remembering the time we had keeping our pets out of ours in previous years.
There’s no question we love our pets and also no question that even the cutest of cats and dogs can trample, dig, crush, tear and leave their little presents in our nice rows of fresh veggies and flowers. What to do that doesn’t mean using the very kind of commercial repellent we’ve been trying to avoid?
Try soaking cotton balls in citrus (or mint or menthol) essential oils and place around the garden perimeter. Many pets are repelled by these scents. You may have to change the balls weekly or after a heavy rain until your pet figures out the garden is a no-go area.
Use rose prunings, if you have them, around the base of larger established plants. Paws, especially those sensitive cat pads, will not relish these thorny clippings and quickly find a new pathway.
The visual image of a barrier works wonders for cats and dogs. Try using floating row covers, which some of you may already by using to prevent insects and birds from feasting on those tasty shoots of budding plants and flowers. Planet Natural has the most reasonable I could find, and there are many other sites that sell the garden material on rolls. You can water and fertilize right through this light, breathable barrier without removing it.
Of course, there ARE some benefits to having our pets near our gardens. Cats will reduce the amount of mice, voles and moles if they are in your area; dogs scent and barking will keep deer and groundhogs at bay, or at the very least, in your neighbor’s yard!
Happy Gardening~
Food preservation is a dandy way to make the most of summer’s bounty for the long winter months. It’s also a dying art as fresh produce is available everywhere at a low cost. And if it’s not? We can buy food that somebody else has canned or frozen for us. So why bother? Why stand over a kettle of boiling water on a hot August afternoon?
The best food is fresh food, but if you garden at home you’ll find that a crop of zucchini or beans or strawberries soon exceeds your immediate needs. You look with pride at your pile of homegrown veg and it strikes you: Why NOT save this for another day? After all, you’ve grown the food, it’s practically free, it’s not laden with chemicals and it’s sitting on your countertop inducing guilt. Or perhaps you’re at the farmers market and there are bushels of tomatoes marked down if you buy them in bulk. These situations naturally lead to deciding whether To Can or To Freeze.
Freezing is easier, Enviro Girl isn’t going to lie to you. She’s made jam both ways and freezer jam takes half the time. But the jars of ruby-colored jam in her pantry make her much prouder than the plastic containers of jam in her freezer. More produce can be frozen than canned–in most cases you simply boil, blanch and stick in the freezer. The problem Enviro Girl has with freezing produce has to do with the energy use involved. Frozen food requires a freezer’s energy all year round, in addition to the energy needed to heat the water to a boil so you can partially cook it. Plastic freezer bags or containers can be reused, but it’s a tricky and time-consuming proposition to clean them and keep them good from one year to the next. It’s dicey to freeze things in glass because if you overfill, broken glass will explode all over your freezer. Most of the time, one year in a frozen environment between slabs of meat and a gallon of ice cream is enough to wreck a plastic container for any future use. Freezing makes plastic brittle and susceptible to cracking. And weak plastic? Effectively freaks Enviro Girl out.
But canning requires fully cooked food, which means fully mushy food and Enviro Girl doesn’t care for that–at least if she freezes green beans she doesn’t compromise texture. Canning takes more time and a modest investment in a canner, jars and lids–but these are all reusable from year to year. Canning requires energy initially, but once those jars seal they can be stored anywhere dry and dark and cool–like in a kitchen cupboard or on a basement shelf. Canning got Enviro Girl’s ancestors through hard winters and if it was good enough for her German brethren, by golly it’s good enough for her. But the beans taste mushy.
The “greener” choice is to can. There’s no weird risk of plastic leaching chemicals or glass storage breaking, it requires less energy and jars are reusable. Green Girl has decided to can the bulk of her fruit–applesauce, jam and tomatoes this season. It frees up a lot of freezer space and makes her pantry look darn impressive. She’ll freeze her vegetables and a few bags of berries and zucchini for muffins and breads. Maybe when she’s older and prefers softer food, she’ll go full throttle on the canning.
Whatever your choice, by preserving your own food, you’ll reduce your footprint by reducing and reusing and home preservation is a cheap way to keep your family fed. Learn more about freezing and canning at the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This website addresses canning, freezing, drying, smoking, fermenting and pickling! The site is categorized by foods, making it an easy resource to use.
1. Pot scrubbers–those plastic mesh bags you buy onions and apples in? Wad them up or tie them up with fishing line and you’ve got a nonabrasive scratchy plastic pot scrubber (or pan scrubber or casserole dish scrubber).
2. Use a tube from an empty roll of toilet paper as a seed starter–fold down on end, fill with soil and plant your seedlings. When it’s time to move your plant outdoors, you can leave it in the biodegradable cardboard tube, unfold the folded end and plant the entire business directly into the ground.
3. Repurpose old wire hangers as picture or wreath hangers by bending them into the appropriate shapes. You can cut one end of an old wire hanger and use it to organize spools of gift wrap or craft ribbons, too.
4. Old tights or nylons can be used to tie tall plants to stakes in your garden. For convenient clean up, stick a sliver of soap in the toe and tie to an outdoor faucet–great for scrubbing down after doing yard work or for taking along on a camping trip. Old tights or socks stuffed with coffee grounds make an excellent deodorizer for cars, coolers, suitcases or freezers.
5. Never buy Ziplock Takeaways or Rubbermaid storage again. A stash of clean empty food containers (with lids!) make great “to-go” cartons for leftover food, craft supply organizers, office supply organizers or pots for plant swaps. Enviro Girl uses empty yogurt containers to bring gift meals to new moms/homeowners (salads, granola, cookies, any cold dish) alleviating any need to return her dishes. She uses smaller containers (sour cream or cottage cheese) to store her sons’ mouth guards in their gear bags.
6. Empty liter bottles or milk cartons make great “greenhouses” in the garden. Cut off the bottom and settle over young seedlings–leave them until the plants outgrow the space. The plastic will retain heat and protect plants from late-season frosts while keeping the soil moist for growing roots.
7. Lint is incredibly flammable. If you’re not composting it, you can wrap it around a toilet paper roll and use it as a fire starter in your fireplace or fire pit.
8. Those tall bags wrapping your drycleaning? Don’t throw them away! Tie off one end and you’ve got a giant trash bag.
It’s no surprise to learn that food prices are on the rise. Severe weather prevented many farmers from planting and harvesting as usual and that, combined with rising fuel costs and demand, will make it more expensive than ever to feed our families.
Enviro Girl has to feed three growing boys, her husband and herself, so she’s vigilant about looking for ways to shave their food costs. Here are 5 ways she’s found to save money while eating healthy:
1. Buy in bulk in season. It’s a lot cheaper to buy anything when there’s a surplus of supply. When strawberries are in season, they’re $2 or less for a pint, off-season they cost $4 or more. If you can buy seasonal fruits and vegetables in mass quantities and freeze or can them for the rest of the year, you’ll save bundles of money. Enviro Girl buys a few cases of blueberries and peaches directly from a farm when they’re in season and freezes the contents — here’s the math on the blueberries:
$26 for a case in season is the equivalent of 30 pints that sell for $4 off-season, or $120.
Often you’ll find farmers selling bulk quantities of in-season produce at farmer’s markets — tomatoes by the bushel, cucumbers by the grocery sack to people looking to preserve it for winter.
2. Learn how to can or freeze produce. If you can put up 4-5 food items over the summer months, you’ll have food on hand to use when it’s out of season and you’ll save money because even if you buy that produce in bulk in season, it’s much cheaper than buying it processed at the grocery store. Enviro Girl doesn’t think you’ll become Ma Ingalls overnight, but she assures you that freezing strawberries, peaches, beans, tomatoes and peppers is a cinch — the prep time involved is minimal for these foods and they’re easy to add into one’s weekly diet year-round. As you learn how to put up a few foods each year, you’ll gradually add to your repertoire and soon have a pantry to rival any pioneer wife.
3. Grow your own. A 2 foot by 10 foot strip of dirt running along the back side of your garage or yard can produce enough tomatoes, beans, onions, peppers, cucumbers and carrots for a family to eat for a year. A tomato plant costs $1.50 at a greenhouse, a vine-grown tomato at a grocery store costs $1.50. You’ll pick at least 15 tomatoes off a healthy tomato plant, more if you nurture it well. By growing your own food to supply your groceries, you’re able to save money and reduce the impact of rising food prices on your family’s budget.
4. Join a CSA. For $25 a week (on average), you can buy locally grown produce every week in season. CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is a kind of farm business where the farmer sells “shares” to customers. Customers buy into the farm by purchasing “shares” and they get a portion of the farm’s production in return for their investment. This is the most direct way to support local farmers if you’re not inclined to grow your own food but want fresh-grown produce. It’s also less expensive than shopping at a farmer’s market. In Enviro Girl’s experience, her $25 share was the equivalent of $50 of grocery food, she hauled home a huge box every week and had plenty to feed her family with leftovers to freeze for later. Her money supported a local farmer, invested in organic food production and fed her family for less than any other resource around.
5. Get back to the basics on your table. Certain processed or “convenience” food only seem cheaper, but are really more expensive. Let’s compare a few foods:
container of oatmeal: $1.50 OR box of cereal: $3.50
gallon of milk: $3.50 OR gallon equivalent of bottled water: $5.00
5 lb. of potatoes: $3.00 OR 5 lb. of potato chips: $25.00
3 lb. of apples: $2.90 OR 1 48-oz. jar of applesauce: $1.78
1 lb. carrots: $1.00 OR can of vegetable soup: $1.30
Feeding your family isn’t going to get any cheaper. The best way to avoid extra expense is to cut out the middle man by buying directly from a farmer or grow it yourself. Learning how to preserve food while it’s in season and learning how to shop for raw foods instead of processed foods will also cut costs.
Tell us, readers, what are you doing to cut your grocery bill?
