Posts Tagged ‘grow your own’

date:
04-02
2010
Happy Easter

Happy Easter to every­one, reli­gious or not, at least we all get a long week­end, I don’t get to do Easter egg hunts any more since all my sib­lings are too old now :( Look­ing for­ward to doing them with my own chil­dren and with my friends chil­dren in the future :)

Not a lot going on in my house­hold, we went to B&Q last week­end (We’ve turned into one of those mid­dle aged cou­ples who like to look at DIY stores, when I was younger I use to hate being dragged to them and now I love being in them), to get some seeds so we could grow some flow­ers and I could grow some veg­eta­bles, I have planted cucum­bers, red onions, spring onions and cour­gettes and got a lit­tle green house for them, they are doing well so far:

Grow­ing Day 1

Grow­ing Day 2

Day 3

I think I will have to plant them out today or put some twigs in there as they are falling over, these must be my cour­gettes and cucum­bers going crazy!!!

Oh and also last week­end I got to DJ, this is the first time ever, my hus­band is an amaz­ing DJ and has been dj-ing for about 15 years now, I took some nice pic­tures of him, and he got a few blurry ones of me :)

Off to revise while the hus­band is still in bed at mid­day but he has worked hard and this is the first day of his hol­i­day :) I’m going to try and get more revi­sion done :)


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date:
02-28
2010
Being Green in the Kitchen

Long await post about being green in the kitchen, this one is more than likely going to be a long one as I can think of so many way of being green in the kitchen.

Dishwasher

Now I know a lot of peo­ple worry that using a dish­washer is worse than hand wash­ing but I have researched this in depth, and it turns out that no using a dish­washer on a ECO wash is cheaper and uses less elec­tric­ity than hand wash­ing.  But I would like to men­tion please remem­ber to turn the plug off while not using it as this is use wast­ing energy that doesn’t need to be wasted.

I found this arti­cle which works out how much energy and water you will use in a dish­washer vs hand washing

Water use, energy use, and car­bon foot­print
There are three big fac­tors we’ll con­sider: water use, energy use (for heat­ing the water, largely), and the car­bon foot­print that results — we’ll save things like soap and dish­washer cook­ing for another post. And, of course, fol­low­ing energy-saving tips like run­ning the “light†cycle and turn­ing off the “heated dry­ing†option will change the way the num­bers work.

Built-in dish­washer effi­ciency
The aver­age dish­washer uses 6 gal­lons of water per cycle; the aver­age Energy Star-rated dish­washer uses 4 gal­lons per cycle, and their energy use ranges from 1.59 kWh per load down to 0.87 kWh per load. Using the Depart­ment of Energy’s car­bon diox­ide emis­sions num­bers of 1.34 pounds of CO2 per kWh, that’s 1.16 to 2.13 pounds of car­bon diox­ide emit­ted per load, to go along with 4 gal­lons of water.

Energy Star assumes each load in a “stan­dard†dish­washer (usu­ally 24 inches in size) has “a capac­ity greater than or equal to eight place set­tings and six serv­ing pieces,†so we’ll go with that when con­sid­er­ing how many dishes need to be washed by hand.

Can hand wash­ing be as effi­cient as dish­wash­ing?
The short answer: maybe. First, let’s look at water usage alone. The aver­age faucet flows at 2 gal­lons per minute, so if you can suc­cess­fully wash and rinse eight place set­tings — plates, bowls, forks, knives, spoons, glasses, etc. — and those six serv­ing dishes that your dish­washer can han­dle with­out run­ning the faucet for more than 2 total min­utes, then, you might be bet­ter off hand-washing. Assum­ing you’re wash­ing 54 pieces of dish­ware (that’s 48 pieces of dish­ware — 6 pieces per set­ting — and 6 serv­ing dishes), you’ve got about 4.4 sec­onds of wide-open tap water per piece, or about 9.5 ounces of water to wash and rinse each dish.

Impacts of heat­ing the water
Let’s assume you use warm water for both wash­ing and rins­ing — half hot water and half cold water. Heat­ing 2 gal­lons of water with a gas hot water heater (from about 60 degrees as it enters your house to, say, 120 degrees, set by the ther­mo­stat on your hot water heater) takes about 960 BTUs, or about 0.9% of one therm (100,000 BTUs), assum­ing 100 per­cent effi­ciency.
Gas stor­age tank water heaters
Gas water-heaters are usu­ally more like 65 per­cent effi­cient, so it really takes 1477 BTUs, or about 1.5 per­cent of a therm, to heat that water. One therm emits 11.7 pounds of CO2, accord­ing to the EPA (pdf), so heat­ing the water with gas for each 2-gallon load emits about .17 pounds of car­bon dioxide.

On-demand (or tan­k­less) water heaters are closer to 80 per­cent effi­cient, which changes the num­bers a bit; it works out to about 1200 BTUs, or about .14 pounds of car­bon diox­ide.
Elec­tric stor­age tank water heaters
The story is a bit dif­fer­ent when con­sid­er­ing an elec­tric water heater; while most elec­tric water heaters use between 86 and 93 per­cent of their energy for heat (com­pared to between 60 and 65 per­cent for gas), elec­tric heaters aren’t as effi­cient at heat­ing water. It still takes 960 BTUs to heat that much water; it just takes about .28 kWh (since, accord­ing to the EIA, 1 kWh equals 3412 BTUs) to heat 2 gal­lons of water at 100 per­cent effi­ciency, or about .30 kWh at 93 per­cent effi­ciency. Each kWh emits 1.715 pounds of CO2, on aver­age (thank you, EPA), so heat­ing water with elec­tric­ity for each 2-gallon load emits about .51 pounds of CO2.
Built in dish­washer vs. hand-washing: And the win­ner is…
These num­bers indi­cate that it’s pos­si­ble to be more effi­cient when hand-washing, but it’s pretty tough. Can you suc­cess­fully wash and rinse a soiled din­ner plate in just over a cup of water? If you can keep the water use low, equal to an effi­cient machine, you’ll require less energy, but doing an entire load of dishes in 4 gal­lons of water is roughly equiv­a­lent to doing them all in the same amount of water you use in 96 sec­onds of show­er­ing (using a show­er­head that emits 2.5 gal­lons per minute).

So, as long as you don’t often run your dish­washer when it’s only half full of dirty dishes, or unless you are very miserly with your water use (or have an old, inef­fi­cient dish­washer), the auto­matic dish­washer is likely to be more effi­cient. That is to say, it’s pos­si­ble to use less water and energy by hand wash­ing your dishes, but it’s not easy. Of course, if you do it just right, it might just be a wash.

More infor­ma­tion at treehugger.com

Clean­ing Products

Now I have men­tioned this before down in the being green in the bath­room but clean­ing prod­uct are an large impact on the world, using more organic, more nat­ural prod­ucts is always best, the only issue that gets me if the price, I under­stand why that have to be more expen­sive because it is not just chem­i­cals like the cheaper brands but I wish they would bring it down a lit­tle bit as not all of us have money to burn.

Pet related

This one is a tough due to the fact it has taken me for­ever to find cat lit­ter than is not going to kill the envi­ron­ment, I have tried loads of cat lit­ter for one I hate the clump­ing ones as they take for­ever to clean (which wastes water, clean­ing prod­uct and not to men­tion it smells), I have gone for a one at the  moment which is lit­tle tubs of old wood shav­ings, the think I like about it the most is the fact when the cat goes to the bath­room the lit­tle tubs dis­ap­pear a leave what I can only describe as saw­dust (kind of like a ham­ster cage lin­ing) but it does have a nice pine smell and lasts longer so you don’t use as much sav­ing money and sav­ing time.  If you can go for an eco cat lit­ter it is nicer for the cat and for your noses.

Cat food tins wash out, I know it is a huge pain but if you have one cat or three like myself you will end up going through at least one tin a day, with mine it is two tins a day (I swear Onion steals every­one else’s food but I can’t prove it!), I did try putting these through the dish­washer but every­thing smelled of cat food so now I have to hand wash them with bleach as well as wash­ing up liq­uid, please use a dif­fer­ent wash cloth as it is not nice otherwise.

Also check out Eco-Me Cat Kit Nat­ural Tool Kit, you can make your own cat lit­ter and flea spray, also cat treats, I might have to give this one ago.

Recy­cling

I am huge on recy­cling, lucky for me my coun­cil pro­vide me lit­tle pink bags which I put out every week, what I have found is a lot of items can be recy­cled, in my house­hold we have one bin for rub­bish and one for recy­cling, my mother is even bet­ter and has a bin for veg­etable ends, egg shells and other organic food mat­ter which she puts in her com­post down at the end of the gar­den.  I haven’t got a huge gar­den more like the size of postage stamp but I could fit a small one in my mother informs me.

Hav­ing two bins really saves me the headache of hav­ing to keep the bag some­where, since recy­cling (I even have my hus­band doing it who told me it was a waste of time) we hardly but out much black bin bag rubbish.

Grow­ing your own Vegetables

See I tried this last year but only man­aged to grow a cucum­ber and some herbs, my mother on the other hand split half her gar­den into her veg­etable and fruit patch and grew so much, loads of leeks (I love leeks), but this year I am going to grown my own car­rots, pota­toes and leeks plus the nor­mal amount of herbs, I’ll have to update you about this later in the year.  I think grow­ing your own veg­eta­bles doesn’t take a lot of work but it is so pleas­ing to see them grow even for me grow­ing any­thing makes me happy and I suck at gar­den­ing in gen­eral, I get the hus­band to do it for me.  Even if you don’t’ have a gar­den just a small bal­cony you could grow new pota­toes in big pots.

Gen­eral Tips

Don’t over fill the kettle Don’t waste food Bulk cook where you can Make your own lunches Re-use items where you can Turn the lights off when you leave a room Re-use pack­ag­ing Use energy efficient Only wash full loads this goes for the wash­ing machine, dish­washer and the tum­ble dyer

Next week I am cov­er­ing female prod­ucts and make-up :)   Sorry I haven’t been around so much uni has me all tied up.


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