A green challenge
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What we really need to do is ditch the gas-guzzling car, build a green-powered strawbale home, and grow our own organic food. Until then, I'll keep up with my baby steps...
(For the entire list, check out the site map or the Full Review which may or may not be up to date!)
We use cloth napkins. Way back about 8 years ago I bought 4 cotton white and 4 blue napkins and I also have 5 black and 5 brown hemp napkins. Brown and black are much more practical than white and light blue, let me tell you. Especially after 8 years of use.
Conveniently, I also have a friend who does, among many other great things, wonderful tie dye shirts, tablecloths, etc. So I asked her if she could tie-die my stained old white and blue napkins and she did! We now have these beautiful fun…
I saw the documentary Food, Inc. a couple of months ago (at the Carlton - a rare theatre in Toronto that doesn't only show big budget Hollywood flicks) and have been meaning to write ever since. Now I've been researching this sort of thing for a couple of years now and eat local naturally raised beef and pork, and local organic produce, so you wouldn't think that the information and images in the film would come as a surprise to me, but let me tell you, they did. See this film for yourself. You…
Just updating the full review since the last time I did it was a year and a half ago in April 2008.
Why review? To let you know how it's going, what's easy, what's not as easy, etc.
I figure a table with a 1(hard)/2(medium)/3(easy) star (*) system (x means failure and there is one n/a not applicable) with a comment might be easiest to peruse, but sorry about the scrolling...
| # | Description | *** | Comment |
| 1 | Mow lawn every week | * | I am always a slacker by the end of summer, but I just let it grow - … |
So I haven't written much lately. I blame the accident. I had a bike accident (the streetcar tracks are treacherous, as almost every cyclist in Toronto appears to have experienced at one time or another) back at the beginning of July which led to reconstructive surgery on my thumb and physiotherapy for my shoulder.
Well, that kinda put things upside down here since I don't actually have full mobility back yet. No more cloth diapers and no laundry line (ever try to hang clothes up on a line…
This isn't really a change, it's a change back.
You see, a while back (several months) I had too much on my plate and figured something's got to give, and since Toronto's green bin program actually composts diapers, I made the switch to disposable diapers. My apologies... everybody's human. Then about 2 weeks ago we ran out of diapers and I couldn't face the crowds at my local grocery store, so I just switched back to cloth. I figured, it's summertime and I can hang them on the line again…
Well, as I don't have any new challenges, I figure a way to help anyone who might be trying to do their part by eating locally (either through your local CSA or trips to your local farmers market) might be to share ideas on what to do with the current seasonal fare.
This week and last week in our CSA share we received, among other things asparagus. Last week we had it with shrimp and pasta in a lemon cream sauce similar to this epicurious recipe (we actually used a slightly modified Donna Hay…
My 4 year old son loves to draw and paint. We went on a mini-holiday last month and were poking around in a bookshop and I came across something for my son that was a great alternative to colouring books. Colouring books can be entertaining, but frankly, they don't involve a whole lot of creativity and once you've marked up a page, it's done. One more tree down..
The book I found was the Klutz Draw-It-Again book of simple photographs to embellish into something different using dry erase…
Well, I haven't had much to write about lately since I haven't actually taken on any new challenges, or if I have, I haven't really noticed. That's the thing, once you're down this path, you just keep on keeping green, and it becomes second nature. I'll give you some examples to show our life in the green lane (or maybe it's life in the bike lane...):
Just a quick reminder that this Saturday (March 28) is Earth Hour so at 8:30 p.m., wherever you are, power down everything you can and chill for an hour! I will be.
Apparently, so will Kevin Bacon:
We've been using a pile of paper (printer and it's used for the boys' art) that I bought years ago and I was thinking that I should find some recycled paper when we ran out. Well, we ran out last week and I managed to find a box of 100% recycled white paper. I didn't actually check until I got home whether it was not bleached (duh) and it is! Chlorine free, 100% recycled and made in Canada to boot! It's Cascades copy paper, and the extra bonus is that it's made using BioGas Energy, which is…
I got an email from not far from the tree about the Community Orchard Proposal near Eglinton West station. It's below:
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not far from the tree
Community Orchard Proposal
Public Meeting: Wednesday March 25 (7-9pm) at Cedarvale School (145 Ava Rd.)
On Wednesday March 25 from 7-9pm, a community meeting will be held in Ward 21 to discuss the development of 3 parks in the neighbourhood, including Ben Nobleman Park. Not Far From The Tree, along with Growing For Green, landscape…
Well, it's that time of year again, when you think about signing up for local, organic fruits and veggies delivered to a local depot or to your door for 18-20 weeks - our harvest season. We're going with our provider for the past year, Plan B Organic Farms and catch their early bird special by signing up and paying (2 cheques, 1 post-dated in June) by March 9.
I recently got an email from Steve and Lisa Cooper of Cooper's CSA Farm and Maze so I wanted to mention them here. Frankly, they're…
I've been meaning to make hankies out of a bunch of flannel receiving blankets (ones we're no longer using an d freecycled ones) since I bought the second-hand sewing machine. Which was back in ummm... 2007. Better late than never, I say!
We ran out of tissues and my husband and I both had wicked colds and frankly the prospect of leaving the house in the extreme cold seemed like a worse prospect than cutting and sewing up a couple dozen hankies, so I did it. Then 3 more dozen the next day. So…
When I was in high school, I briefly got into knitting. I knit a couple of things and then started a sweater and managed to finish it in first year university (it was lovely and I wore it for several years but have no idea where it went). Then I put down my knitting needles and promptly forgot all about it for nearly 2 decades.
A year or so ago I went to a fair at a Waldorf school near my parents' place and picked up a little learn-to-knit kit (a little ball of yarn rolled by the kids, some…
So last year (summer 2007, I think) we had a new smart meter installed by Toronto Hydro-Electric. It hasn't actually affected anything yet, but soon (as of Nov 1, 2008 according to this website, but I've since found out that was the incorrect date) we'll see the different rates for different times of the day. Here's a screenshot of the high/medium/low rate times from the site:
So as a money saver and an attempt to put less strain on the grid when most of us are, I've gotten into the habit in…
My son's 4th birthday is coming up and we decided to ask the guests (a modest party, by today's standards, by the way, but he only wanted 3 guests. What sane parent is going to argue with that?) to buy a UNICEF gift of magic (one of a list of necessities, basically, for a child in need elsewhere) instead of buying a gift for him. Don't worry, he'll get lots of gifts from his family so he won't be neglected...
I love having Christmas lights in my home because of the way they light up the room. I don't much like the Christmas season because it's become a consumerist frenzy, but I love the lights. Last year, we didn't do any because they are a waste of energy. This year my near-4-year-old started asking about the lights that the neighbour put up all over their front lawn and it got me thinking. How about some low energy LEDs? So, tonight we picked up some solar powered LEDs! No power sucking guilt.
Today we went out and bought my late birthday gift: a high-efficiency dual flush toilet. Okay, I know that's a bit of a lame thing to ask for, but I don't really need more "stuff" and our previous toilet was terrible (flush, flush, plunge) and used the old standard of 13L of water every flush. It was really getting to me. So, we picked up an American Standard Flowise Dual Flush toilet.
It uses 6L for the heavy flush and 3L for the light flush, and I can send into the City of Toronto for a $75…
I'm on the board of a local community organization that runs a bunch of programs for people in the community (pre/post natal, parent/child, summer day camp, after school, teens, leaders, seniors euchre, etc) and we just had our first annual fall family festival called Applicious at Woodbine Park today.
I was on the planning committee for the event and ever since I heard that Hillside was a bottled-water free event, I figured we should definitely go the same route! Well, we managed to do just…
Just a quick note to say that Monsanto is no longer producing rBST - a genetically engineered bovine growth hormone used to increase milk production in dairy cows. More information here on the Greenpeace site. From the article:
"The power of global consumer pressure has forced U.S. chemical giant Monsanto to get out of producing the bovine growth hormone rBST, a genetically engineered (GE) product to increase milk production in dairy cows."
"Safeway, Starbucks and Kraft recently announced they…
Just a note to say that we've really enjoyed being a part of the Plan B Organic Farm CSA.
We got a half share plus the fruit box this year. The half share is totally local produce, not always from Plan B but from neighbouring organic farms as well. It's mainly veggies with fruit when it's available. The fruit box was a pilot for them this year I believe (from an email they sent me "Our goal with the fruit box is to create a market for local organic fruit to keep them from digging up trees!")…
Last summer I was talking to a friend on the phone while hanging laundry on the line and I made the comment, "This getting green thing is time-consuming!" because I'd done so much laundry (2 little ones under 3 and lots of cloth diapers to boot) I could barely keep up (it's much more manageable now that they don't spill all over themselves at every meal and one is toilet trained- yay!). And she responded, "Yes, and expensive!" I didn't say anything at the time, but after I got off the phone I…
I get the GoodWorkCanada green job site email every day (hoping to find my dream green job one day) and today there was an interesting listing. I mean, there are always interesting listings, but this one I never thought about before. Say you have some fruit trees on your property that you don't have the time to or are otherwise unable to harvest. You can call up Not Far From the Tree and a group of volunteers will come and harvest your fruit. 1/3 of the harvest goes to you, 1/3 gets split…
You've got to love summer. The warm days lead to so much less energy consumption in my house. For instance:
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