Green SAHM

Home Depot is without a doubt one of my husband’s favorite toy stores. Fortunately, it’s the garden department he’s mostly after. And that made it a lot of fun when a representative asked if I would like to review a few of their green products. They gave me a gift card to try some things out.

What can I say? There were certainly a few plants I need for the garden.

What I really love about these plants (cilantro, watermelon, basil and sage were some of what we needed) is the biodegradable containers. They’re in peatpots rather than the usual plastic containers. You remove the little plastic wrapper (sorry, can’t avoid it entirely), carefully remove the bottom of the pot, and plant.

When wet, the peatpots are a little flexible, so you have to be more careful when picking them up. But I like them better than the plastic ones that most people don’t recycle. I think you can sometimes return those to the store for reuse, though; I don’t know how many places do that right now but it’s something to ask. I remember my mother doing that a lot.

We’ve planted a couple plants from these already, and they seem to be doing all right. We’ve used peatpots for starting seeds in the past, so I have confidence in the technique.

I also checked out the Clorox Green Works products. These have been pretty controversial, since Clorox is not exactly a green company. The Green Works products do have a good ingredients list, though, and I do think it can be good to encourage a company to be greener. If all we do is say it’s not good enough because their other products are bad, what’s their incentive? Up until now I’ve enjoyed products like Simple Green and my own homemade cleansers, so it should be interesting to see how this compares.

I’ll get around to trying these out when it cools off a little. The house is over 90 degrees inside, so even though the bathtub really needs a scrub (how do men generate so much dirt?), it can wait a little while.

I got thinking on the topic of summer today when my daughter’s kindergarten teacher commented that there are only 4 Mondays left in our school year. It was one of those “wow, summer’s almost here” moments for me.

That, of course, brought me to thinking about cleaning up the outside of the house. Living in southern California, it’s pretty practical to keep the outside areas of the house nice all year. We don’t get much rain here, after all, never mind significantly colder weather.

One of those things that has always been a bit annoying is how some people like to clean their walkways and driveways with the hose. Considering the water situation in our area, I hope to see very, very little of that this year, but I know people will do it just because it’s faster.

A good broom will allow you to take care of most of the problem without water. You’ll want one that does well outdoors, which may be a little heavier duty than many like for the kitchen or other parts of the house. I always liked the big push brooms for larger areas myself.

Most of the time, that’s all you need. If there’s a dried up mess outside then yeah, you might want to get the hose as the fastest way to clean it up. But most of the time you don’t really need it.

The same goes later in the year for leaf blowers and such. Get a good rake and a broom for the walkways, and get your yard cleaned up without wasting fuel, electricity or water.

Of course, many people do one thing that is pretty green is add plants to their garden. That can be more or less green, depending on how you garden. The plastic containers that many plants come in can be problematic, although some garden centers may take them back if they’re in good condition. Use compost instead of fertilizer, and you can make your yard more beautiful without hurting the environment much.

I was using Stumble Upon today when I came across this article about the Moringo tree. Very interesting!

Interesting enough that my husband and I decided to buy some seeds for it.

<>Normally I like to think about local plants, but this one produces food as well as grows quickly, which really cuts down my resistance. My husband and I have agreed that as much as possible when we own our own place, decorative landscaping will be local plants, but we’ll still have a garden.

The Moringo grows quickly, which is a part of the attraction. My son’s bedroom heats up worse than any other part of our house, so something that grows quickly enough to shade it would be a huge help for our heating bills. And since it doesn’t require great soil, and apparently can grow in dry areas, we have hopes for this being a good choice for our area.

One of the catches is that it requires a lot of pruning. But if the leaves are edible, I don’t think pruning will be too big a deal.

We’ve already ordered our seeds from Seedman.com. Hopefully they’ll come quickly and within a few weeks I may have more to report.

There’s a somewhat disturbing report on Discovery on how bumblebees appear to be vanishing. People don’t pay nearly as much attention to them as they do to honeybees, which we already know have been in trouble.

Reading this article made me think. I haven’t seen bumblebees much lately in my area. They were never so common as honeybees, but they weren’t rare.

From the article:

But if bumblebees were to disappear, farmers and entomologists warn, the consequences would be huge, especially coming on top of the problems with honeybees, which are active at different times and on different crop species.

Bumblebees are responsible for pollinating an estimated 15 percent of all the crops grown in the U.S., worth $3 billion, particularly those raised in greenhouses. Those include tomatoes, peppers and strawberries.

As more of these problems show up it becomes all the more clear that we need to pay attention to what is happening in the natural world. Pollinators are one of the most vital links in the entire food chain no matter what it is you like to eat.

Technorati Tags: bumblebee, vanishing bumblebees, environment

It’s been horrendously hot here. Lots of wilting plants when we aren’t careful enough about watering. Most obvious to others, of course, is the lawn.

My own standards for the lawn are pretty low. I don’t need a golf course green lawn. I just need a place my kids can play.

One tip for this I heard on my local news a while back was to simply water less often, but water more deeply. Deeper waterings help the lawn for longer, and can use less water overall. I believe he said something like an inch of water a week would keep an adequately healthy lawn. I don’t know that I reach that much watering even, but I might. I’ve never put a gauge out to be sure.

We rent, and the landlord has a yard service that does what I consider to be a pretty poor job of lawn care. In other words, weeds are taking over, but all they do is cut the lawn. On the plus side, I guess that makes the care more or less organic. The minus is of course that some of the weeds aren’t exactly as good as grass for kids to play on. Another minus would be that they haul the clippings away.

If you have more control over how your yard is cared for, sites such as SafeLawns.org can be a huge help. Not everyone will like all the advice, such as allowing clover to grow, but many of their tips just make sense.

Technorati Tags: green lawn