Green Shopping at Home Depot?

May 18, 2008 Gardening, Home and Family

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.

Tags: green shopping, home depot