Tomato Thievery

Let me preface this post by saying that I should be studying for a test right now, but I need to get this off my chest or I won't be able to concentrate on anything else! Yesterday, as I left for school, I walked out the front door and paused to take a look at my tomato plant. It's been warm the past week or so which has prompted my plant to put out some new flowers. I had hopes that these would be the last tomatoes of the season. When I returned from school however, the plant was gone! That's right. GONE. Pot and all. The only thing that remained was a wet ring of dirt on the cement where the pot had been sitting all summer. Who could do such a thing?

Environmental Enlightenment #18 (If It's Yellow Let It Mellow)

Yep, you read the title correctly and I'm sure that most of us have heard the phrase, "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down." For those who haven't heard the phrase before, the first part means that while using the restroom one wouldn't flush the toilet after urinating and instead "let it mellow." The second part of the phrase refers to always flushing after solid waste. Some people get really grossed out by this concept and honestly I don't see any rational reason for it. Also, I don't know why I didn't start doing this sooner!

National Ride Your Bike to Work Day

According to The League of American Bicyclists, May is National Bike Month and National Bike to Work Day is today, May 20th, 2011.

If I had a bike, or a job for that matter, I would definitely participate. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I've been trying to figure out a way to get rid of my car altogether. In the mean time, that means reducing its use as much as possible. I think that Ride Your Bike to Work Day can be a good experience for people to test the waters and see what they think about incorporating a bike into their commute.

Green Festival 2011

Yesterday I attended the Green Festival in Chicago at McCormick Place. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was very excited! The festival took place on Saturday May 14th and Sunday May 15th, but I only went on Sunday. There were stages where people were giving talks, a music stage, an organic wine/beer garden, renewable energy booths, fair trade booths, organic food booths and so much more! I was a little overwhelmed at first, but we made our rounds, I snapped some photos and grabbed a bunch of pamphlets. I'll post some pictures here and talk about what I saw and also what I bought.

Environmental Enlightenment #15 (Know Your Meat)

I'm about 3/4 of the way through "To Buy or Not To Buy Organic" and already it has encouraged me to discover where my meat is coming from. I'll review the book in a future post, but I do want to say that it brought up a very good point about not only considering organic foods, but also considering local and sustainable foods. Those organic grapes from Argentina may not be worth all the fossil fuels used to transport them to your doorstep. Anyways, it got me wondering where my meat is coming from. So I did a little research...

Mini-Farming Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre

I finished reading the Mini-Farming book yesterday and I was very pleased by the 200 plus pages of detailed information! Reading this book made me want to throw on a pair of over-alls, grab a shovel and get planting. Unfortunately, as it stands right now, I don't have any "land." The indoor garden is it for now. Although I have made a bargain with my parent's for some of their yard space and I fully intend on applying some of the methods that I learned in this book when I transplant some things over there.

Indoor Garden Update

The indoor garden is coming along just as planned with the exception of the stubborn mint and the addition of a few new plants. I got a strawberry plant for the boyfriend's sweet tooth and a lime basil plant for my Mojito tooth. I never heard of lime basil before, but when I saw the seed packet I had to have it! I immediately imagined it in various cocktails, teas and pasta sauces. Also, I had been waiting for my potato tubers to come and they finally arrived earlier this week. I will be planting them today and I'm so excited!

Earth Day 2011

This past Friday, April 22nd, was Earth Day. I have recollections of a handful of Earth Day "clean-ups" taking place at my grammar school, but I haven't attending any such events since then. When thinking about what to do for Earth Day this year I thought back to this blog post about picking up litter. It seems that I got ahead of myself in writing this blog. For one, I didn't take into consideration weather. It's snowed here well into March and April has been a cold rainy mess. Now, there have been a sprinkling of unseasonably warm days, which I have taken advantage of, but for the most part it seems like picking up litter everyday will be more challenging than I expected.

Environmental Enlightenment #14 (Lunapads)

Prepare yourself for another "feminine hygiene" related post. When I first wrote about the DivaCup I was only beginning to realize how much this product would change how I handled my monthly gift from mother nature. In this post I would like to go into a little more detail about the DivaCup as well as my new experience with Lunapads.

In my original post about the DivaCup I briefly mentioned Lunapads as an alternative reusable menstrual product, but I hadn't yet tried them for myself. Since I was using the cup I saw no reason for purchasing a Lunapad. While learning how to use the DivaCup I was still wearing a disposable liner "just in case." I thought that once I became confident in my DivaCup skills that I would be able to stop using the liner and just go with the cup. I underestimated my paranoia! The cup has never leaked, but I just can't help wanting some extra protection on the off chance that it does leak. So after reading numerous positive testimonials about Lunapads I decided to try one out for myself. I purchased a mini pantyliner to wear as a back-up with the cup.

Environmental Enlightenment #13 (Natural Easter Egg Dye)

In addition to my magazine subscription to Fine Cooking, I also receive e-letters from them via e-mail. These e-letters usually include recipes related to the season. For example, the most current e-letter features how to plan your Easter menu. It also includes how to make the perfect hard-boiled egg and how to naturally dye your Easter eggs. That last part caught my attention. So I followed the link that they provided and found the recipe for naturally dyeing Easter eggs here. This recipe uses vegetables, fruits, coffee, tea and spices to dye the eggs a wide range of colors. I haven't dyed Easter eggs since I was a kid, but I might just try the recipe out this Easter.

Environmental Enlightenment #12 (Recycle Old Shoes)

When it comes time to get rid of something used/old I am trying my hardest not to throw it away. I've been doing a lot of research on how to recycle things that I never knew could be recycled! Earlier this week the boyfriend had some old gym shoes to get rid of and my first thought was to donate them to charity. However, they were unwearable at this point (falling apart and too abused to be useful to anyone else's feet). As far as I knew there weren't any shoe recycling programs, but I decided to do a quick Google search to double check. To my surprise there is a way to recycle old gym shoes! Nike (and their sister company Converse) has a re-use a shoe program. Every part of the shoe is used. The rubber from the out-sole is used to make running tracks; the fabric from the upper-sole is used to make padding for basketball courts; and the foam from the mid-sole is used to make the springy surface of tennis courts. The materials are passed through grinders to make the raw material which is then used for the previous mentioned purposes. Yesterday I found the nearest drop-off location and took the old gym shoes into Nike to be recycled.

Newly Purchased Books!

Online shopping can be a dangerous thing. I went on Amazon for just one book, I swear! But I ended up checking out with four books. Although I'm pretty excited about all of them. I'll be writing up a review for each book as I read it, but for now I wanted to share the titles of the books and what I know about them from their inside covers.

Renewable Energy Tour

Saturday, April 2, 2011 I embarked on a renewable energy tour in White County, IN. I had no idea what to expect, but I was mainly attending out of curiosity anyways. I live in a big city where farmers and their land are very much out of sight, out of mind and it was interesting to see what the farmers of White County were doing with their land and resources. The description of the tour according to the IEEE website is as follows:

"The tour is an all day event with the tour taking four hours having stops at a 500 Megawatt wind farm, a Algae wheel wastewater treatment plant, a Anaerobic Digester running off cattle/swine waste and other organic products to produce 3 megawatts/hour of electricity off methane gas and a visit to the Liberty Landfill for a 6.9 Megawatt biomass power generation plant."

Earth Hour 2011

This past Saturday, March 26th at 8:30pm, was Earth Hour. There are many opinions on whether or not turning lights off for one hour each year actually accomplishes anything, because burning candles still releases carbon dioxide. Regardless of any environmental benefits, I think it is nice to unplug from technology for a while. I set up some candles in the front room, bathroom, home office and kitchen. The boyfriend played some acoustic guitar and friends came over with wine which we drank by candlelight. It was a nice night and we even went beyond the hour because the candles just looked so nice and I was talking and lost track of time anyways.

Environmental Enlightenment #11 (The Diva Cup)

Let me preface this post by saying that this one is for the ladies. More specifically, this post will be about environmentally friendly feminine products. Boys feel free to stop reading now, or keep reading, but know that I warned you!

When I started reading Sleeping Naked Is Green I was hoping for a chapter on how to green that special time of the month and I was not let down. There was a chapter about The Diva Cup. This was the first time I had heard of menstrual cups and I was instantly intrigued. I had a feeling that a large amount of waste in my life came from disposable pads, tampons and their packaging. The following statistic is taken from the Diva Cup website:

"Women, on average, experience a lifetime menstruation span of 41 years (11-52). From use of disposable feminine hygiene, an estimated 12 billion sanitary pads and 7 billion tampons are dumped into the North American environment each year (1998). More than 170,000 tampon applicators were collected along U.S. coastal areas between 1998 and 1999."

Environmental Enlightenment #10 (Natural Bath Products)

I promised a post in which I would share my love of Lush products and here it is! I'd like to start out by saying that I haven't used many of their products, but the ones that I have used I love. Lush has a wide selection of bath bombs. I enjoy a soak in the tub a couple times a month so I decided to try two of them out. My favorite was the French Kiss Bubble Bar.

I have a soft spot for Lavender. It smells so good! One day while I was out shopping with my sister we stopped in Lush and started sniffing all of the bath bombs. Picking up their products and smelling them in the store is totally acceptable and quite fun. The woman working at the time was very helpful. She asked what scents I liked and directed me towards the French Kiss Bubble Bar. It contains Lavender oil, Rosemary oil and Thyme oil. Then she performed a demonstration on how the bubble bar works. She plopped a small piece of a bubble bar into a pitcher and started to pour water into it. My sister and I watched as the water began to bubble up. Then she poured the bubble-y water back and forth between two pitchers and the bubbles became fairly thick and soapy, just as a regular bubble bath solution would. This demonstration was supposed to mimic the act of filling up your bath tub with a piece of the bubble bar in it. I took it home and tried it out and it worked so well. I also have jets in my bathtub so when the bubbles popped I just ran the jets and it stirred it back up into bubbles again! I used about 1/4 of the bar for one bath and it was plenty. I love this product and would recommend it to anyone who wants to take bubble baths in an environmentally friendly way.

My First Freecycle Transaction

I completed my first Freecycle transaction today! I've been perusing the OFFER posts for something I've been wanting/needing, but I haven't found anything. So I started going through the WANTED posts to see if I could find a post for something that I had laying around and wasn't using. I came across a post for a floor length mirror.  I responded to the post yesterday and set up pick-up for today. Like Vanessa in Sleeping Naked Is Green, I was a little apprehensive, but I live in a condo building so I advised my fellow Freecycler to ring the buzzer and I would come down with the mirror. I ended up getting rid of this mirror...

Going Car-less

I've been fantasizing about getting rid of my car, but there is a part of me that loves the convenience of having it and is a little afraid to give that up. I've been doing some research, looking into alternative modes of transportation and trying to apply the idea of not having a car to my current lifestyle. I live close enough to the train to take a short walk, hop on and go pretty much anywhere I want in the city.

I haven't owned a bike for a while so I started looking into buying a new one and the choices are endless! For the first time I discovered folding bikes. The CTA does not allow regular bikes on the trains during rush hours (7am-9am and 4pm-6pm), but folding bikes are allowed during these times. This is a plus for me because if I get rid of the car and getting on the train with my bike is the only option to get somewhere then it would be much more convenient to not have to worry about avoiding the rush hours.

Environmental Enlightenment #8 (Fair Trade Tea)

Food has always been the hardest thing for me to change when it comes to being the most environmentally friendly as possible. Since I love to cook it is personally very hard for me to go without avocados, butternut squash, mangoes and other food items that come from outside of the United States. The indoor garden will be (I hope) a small step towards alleviating my reliance on non-local produce. My trips to the grocery store are becoming more and more time consuming because I have been spending more time reading labels and scanning for organically made products. I normally get my fresh produce from a store called Fresh Farms, but for other food purchases I head on over to Jewel. I've noticed that recently they've been stocking their shelves with a brand called Wild Harvest Organic. So I bought some of their organic tea which is certified fair trade.

Basil and Cilantro Planted

A couple days ago I planted the first two plants that will be a part of the indoor garden: basil and cilantro. I've grown basil before, but not cilantro so I'm pretty excited about that. I've also been reading up on how to save seeds from these plants so that I can possibly grow other plants from my own seeds. The main reason that I wanted to write about the basil and cilantro was to share a couple of crafty ideas on how to label your pots so you don't forget which plant is which before it sprouts. The first idea came from Gayla Trail's book Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces. She writes that an inexpensive way to make plant tags is to spray tongue depressors with chalkboard spray and then write in chalk which plant is in that pot and you can always erase the chalk and reuse them! At Christmas time I was given a chalkboard wall decal which I didn't have a purpose for, but I remembered Gayla's idea and came up with my own version. I cut up the wall decal into smaller pieces and stuck them to the pots (labeling what plant was in there and the date that it was planted).