Eco Friendly House And Garden

I know that net curtains are a bit old fashioned these days - but they protect what’s inside!

So, how about a modern alternative: Blinds.

In winter, an uncovered glass window is just asking to let heat escape 24 hours a day.  So why let it?  Here are some great benefits and tips for modern window coverings - and it’s not just about heat either, but we will start there:

1) Escaping Heat:
If your window isn’t protected from the inside, all the heat from your room is going to head for the outside.  Nature likes to keep everything equal, so if the nice warm air can get outside and mix with the colder air - it will, just like cordial mixing into the glass of water.

If you don’t give the warm air a chance to get cold - all the warm air will stay in your home and keep your fuel bills down.  Blinds and curtains are the equivalent of insulation in your roof: without them the heat just escapes!

Close your blinds as soon as it gets dark outside to trap most of the daytime heat inside.  

2) Letting In The Sun:
In summer it is quite the opposite!  You want all the sunshine you can to come in the windows - flooding your home with warmth.

A net curtain in the way could be a hindrance to this - so blinds are perfectly designed to roll completely out of the way - allowing you room to fill with the sun’s rays - and keep your home warm into the evening.

Use natures power when you can! (and it’s free!)

3) Security:
Closing your window blinds when it’s dark outside is also essential for good security.  Once you lights are on and it’s dark outside - everyone can see straight into your home - with all your electrical goodies on show.

Walking in the streets when it’s dark is a great opportunity for thieves to ‘case the joint’.  They can see everything you are doing - and more importantly - they will know when you are not in!

4) Privacy:
Linked to above, but for those people who have a window actually on the street front - you don’t want people looking in, but you don’t want to shut out the sunshine - so why not fit a half-blind at head height. 

Alternatively you can now order blinds that open from the top rather than the bottom.  Ideal for letting in the light without letting in the nosey parkers!

5) Conservation:
Sunlight and UV rays can damage precious materials and paintings over time, so sometimes you would want to block out the light when it is directly shining onto a certain piece of furniture or art work.

Net curtains won’t do the trick and full curtains will make the whole room pitch black - however blinds can be adjusted to cover only the articles you want to protect, letting the rest of the room stay in sunlight!

6) Style:
And finally - why should saving energy be boring?  It isn’t, you just have to look in the right places.

There are many suppliers of trendy, fashionable, traditional, plain, black-out, bamboo and wood blinds, either fitted into the frame for extra heat and light control, hanging loose - so you can still peak around them, or top opening for privacy.

So, maybe consider using blinds to save money, save energy, protect your property and look great!

Give your kids the chance to become involved in their future.

I know this blog is mainly about your home - there is no reason to think that the outside world isn’t connected to that. You chose your home for it’s location and everything that came with it - but you don’t want to just live in your house for ever.

You want to go out to the local parks and woods, even travel further to other regional areas and zoos - maybe even to the other side of the world to see wildlife and natural landscapes that are unique. And that’s where the biodiversity comes in.

Without this variety, there would be no beauty in the world. Imagine if all animals were either cows or dogs, or only brown or white in color. Imagine if zoos and nature reserves only had squirrels and rabbits in them! It would be awful - and it would not inspire kids to explore the world around them.

The world needs the kids out there discovering things for themselves - as this is how things happen and changes are made. If young people don’t become involved in their surroundings and the amazing variety of wildlife and plants that it supports - then they cannot have a say in their own future or that of their own children down the line.

This Is Biodiversity.
The way that animals and plants interact to survive keeps the status quo. The classic example of ‘the plants feed the herbivores and the herbivores become food for the carnivores’ follows the basic principles but it is not a chain so to speak - it’s a web.

So add to the above that insects are needed to pollinate the plants - but they in turn need other plants for their young to live off and those plants might need to be in a certain location to thrive. They may also (in the case of bees) need to nest in tunnels dug by mice or voles which survive by eating certain other plants and insects.

The list of connections goes on and on through animals and plants of all shapes and sizes - and they all have their part to play in the natural world that we see every day. Everything has changed it’s appearance or shape of needs to fit into a gap in the web so it can survive.

The Competition:
So, why not help your kids to get active and try to capture these connections and these differences with a great photo.

You don’t even have to travel anywhere to get involved as your garden could be home to mini-beasts of amazing colors, butterflies feeding on your plants, birds looking for an easy meal and even small mammals creeping around your garden furniture.

Of course, the further afield you travel the more variety you can find. Bold patterns and bright colors are found in the tropics and larger mammals need a lot of space to thrive - but a simple brown bird can steal the show if it has a specialisation - something about it that makes it different from other birds - like really long legs or a really long beak.

Take a look at the short video on their website to get the finer details - and to find some photo-taking tips - and to see some inspiring shots that have already been added. Your entry could mean that your image is spread across the globe as the best of them all. Not only winning the first prize - but also inspiring the next generation of wildlife protectors.

Something our world is in great need of.

It really is a light for your garden powered only by the wind!

Imagine sitting outside in your garden or on your balcony and you are being mesmerised by your spinning light! Sometimes it is a solid tube of color and other times it is a pulsating spiral of energy!

How Does It Work?
Well, there are 14 LED lights embedded on the edges of the product which are powered by the spinning of the FireWinder in the wind.

The Firewinder itself is made of 100% recyclable materials and is moulded in the shape of a helix. This way it can catch the wind from any angle and any strength.

Any breeze over a few miles-per-hour will spin the helix around - giving the illusion of a rising edge and in daylight this is more like a mobile than a piece of cutting edge eco-technology!

However, what makes it light up are the 14 LED ‘bulbs’ or ‘patches’ spread out all up the outside edge of the spiral which are powered by the tiny turbines inside.

As it is the outer rising edge of the FireWinder that has the lights on it - when the wind picks up, these lights spin around really quickly forming a continuous band of rising light around the lamp: See Light Spinning.

In slower winds the light pattern is mesmerising and moves upwards around the FireWinder at differnt speeds, sometimes throbing in the breeze. But at higher wind speeds, the lights stay solid and so you will have a what appears to be a static column of light 14 bands high!

It really is something to just stare at for hours!

Is It More Of An Ornament Then?
I suppose you could say that. I mean it is not going to be bright enough for you to read books by or offer home security features - but it will be a welcome edition in gardens during those warmer summer months.

FireWinder is I think the first and only wind-powered outdoor lighting product - all the others on the market are solar-powered - and offer a less fun form of lighting! However, if you don’t get a lot of wind then you best opt for these!

One great eco-friendly product for garden lighting are the solar-powered ‘rock’ lights. As their name suggests, they are plastic ‘rocks’ that have a tilted and so hidden solar panal on the top. By day they look like a simple stone and by night they emit a quite powerful beam of light.

These come in a range of different sizes and offer a more continous and reliable solid light in the garden than the Firewinders, but are not so amazing to watch!

There are of course plenty of more light-looking solar powered lights for your garden - some white, some colored and even some color changing lights - but you can’t beat the spiral effect!

Did you know that honey bees make onions and carrots grow?

Bees pollinate a huge number of plants, fruits and vegetables, and help to improve the yields of so many others. So without them, there may be less, smaller or no fruit and veg for us to eat!

Don’t Plants Just Grow Themselves?
Well, yes. All plants will grow into an adult plant or tree from a seed in the right conditions, but most will not fruit without pollination.

Pollination is where the male parts (the pollen) are moved from one plant to another by a bee, another insect or the wind (the pollinator) and join with the female parts (the ova) and make the babies if you like - and the babies in this case are the seeds. Most seeds are normally encased in fruiting bodies like apples, pears or nuts.

So, if for example, you enclosed an adult apple tree in a bee proof environment - it would produce blossom - but not any apples. The apples only grow once the flower has been fertilised, and the apples then grow from where the flowers once were. No pollination = no fertilisation = no apples.

The same is true for any flowering plant.

Can’t Something Else Pollinate Our Food?
Well, yes of course - some are pollinated by a variety of birds, insects or mammals - and many by the wind, but certain plants have evolved over thousands of years to work best with just 1 or 2 types of pollinators.

You may have seen the incredibly long flower tubes that only certain birds can reach into to feed, or the incredibly intricate ways that plants transfer pollen onto butterflies heads. Did you know that some plants will only release their pollen if stimulated by vibrating bee wings!

We can stimulate pollination ourselves if necessary, but it takes a lot longer and is nowhere near as effective long term. There is for example a town in China where villagers have to rub feathers across all their pear trees to make sure that they produce fruit - as they killed off all their own bees with pesticides.

This is all well and good for 1 small location where everyone chips in a bit of time for their own rewards, but imagine how many people you would need, how much time it would take and how much money it would cost to pay people to pollinate - by hand - the 60 million almond trees in California alone?

And this is just one crop. We farm a tonne of other more important crops - all of which will suffer if there are no bees.

What Can I Do?
Firstly, you can make sure that you limit or stop your use of pesticides or garden chemicals for ever and garden more organically. Bees are insects and so an insecticide used to kill those pesky aphids could well be killing bees too as well as butterflies and ladybirds - and possibly even birds and mammals.

Ladybirds which eat poisoned aphids could build up the toxins inside themselves before getting eaten by birds and passing these poison on up the food chain to larger birds or mammals! So insecticides can poison sparrows, falcons and even domestic cats!

Secondly, make a home for them! Now I am not suggesting that you need to set up a hive - you can easily make a home for a single bee in a tree or a hole in the ground and help to encourage wild bees (domesticated bees in hives cannot survive without human help) into your garden.

Make sure you leave wild areas in your yard - and make sure it has flowering plants in it so the bees can eat the nectar. A garden filled with decking and concrete isn’t going to make a good home for any animal!

Wild bees are just as good if not better at pollinating some plants and foods, but they live singly or in much smaller groups and don’t always want to live in the same hive. Your garden could supply the next home for some travelling bees - helping to keep your plants alive at the same time!

Thirdly, you could support local bee keepers by buying local honey - after all - their bees could be helping to pollinate your garden and local parks. They could also be creating all the yummy fruit you keep buying from your local farm store!

Nationally, Hagen Daz have made a Vanilla Honey Ice Cream to help highlight the plight of the honey bee (bees pollinate vanilla orchids if you didn’t know). By buying some of this delicious product - I have tried it myself - you can help fund research into what is causing the massive bee losses across the world - and hopefully prevent the honey bee as we know it ceasing to exist.

As a result, you will be keeping (excuse the pun) all those apples, pears, melons, cherries, blueberries, pumpkins, carrots, onions, broccoli, soya beans, almonds and sunflowers on your table!

Here, we continue from yesterday, with the final 3 tips on making those small steps to running a healthy eco friendly house!

5) Don’t Do Disposable!  Try to reduce your consumption of disposable items - they are everywhere.  Pens, sticky note pads, razors, toothbrushes, cotton-buds, cotton wool balls, facial pads, tissues, baby wipes, hygiene wipes, even personal ‘lady’ items.

Try to find the longer lasting equivalent - it’s not less hygienic if you do it properly.  For example facecloths instead of wipes or cotton wool is perfectly clean and gets the job done - then gets washed - and does the job all over again!

Toothbrushes with changeable heads and razors with replaceable blades all go towards reducing waste - and reducing your consumption of new materials.

Feminine hygiene products now come unbleached, and in smaller sizes to help reduce waste and resources - but now even come in washable versions.  There is even the menstrual cup today (a small insertable item that will ‘contain’ rather than ‘absorb’) that does away with the need for cotton products altogether!

Similarly, the contraceptive device known as The Coil (an IUD) works perfectly well as a contraceptive device for most women - reducing the need for wasteful alternatives.

In sexually active individuals and couples, one Coil could reduce the need for a continual supply of ‘the Pill’ - filled with either/or both oestrogen and progesterone (which eventually leave our bodies and enter the water system and affecting animals and plants) and could stop the rising tide of used condoms filling landfills or floating down the beach!

6) Buy Big!  Make sure that you buy the largest pack size of your products that you can.  Not only does this reduce packaging per unit - it should also save you money and reduce your weekly trash pile! 

Therefore, not only will you need to shop less as a result, the container is more likely to be re-used for storage.  (You can keep a smaller bottle for decanting into if space is an issue).

Don’t be tempted by promotions or buy-one-get-one-free offers for the smaller products.  They usually work out the most expensive way to buy your products, weight more with the extra containers, use more ink and labels with their individual wrapping or information, take up more room in your house and create more waste.  Therefore their overall ‘cost’ is not actually any cheaper!

And Finally (7):
Try something new if it’s eco credentials impress you.  Remember that advertised brands in commercials and magazines, pay $$$$$$$’s to advertise - and it’s you who pays for it.

You pay for that model to walk along tropical beaches for an ice cream, or that famous person to fly a plane for some anti-aging cream, or a mountaineer to climb a high mountain for a washing powder.  That must mean that they are making a huge profit from you somewhere - and that means that their products are made a lot cheaper than the price you pay!

Unadvertised products usually put a lot more into their products as they sell by word of mouth saving advertising costs.  And, in all honesty - noone recommends a product that doesn’t work, taste good or fit properly. 

So trust a brand that has been recommended by people you know sometimes instead of just believing what you are told on the TV!

Let me know how you get on, or have any other tips…….

Several continuous small steps are better than one big single one.

I have put together some simple steps in the ‘beauty & fashion’ department that can help you make a move over to more environmentally friendly products without too much hassle.  And it can be a bit of fun too.

Many people are worried about which brand of this they should chose or what brand of that is better - but really the answer is to change bits of your lifestyle not just swap one thing for another.

It is always easiest to Reduce - this is the key to sustainable and eco friendly living.  Reuse comes a close second and of course never forget to Recycle - but focus on the life cycle of the items you are buying or thinking of buying and follow it from production, through use and then to disposal.

This brings me to the first fashion tip:

1) Stop Shopping!  The greenest products and clothes are those items you already have.  They have already been made - and it’s up to you to use them or recycle them.

If you decide to become ‘green’ overnight and go and buy something ‘organic’ or ‘bio-degradable’ instead - you are wasting all the energy, transport and ingredients that have gone into the one you already have, but are going to leave on the shelf.  Wasted.

We need to Reduce our consumption, so make sure that you keep wearing all your old clothes, use the last of that old shampoo or bubble bath, and don’t throw something away because you want something new.  Or, try Tip 2:

2) Have A Swap Party. There are many people like you who grow tired of the same shoes/top/beauty products/etc - so why not give them to your friends in exchange for something they ‘don’t want’.

You could come away with a whole new outfit, and change of facial regime or some household ingredients that your friends would otherwise have wasted.  Similarly, your ‘waste’ finds a second life!

3) Simplify Your Life.  Another things to consider when going to purchase a new item, is whether you actually need it right now.  I mean, rather than buying some nutritional supplements - why not actually consider eating more healthily instead!  Buying fresh local fruit and veg produces far less waste that factory-made tablets in tiny plastic bottles!

Similarly, technology out-dates itself overnight it seems - so rather than make that rash purchase - think about ways you can make do with what you have until you really have to upgrade.  Otherwise, you could be disposing of something that was perfectly usable for something that will be out-of-date in 3 months anyway!

And, most technology and appliances come ‘eco friendly’ these days.  With low energy rating listings and reduced-chemical electronics readily available and at a similar cost to the short-use energy-hungry models we brought last time!

4) Back To Basics.  Why do we need everything so perfumed and highly specific these days?  Can’t we just use unscented nappy-sacks, hygiene products and ‘exotic’ air-fresheners?  Use natural instead: tea-tree oil, lavender, along with other plants and herbs all have their uses - and without the chemicals!

Try Aloe for sun care, oats for facial scrubs, cucumber slices for eye recovery - and many many more.  I have seen quotes that ladies apply, on average, 126 ingredients and chemicals in daily beauty regimes!  That’s amazing really - and seeing as so many of those are potentially harmful to us.

Babies are particularly sensitive to chemicals yet we use an array of man-made (and potentially hormone-affecting) toiletries for them without any real reason - other than ‘we saw the advert’ and it said ‘this does this…..’.  Well warm water and an organic cotton cloth cleans even the dirtiest of bottoms!

See Part 2 tomorrow for further eco friendly tips…….

Are you serious about saving energy in the home?  Are you thinking about constructing an eco friendly house or other property?

Then maybe you should consider a holiday to Wales!

Over the first weekend of June 2009, there is the Greener Homes and Buildings Show - pitched as ‘..the UK’s one stop shop for green building solutions’.

Or, ‘cartrefi ac adeiladau gwyrdd - siop un stop am atebion i adeiladu gwyrdd’.

Wales is already the home of the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Powys - as well as one of the most amazing scenery and adventure landscapes!  So why not combine a visit to this region with a trip to the show?

What’s There?
Well, all of the seminars from last year are available online at this years website: Greener Homes & Buildings so you can see if the topics covered will suit your needs this year.

Whether you are renovating an existing property or building from scratch, there will be something for you to learn here.  With over 25 companies exhibiting and many professional seminars taking place over the weekend, you are sure to come away all the more knowledgeable about your interests.

CAT will be there to answer your questions, offer advice and products as well as details for their year-long programme of sustainable living and green building courses to continue your learning.

What Else?
The show takes place in the Royal Welsh Showground in central Wales, so you are in prime position to explore the beautiful landscapes of the Cambrian mountains, Snowdonia National Park and the Brecon Beacons.  All great reasons to show why we are trying to live more sustainably and preserve these landscapes!

Visiting such areas of outstanding natural beauty also makes us realise how we can seriously influence what happens to the land - no matter how great its size. 

What we do to change our lifestyles and the way we build and use our homes can prevent local, national and global changes that are for the worse - and shape them for the better.

What Now?
So, book your tickets for the show before the 15th of May to get and early bird discount and pay just £6 entry.  Kids under 16 go free!

Then, get online and find accommodation for the long weekend or the whole week and start planning your adventure!  Don’t be shy - if you are saving the landscape - you may as well go and enjoy it!