Eco Friendly House And Garden

When you visit you local stores – you aren’t just saving petrol these days!

There are many, many reasons to shop in your local stores, but supporting small businesses rather than national and international ‘brands’ is also a key factor in keeping your community intact and offering a wide variety of choice and prices to suit all budgets and households!

Take a look at the following list to get some idea of the difference you can make as an individual.

You Help Keep Money In The Local Economy:
The first and most important thing you do is to make sure that your lovely stores are re-investing their money in local services and your community.  Shop-keepers have a huge amount of ‘sway’ in the high street and your local community, with committees funding new ideas and urban improvements.

You Help Generate New Money:
By making your stores and your community a ‘place for shopping and eating’ as well as clean and organised, you will be attracting people from outside in to your environment who will bring money with them – fuelling further improvements.

You Help Improve Public Services And Transport:
By attracting all these people in to your community, you make sure that the services they – and you – need are there.  These include better public transport, clean toilets, public seating, better parking, cleaner streets and more events and activities being organised. 

Compare travelling through London on the Tube with a shop on every corner to arriving at a village train station in Norfolk with no buses, toilets or even a restaurant that takes credit cards! (and I only went there a couple of months ago!).

Creating Local Jobs & Keeping Local People:
By creating a healthy employment market in your town, you are attracting families to move in therefore keeping the housing market (and house prices) at a steady rate – as well as promoting healthy competition between schools with the influx of children – thus making education a priority.

This also includes making sure that elderly residents don’t have to travel some distance to get their shopping.  If you make sure that a variety of shops remain on the high street, then this gived those less mobile the opportunity to visit individual stores for their goods – rather than having to travel to out-of-town superstores all the time.

Support New Ideas And Entrepreneurs:
People who want to try something new can’t always get their foot in the door of larger companies, so want to start out alone – and your high street is the perfect place for them.  By visiting them and buying just one little thing can be the difference between them surviving the next few months!

You must remember the high streets a few months ago after we lost some big name shops – we need to help fill the gaps back up and see some new stores popping up.  They won’t move in unless they know you will support them.

Be Unique:
Unique things are what we love – think of the Brighton Lanes or London’s Covent Garden – we wouldn’t be without them.  Their individuality allows our homes to be unique too!  With a thousand different scarves to choose from – you can be just you!  Imagine if everyone had the same curtains, same ornament over the fireplace or 1 of only 3 types of fruit bowl in the world!

So grab your purse and your cotton bag – and head into town!

Should smaller woodland areas near villages and towns be for pets or wildlife?

Having recently moved to a new area, I am still getting used to the local woodlands, parks, commons and footpaths close to home – but I arrived at one the other day to find that the area just outside of the car park was a dog poo hot spot!

Being a nice woodland area in a small village just a 5 or 10 minute drive from a much larger town – it seemed to attract what I call the ‘for the human’ dog walkers – which are the ‘busy’ type that think that the only reason you need to take your dog out is for a wee and poo – and they fit this ‘chore’ into a slot just before work and just after they get home.

They are also the type that think that if noone sees it or their dog does it near some trees, then they don’t have to pick it up!

I’m sure that these types of woods are found all over the country and all over the world infact – but it was funny how people reacted to the news that, thanks to a recent exchange of hands, this woodland is being converted into a nature reserve over the next year or so. 

There will be heavy machinery on site to clear dangerous trees (so the site will be closed for some months) a new path for dog walkers with a big splash pool for water loving dogs (to reduce the contamination of a delicate chalk stream on site) and a poop area to reduce dog waste across the rest of the site.

The idea is that the current habitats will be enhanced to attract the wildlife that has been lost over the past 50 years or so.

The Village Meeting:
All this sounds fantastic, and I can’t wait to volunteer some of my time to help them achieve their goal – but the rest of the discussion group seemed up in arms!

The first thing they wanted to clarify was that they were a responsible dog owner – then all they talked about was where they were going to walk their dog while the site was closed and what they were supposed to do with their dog waste if there weren’t enough poo bins supplied.

Shouldn’t the owners of the land supply them with more bins? they were asking.

There wasn’t one mention of the hope of getting newts back into the pond, or clearing waste materials out of the lake to attract waterfowl.  They weren’t too sure about the 4 cattle being released to keep the grass and weeds down either or even having a ‘dog friendly’ path (I mean why can’t they just walk where they want on someone else’s land that happens to be close to their front door!).

What’s Best?
So, I was stuck in the middle: annoyed at pet owners for only caring about themselves and their dogs rather than wildlife, but then asking myself where do we expect these people to walk their dogs?  In the street?  Driving to areas that are more delicate or currently free from dogs?

If we don’t supply a spot for them close to home to ‘ruin’ – what areas will they end up destroying instead?

Walk To Work Week – Go On, Give It A Try!

It’s the first ever Walk to Work Week – organised by Living Streets, and why don’t you become a part of it?  It’s planned for the week of April 27th to 1st May, this year.

We all know that driving short distances to work adds to the rush hour traffic, costs money and isn’t great for the environment – so why not change to walking.

I don’t mean you have to walk all the way to work from home – and we all know that this isn’t even possible for many people these days – but using a combination of walking and public transport can have a huge impact on the environment – and your health!

Why Do It?
Well, I walk to work along the canal and through a park at the moment – although I also have to walk past a building site – I arrive at work after having had my own little adventure!

And my route is a shorter distance than the equivalent drive, so it doesn’t really take any longer to walk!

And driving to work adds to the endless traffic we see in towns and cities - which no-one wants to sit in it – yet many of us choose to drive and ultimately cause it!  I hate being stuck in traffic, so I try my best not to cause it. 

My theory is that everyone should work close to home anyway, so walking to work shouldn’t be a problem!

Can you walk to work all year – not just the one week?