Eco Friendly House And Garden

Are you up to the challenge - to live on a £1 a day? - she says….

Basically this book explains how the author decided to try to live on just a £1 a day for an entire year to save money for her sisters wedding.

And to prove it, she details every little penny she saves and how she does it.  From stealing food out of bins, to hand delivering Christmas cards, and from attending free events at the library for free drinks to hitch-hiking and wild camping!

The Book Itself:
Reading the book is very easy indeed as her writing style flows nicely - however, I did have some issues with the way she did things that really aren’t suitable for everyone.

She also listed endless ways in which she saved money - but not all were very good for the environment - such as ordering free samples of everything she could to use for herself and to give away as presents - as these small products use a huge amount of packaging in relation to the product within.

However, she did use an awful lot of great techniques that can’t do you any harm, like eating less, wasting less and buying reduced price food every day from your local stores.  She also raised a fair amount of money by simply finding it on the floor!  And many of her eco friendly tips can be put into practice immediately!

Attending all the free events did have the role of extra socialising and supporting local businesses and events - but was perhaps somewhat selfish in the fact that she would never join their club/gym/mailing list - she just wanted a warm room and free drinks (probably in disposable plastic cups).

The Author helps to explain how to get things for free - but this started to lean towards the ‘money saving at someone else’s expense’ rather than ‘homesteading and being frugal’! 

She also didn’t take into account any of her normal running costs like rent, bills and running the washing machine (although she was happy to discuss that washing clothes more often extended their lifespan - although how she thought that it washed for free I’m not sure!).  So, her money saving stopped at not spending it rather than saving it from other ‘leaky’ areas - like energy loss.

I totally agree that we can do a certain amount of things for less money - and we can certainly cut down on the amount of things that we buy and therefore waste - but maybe setting such a tight budget was unreasonable in an eco friendly sense. 

Result: 3/5
Although this book was a great read - and I did enjoy her tales and adventures - it is not really that eco friendly: hence the average score. For a general read it would get 4/5, but we are not here for just that - we are here to get eco friendly help and advice and I found myself arguing a bit with her over some of her thinking!

She still uses resources that use up a lot of energy throughout her ‘budget’ year - she just doesn’t pay for them! And in fact a lot of the things she gets for free are ‘trail size’ so are infact less eco friendly in the scheme of things. She also lives a life that is very dependant on others.

She didn’t think about growing her own food or making her own clothes, she just turned up at free local events and ate their food! She used the ‘free’ computers in the library (so the library pays), read endless books while sitting in book shops (ie brand new not paid for books that she put back on the shelf after reading) and still used her washing machine with impunity (well, she’s not ’spending’ the money in cash - it comes out of her bank account invisibly)!

Trying to find ways to be eco friendly can indeed save you money - but money-saving actions are not necessarily eco friendly - and this book proves it!

ISBN: 978-1-906593-12-4

Lighting your home for low energy consumption is an important part of modern eco living.

But don’t forget that it is also very important for all your other hoursehold activities too - like reading, entertaining and general safety.  So do think about these when trying to change your lighting for the better.

If you don’t plan for the correct number of light fixtures in your rooms - or bulb brightness; then you may end up having to make adaptations to the room, or changing room uses - which could all be avoided with better planning.

For example, if the lights are not bright enough in your lounge, you may want to read and use your laptop in the kitchen instead, where seating is usually more uncomfortable - and you may have to keep moving out of the way for others to eat.  And why heat the front room if noone ever really uses it anyway?

But then what if your kitchen is open plan to the hall, the stairs or the conservatory - heating that space is going to cost you more money and energy than having fitted a suitable light in the lounge in the first place!

No Need To Compromise:
Planning for a greener home doesn’t mean you have to ask for less stylish fittings - and you can still take advantage of contemporary designs like modern alessi Designs or AXO’s avant-garde approach in your home.  ‘Eco Friendly’ doesn’t have to mean ‘boring’ - just plan ahead and choose the eco options where possible, for example fittings that work with low energy bulbs and lighting that makes a room in your home fit for the purpose you want to use it for. 

I mean, you can still have glitz and glamour in your home - but make sure it is with a purpose: like some delicate chandelier lighting in the dining room!  If you have a dining room that you want to glam up for special occasions - then go for it!  Energy-efficient light bulbs can be used for most fittings these days - and you still get to enjoy that special treat for yourself without having just a boring single lampshade in your room!

And, as you use it regularly for entertaining - it will be fit for purpose and so make better use of that space, those fittings and your energy choices.  It can also help to keep that room ‘kid free’ so it stays as a special place for grown-ups or special events.

Planning Ahead For A Night In:
Another idea is to have 2 sets of independent lights in a room - for 2 different purposes.  Take your lounge: day to day living for the family, or quiet night in for the grown-ups? 

If you are like me and want the lounge only lit with low light while watching an evening movie - then consider a pendant light - or three.  Rather than leaving the bright kitchen or hall way lights on to create that ambiance; why not light the room with low wattage (and low energy) tiny lights - maybe with colored covers for some warmth. 

And don’t forget - keeping the lighting in the room you are actually in means you can close the door and keep the warmth inside in the winter - rather than it all leaking out of the open hallway door!

So, plan ahead - way ahead - and make sure that the time and energy you spend on planning your new light fittings will fit with your hopes and uses for each room. 

No more having to sit somewhere stupid just because it’s brighter, no more having to move the furniture around to fit in a new lamp - and of course no more compromise on having an eco friendly house!

We bulk buy products to be eco friendly - so does a bigger house give the same benefits?

We’ll not if you are just a single person or a couple - but what if you involved the whole family or some friends?  And I don’t mean join some commune or hippy campsite - although they are both options for some people.

What I am talking about is a great idea for saving energy, combining skills and resources as well as improving everything else ‘in bulk’.  So how about it?

The Theory:
I would love to live in a large home surrounded by land - but I know this would be a bit selfish in the overall scheme of things - so how about a compromise?

How about planning to live in a house with other people, whether they be my mum or sibling - or even friends - And it doesn’t need to be as bad as it sounds: you would plan to buy a property that still allowed you your privacy, for example a 3 story town house, divided into 2 sections or a detached property with a ‘granny annexe’ as part of it.

This way, you can pool resources too, like a joint investment in a garden allotment, solar panels, wildlife garden etc, as not only will you have more combined finances with this arrangement - you will also have a larger amount of space to work with.

2 couples living in townhouses may only have a small courtyard garden and a thin sliver of the terraced roof - but combine those 2 mortgages or using a larger deposit could mean you are able to buy detached, with more garden, off road parking, fruit trees, a larger roof and less overheads: only 1 TV license, one Council Tax, lower energy costs (the first so-many units are higher priced), lower food costs (buying in bulk), the list goes on……

It has all the same advantages as buying a 2 litre bottle of shampoo rather than 4×500ml bottles - but on a much larger scale!

Other Benefits:
For starters, all the maintenance costs will be shared between you all, insurance bills and repairs will all be halved - so more money to spend on green investments.

The security of your home will be increased as when you are away, the other people will probably still be around - and the animals and plants can carry on growing while you are busy.

Magazine subscriptions can be shared, and days out can be treated as ‘family’ tickets as there will always be enough people to make up the numbers! Less cars even, depending on your situation - and more shared journeys - or less journeys even; well if you are going to the store - then your flatmates don’t need to!

Food should never go out of date if there are twice as many people around to eat it - and if you ook together then imagine the energy savings!  And there will always be enough dirty dishes to fill the machine - and clothes for a full wash!

And can you imagine how great it would be for the kids to grow up in a friendly environment where they can learn skills from all the people around them, and live in an house with a bit of character and a large garden with chickens in it!

Sounds perfect - I just need to find some similar-minded friends…………

All around me I see baby trees that are never going to become beautiful oaks or great maples!

In lawns, grass verges, church yards and driveways, I see little trees that have spent all winter putting all their effort into growing - only to be guaranteed to last only a short time more.

With the closing in of the lawn mower season - many of these little survivors will have their tops cut off and live no more!  Yet more can be found growing in ridiculous spots - like a crack in the concrete or up against your home - and will never be allowed to grow to full size!

But, you can help them!  You could give a tree a helping hand - in the same way that we need them to clean our air and feed and protect our wildlife in return.  And it won’t cost you a penny - nature has given you them for free!

So why not move them to a better place while why they are still only tiny, and give them a better chance at growing up!

But How Do I know What A Baby Tree Looks Like?
Luckily for you, spotting a baby tree is so very easy as they nearly all look virtually identical at the moment - growing about an inch or two high out of the grass - see the picture below:

All baby trees grow these same 2 leaves as their first leaves so once you have seen one you will know what they all look like!

It’s only the following set of leaves that are the same shape as their adult leaves - so in a way it is sometimes a little surprise to find out what it is exactly that you have saved!

It could be a mighty oak, a quivering willow or a festive holly tree - but either way - it is a tree that now stands a much better chance of survival if you move it to a flower border, by your hedge or wherever.  As long as it’s not on the lawn!

Watch Them Grow:
Now don’t worry about there being too many trees in your garden if you save them all, as these little babies take years before they will affect your garden - and many of them will become lunch for bunnies and deer or die naturally.

And it will take something like an oak about 30/40 years before it’s big enough for you to climb!  However, they could make a great hedge to make your garden more secluded.

Some of these trees will be smaller trees anyway, like holly, and so will actually look great as they grow up - as well as feeding the winter wildlife!

Maybe take photos of them growing over the years to see your work being rewarded.  And pictures of their first leaves can help you to identify them - and maybe help you decide where the best spot to move them to is.  

I mean, you wouldn’t want a great pine tree right next to the house, and a holly bush close to a path or garden bench could be quite uncomfortable! But an elderberry tree could be great near the kitchen to make some great summer drinks!

Have fun saving your free trees - and our environment!

Can you have an eco friendly house if you eat alone?

People are not solitary creatures by nature, yet busy schedules and the demands of the career ladder can sometimes make it easier to just go it alone.

If you want to impress the boss or just earn more money you could well find yourself working such unsociable hours that you end up eating take-away foods or easy-cook meals that we all know are no good for your health - let alone the planet. But can you stop it?

Apparently, people living alone use 42 % more packaging than multi-human households; they also produce an estimated half a tonne of extra waste per year as well.

Now, many of these such figures can be explained away by ‘economical’ choices, but others are a bit harder to ignore.

By living an economic life, these singles may well only be purchasing the actual amount of food that they need, rather than larger pack-sizes or jumbo containers of food and drink, ultimately creating more packaging per unit. However due to erratic and unpredictable hours, they may well be forced to buy products from more convenient stores that offer only a limited range and at a greater cost.

Lets look at these in turn.

More Packaging:
Generally I would call this the ‘easy packed lunch’ mentality that many busy or less imaginative parents resort to. I mean why cut a large lump of deli cheese into chunks yourself and put them in a lunch box for half the price and about a tenth of the packaging waste when you could by a pack of ready-made bite-size pieces of ‘cheese’ that are all individually wrapped for freshness?

Why not make your own sandwich for lunch rather than buy one that costs the same as 2 whole loafs of bread? Why pay more for a 500ml bottle of branded ‘pop’ at the front of the store than for a whole 2 liter bottle of the same drink further in-store? It doesn’t make sense!

It seems that some peoples choices are too much about themselves with no consideration for the consequences.

All the extra waste we produce will require more time, money and man-power to process - but why should we spend money on clearing up all this seemingly unnecessary mess? We could be forwarding that money into much needed projects like improving public transport, offering local businesses incentives and taking care of our children and more elderly members of the community.

Local councils are having their financial decisions made for them by the mess people make rather than being able to decide on what the community would actually benefit from themselves. And then we wonder why our Council Tax and Rates go up?

Extra Waste:
Obviously the more packaged items you consume - the more waste you will create - but some people’s hands are tied.

Take the example of someone who lives close to work so they don’t need to drive in everyday. However, the only shop on their way home is a tiny petrol station ‘express store’. It rarely has any fresh food by the time they stroll in on their way home, and the product lines it holds have been selected for a reason that suits their business needs more than their customers needs.

Yes, they have essentials like bread and milk, but everything else is in easy-to-carry-home size and meals-for-1-size - the forced mainstay of any busy person. They hold hardly any of the products that you would normally buy from a larger store, and of course hold no bulk items at all. They don’t have any ‘value’ products either.

‘Convenience’ Stores:
Now, working in retail, I can see why they have chosen to fill their tiny understaffed store with the products they have, but it is no good for an eco-shopper or someone trying to save money - or even someone trying to be healthy for that matter!

The irony is of course that if you drive or catch the bus to the nearest larger store once a week (on one of your only days off that week) you may well get all the products you needed, but at the cost of the travel there and back. You will also be likely to buy more food than you actually need - just to be sure you had enough to last the week and to make the journey worth while. Ultimately, this causes more food to be wasted as it goes out of date - but also more packing is thrown out as you brought more things than you actually needed to.

As you can imagine the results are somewhat skewed and neither seems a very good option. But like so many people living and working alone - you almost have little choice in how you shop. Only by seriously putting yourself out can you maintain some sort of eco-friendly house keeping behaviour, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t know where to start.

If you are trying to be a wiser shopper, then here are a few simple steps that you can take to get you started without too much effort:

Keep Supplies:
Always have a supply of basic foods that have a long shelf life and don’t take long to cook so you will always have a dinner when you get home. This will no doubt save you time and money as it reduces the chances of you having to impulse buy. Examples would include frozen vegetables and hearty pies, tins of soup with part-baked rolls or quick-cook pasta with tinned tuna, and selection of dried herbs and sauces.

Plan Ahead:
If you were able to plan what you were going to eat for the next few days or a whole week even, when you went shopping you would only buy what you needed. You would make sure that you used the foods in date order making better use of your fresh foods - and you will make more economical use of all the foods that you brought, reducing your waste as a result. Ideally you need more regular hours to make this 100% effective.

Freeze Your Own:
If you planned your shopping around your day off, you could take the time to make a big pan of chunky soup, a curry, a pasta dish or chilli con carne with fresh ingredients. You could then divide them down into your tummy-sized portions and freeze them. This way you won’t need to buy just one-person sized amounts of everything, you can buy bulk!

You will create your own healthy ready meals exactly to your taste - and they only take a few minutes to microwave back to life!

Bake A Cake:
Why not take the time to bake a fruit loaf, make a fridge-cake or create your own oat flapjacks? You can then cut off a slice of your choice everyday for your lunch box. This way, you won’t be tempted to buy chocolates and other sweet over-priced snacks when working in town as you would have a piece of your very own healthy and unpackaged version to munch away on!

Remember - The tiny things all add up, so there is no need to change your lifestyle overnight.

Let it change in manageable and achievable stages. Even if you only make your own lunch 3 times a week, or plan your meals on your days off - it all counts.

First things first here - I am not expecting everyone here to have all the latest inventions for saving energy, composting your waste and producing all your own food and energy!

This article is just focusing on energy to get the ball rolling, and will hopefully offer you tips and ideas for those little steps that can help you save money and help the environment save itself!  Don’t forget, that the planet can do just fine with whatever we throw at it and will still be here long after we have gone and taken all the other plants and animals with us - it will never just disappear - it will just adapt.  Think of the primordial soup.

What we are trying to do is save the human race.  We need a planet where the human race can survive, not just an actual planet.  Without certain plants and animals, humans will just fade away.  Without certain weather and environmental factors, humans will not be able to survive.

I know it all sounds a bit dramatic, but science has told us that this is where we are heading, we are destroying the very things we need to survive as we are now.

Your efforts can slow this down, between us we can help reduce our impact on the environment and make the world look a bit less bleak for our children and their children.

Electricity.
Electricity is one of the easiest energy source to save money on.  I know that it is really annoying to lean over the back of the PC or the television to switch everything off, but it all helps.

Valuable resources are used to create the energy you are wasting every time you go away for the weekend and leave appliances in a state where they are drawing electricity - and of course it is costing you money as well.  The energy suppliers don’t give you free electricity to keep the light on you washing machine saying ‘READY’. 

Just because you are not actually using an appliance, it does’t mean it is not using electricity.

Water.
Water is a bit trickier as some people have their certain bathroom routines, and I am the first one to opt for a deep bath, but you are still allowing your wages to flush down the toilet every time you do a full flush for a tiny wee, or leave the tap running for whatever reason (cleaning teeth/rinsing plates or veg/having just filled up the kettle but going over an plugging it it before turning off the water!).  These are just little things but they cost you money.

Gas.
Gas is very wasteful.  Try to avoid all appliances (apart from central heating) that use gas because it just runs up the bills.  I once watched the gas meter when I switched on my gas fire - and rest assured I will never use another in my home - go look at yours!.  I have one tip for saving gas, and that is don’t use it!  

If you are using a gas fire - and creating gas does give off less carbon than the creation of electricity - then make sure that the room it is in is well insulated to retain as much of the warmth as possible (curtains pulled/ door closed/ double glazing/ etc).  That way, whatever heat it gives you is controlled and not wasted.

Appliances.
And it’s not just the energy used to run the appliances that is a concern - what about the energy and resources used to make them in the first place?

Now I know that there are now more energy-efficient products on the market, and you should seriously consider buying these when you next need to buy an appliance, but don’t buy one if your old one is still working well.

The reason?  What are you going to do with the old one?  If you are going to throw it away - that is a complete waste of resources.  The old one will end up discarded on a skip, wasting all the valuable metals and minerals that went into creating it.  By all means give it to a breaker who will be able to reclaim any parts that are still useful and recycle them into other machines.

But you are thinking that you will give it to a charity or another person - and this is the better option, but either way, the machine will still be being used by someone.  It is still going to be using the same amount of energy whoever has it, but you would have spent money (and used further resources) to buy your new one as well. 

And I’m sure that if some mathematician could work out the extra energy you save with your new appliance and compare it to the energy cost of making your new appliance, transporting your new appliance, running your new appliance and the running costs of someone else still using your old appliance - it won’t be a saving.

The message I am trying to pass across here, is that jumping on the band-wagon of eco friendly living before you have eased yourself into the whole ‘circle of eco’ could acutally do you more harm than good.  You may have spent a lot of money or invested a lot of time in a new eco-friendly theory or appliance - possibly having family rows about it all, only to find out from someone else that you could have made a different decision in the first place.

Take your time.
Don’t rush into this whole style of living until you have read up on the issues or have spoken to friends, and have drawn the line about your limits.  Making small, effective changes that suit your lifestyle will last longer and give you more satisfaction than some of the bigger changes that you cannot keep up with and end up giving up on.

For example, if you can easily remember to reuse your shopping bags, do that.  If you don’t have a garden or an allotment it would be pointless to collect your waste food for composting.  If you can easily buy (recycled and/or charity) birthday cards on plain paper with plain envelopes then do so.  If you have 2 or more children however, you probably shouldn’t try to swap your car for bicycles!

Be reasonable to yourself and you will achieve more - and feel better about it too.