Eco Friendly House And Garden

Here are some quite simple steps to help you keep on the green road…….

If you are having trouble starting your year as green as you had hoped, then take a quick peep at the things listed below and get back into the swing of it!

1) Find Your Nearest Store:
Don’t drive miles to a store to get the cheapest prices on a few main things - visit a store you can walk to and just grab your essentials.

If you do a little shop every so often in your closest store, not only will it be there when you need it, but you will get to talk to your neighbours and maybe find some new products you never see in a larger store.

2) Find Your Nearest Products:
Apples are apples at the end of the day - but were they brought from down the road or from the other side of the world? 

If they were from a local farm, then in buying them you are helping to keep parts of your local area free from urban development and new roads - keeping wildlife close to your own homes.

3) Take A Little Less:
Always buy a bit less than you normally would of the fresh items, as we never eat everything we buy before it goes rotten!  So the less you buy in the first place, the more chance you have of eating it all when it is still nice and fresh!

It may be cheaper to buy bulk and save on packaging when ordering the larger pack sizes, but the cost of transporting and throwing away our food is just as costly!

4) Expect A Bit More:
Make sure you choose the products that are wrapped in compostable packaging.  There is no reason why vegetables these days are not packaged in compostable tray and wrapping.

If one vegetable can be presented and stored effectively using compostable wrapping, then so can nearly all others!  Make your choice right in the aisles.

If you tell the store what products you want to take home by buying them over others, then you don’t have to write in or attend meetings to get your point across.

5) Be Nosy:
Make sure you go up every aisle at least every month or so - allowing you too see new products and make new choices.  Don’t be put off by everything else in that area as you may find some tasty treasures and some eco friendly ideas.

There is more than 1 way to create the same meal - so check out frozen vegetables and canned fruit, pizza base mix and organic alternatives!  You never know what you can find hidden amongst the huge number of products in your local stores.

Going, going green…..

Welcome back, and I hope you are ready for more top tips for your eco friendly vegetable garden!

Moving on from just growing too many in the first place, these next 2 tips cover storage issues and gardening overload!

2)  Where can we put them all?
What could be more disappointing to the end of your growing season than to have runner beans (or whatever you grew too much of) going rotten in the fridge. 

Home grown crops - especially when grown organically - do not have the same shelf life as those brought from super stores.  They are not designed to stay fresh for a week or so for retail purposes, and if picked or dug out of the ground will only last a few days.

Yes, there are many veg that can be stored for months if you do it right, like potatoes and onions for example, but generally everything else needs to be eaten or preserved as soon as possible really - or given away to who ever will take them!

So, you need to learn which crops can be stored for a long time, those which can be frozen, veg that need processing in some way before storing, and which ones only have a short shelf life.  Then plan how many of each you can grow.

Many beans and peas can be blanched before freezing so as to increase the number of nutrients remaining in them, and others need a certain amount of other actions before they are ready for freezing or turning into preserves or chutneys, etc. 

You also need to make sure that you only freeze them in portion size amounts, otherwise when you want to eat them you have to take the whole lot out and smash off the amount you need to cook!

And do you have enough freezer space in the first place?  Most avid vegetable growers need another freezer to store all their summer veg to last them through to the winter!

Planning ahead is the key here - and if in doubt ask someone who is already growing their own crops what they do with all their veg!

3) What a waste of your land:
If you are turning over great swathes of your garden to vegetables because ‘that’s how many seeds there were in the packet’ then you are taking the fun out of your garden.

Imagine the kids playing ball and they keep tripping over plants and cane poles.  You want a few minutes to yourself on the patio but all you can see are plastic bottles and rows and rows of pots and mud!

You won’t get a moments peace either, as you will have so many crops to keep an eye on that you will constantly be out there checking on everything.  When you look out of your windows making your morning coffee - you’ll see something wrong with the plants, or something has fallen over or whatever.

You could end up out there on your afternoon off from work, tending to a huge number of plants that you might not even end up eating (see points 1 and 2).

The Answer?
Growing your own veg should be fun, and if you grow too much of one thing, then you lose that fun. 

Eating artichoke every so often is a nice treat, but when you always have another 2 in the fridge, it loses it’s speciality.  It’s not even fun to eat it anymore.

Also, if you know that you always have more of something growing outside, you may actually care less about each individual vegetable you have indoors.  For example, will you care if one parsnip goes rotten waiting to be eaten in the fridge if you have another 2 meters of them left outside to dig up?  No, you won’t. 

Too much of something actually tends to encourage waste as if you have so much - why does one matter?

This certainly wouldn’t be true if you had brought the parsnips. Every penny counts these days and you can see it when you have brought something yourself out of your wages.  But vegetables you have grown don’t seem to be worth anything, you don’t see the money and energy they have cost.

Your back yard vegetables aren’t free, so don’t treat them as such.  Value them as your time - and your time is worth more than money.

If you had a smaller oven tray - would you waste less food?

Today’s society seems to be very much about bigger products for bigger value - and for many products - bigger also equals more eco friendly, for example a larger bottle of shampoo means less packaging than 2 smaller bottles and is usually cheaper as well.

However, there are certain things that we do that a bigger just for the sake of being bigger - and this normally involves food.

Super-Size Me!
There has recently been a growing trend in ordering the largest amount of food possible in restaurants just because you can.  You tell yourself that it is ‘just a little bit more’ so it is worth it.

Well, it’s not.

Have you ever wondered how these chicken breasts or beef burgers can be so cheap?  Well, there is a reason for it - and it’s not nice. 

Large food retailers (chain restaurants, popular take-aways and large superstores) have demanded that the meat for their meals be cheaper - and to make things cheaper, you have to make more.  One quote was that large chicken factories have machines that need to process 8000 birds every hour just to make enough meat to sell at the low prices we are used to.

Around 2 million chickens are ‘processed’ every week by one of the largest factories in the US - just to break even - and that is just one.  Imagine how many chickens are ‘processed’ a week in the whole US?  Or the whole World?

Down-Size Me!
It is a hard thing to think about the minimum you could eat to be satisfied - or in the rising number of people ‘full’.  You always think ‘it would be a waste of money to buy the smaller size and finish it when for just a few pence more I could get a lot more’.  And that’s what retailers want you to think.

They have to produce so much food to keep the prices down that they are forever trying to sell you more of what you already eat to still make money.  And we fall for it every time!

Buy 1, Get 1 Free, 20% extra, 3 for the price of 2.  They are all doing the same thing - they are making the retailers money - not saving us money.

How much stuff do you buy that you don’t eat, or that goes out of date before you get the chance?  Loads.  The stats are terrible.  But they make us buy it because it’s ‘cheap’.

Well, I think you need to change you tactics - and fight back!

First Steps:
Plan your meals - by knowing what you are going to cook and eat on certain days means that there won’t be time for food to go out of date as you have planned to eat it in due time.  Buying too much food sometimes makes you unable to choose the most short-dated ingredients. 

Busy lifestyles also make us eat whatever is ‘quickest’ to prepare rather than what we should be eating - all this leads to waste.  We end up replacing the fast-food over and over again, leaving the healthy foods to sit and rot!

Don’t be lured in by special offers - they are only really there so the store doesn’t lose money.  If the store gets a great deal on 10 million of product A, then they have to sell it - so down goes the price and you buy it.  They win!

Start buying enough to be satisfied rather than full - It’s all too easy to cook to much, then try to cram it all in leaving you ready to pop!  But you don’t want to waste money and larger meals are cheaper per serving, arent’ they?

Well, only if you eat them!  So why not prepare a meal for 4 people to use bulk ingredients, but plan to divide up equally and freeze the remaining portions for another meal time.

Buy Smaller Utensils - if you only had a small oven tray, then you wouldn’t be tempted to cook more than you needed - and you would save power on your cooking as they were smaller. 

Also, rather than cooking parts of your meal at different times or all over the kitchen, why not use smaller pans and fit them all in the oven at the same time.  That way, nothing has to share trays - so the meat juices don’t ruin the potatoes!

And less to wash up - which is always good news!