As much as I love summer, it definitely has its drawbacks, mostly in the form of humidity, weeds, and mosquitoes.
There’s nothing I can do about the humidity, but I’d really really like to get rid of the other two. With a dog running around, I’m even more reluctant to turn to chemicals than I was before, but I’ve got to do something.
I’m always on the lookout for green pest control tips that work, but so far, I’ve come up a bit short. So I thought I’d turn to the 5m4gg readers, and see what you have tried and tested.
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In the never-ending quest to find the best food possible–healthy for both people and planet–it seems like there’s a pitfall around every corner. Farmers’ market or supermarket? Buy organic, or not? Is buying local always better? What if the farmers bringing food to the market use unsustainable practices, or dump loads of herbicides and pesticides on their crops? What if they have driven a hundred miles to bring those fat bell peppers to the stall?
Of course, you can always do research, or ask the vendors questions. Some markets have standards in place governing vendors’ growing practices or limiting the distance they can drive to bring their wares to the table.
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As MacKenzie touched on in her February 5th article, knitting is a great and relatively green hobby. My mom has found a way to make it even more eco-friendly –- by using recycled yarn.
Recycled yarn can be purchased, but she takes more of a do-it-yourself approach, buying sweaters at thrift stores to unravel and reconfigure. Watching my mom and sister shop for sweaters to recycle is pretty funny. They barely look at the clothes, instead walking down the row and touching a sleeve of each sweater. If a garment feels soft enough to meet their standards, they’ll stop and examine it, looking at the color, the label (if it has one), and the seams.
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It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I LOVE to shop at thrift stores, but it wasn’t always this way.
When I was a middle-schooler, I absolutely hated it. I felt like it was embarrassing, something only poor people should do. If someone complimented a thrift store item I was wearing (which did not happen often, due to my complete non-thrift-store-related lack of stylishness) and asked where I got it, I would fib and say I didn’t remember. By high school, however, I had fully realized the awesomeness that is thrift shopping, and would gladly tell anyone who asked where I shopped.
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Most curbside recycling programs and collection centers accept a very specific and somewhat limited set of items. The usual suspects are #1 and #2 plastics, paper of all kinds, and aluminum cans. Sometimes corrugated cardboard, metal food cans, and glass containers are accepted as well. But in our over-packaged society, there’s always a lot of waste left behind after the recycling bins have been carried out.
Over the last few years, I’ve stumbled onto a few less-conventional avenues for recycling and reusing some things that our curbside recycling won’t take. By making a few calls around town, you might be able to find places to offload your extra odds and ends.
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When my husband and I moved in together in college, we were both going to school full time and working, and so we always ate at least one meal away from home each day. Eating out was getting too expensive, so we started packing our lunches each morning. That took care of a lot of the excess cost, but I was still unhappy with how much we were spending on plastic zipper baggies. I had recently become really involved with the environmental club on campus, and was examining our lifestyle for ways in which we could lessen our impact on the planet.
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