May
14
Between a third and a half of all household waste can be turned into compost for use in the garden rather than put in the rubbish bin to end up in landfill. Anything in your home that eventually decomposes can go into your compost bin or heap. Read the rest of this entry »
May
14
Worm farms are an ideal way to deal with small amounts of household waste and are perfect if you don’t have much outside space. A worm farm is basically a series of small bins or crates stacked on top of each other with holes in the floor of each for the worms to crawl up through. Read the rest of this entry »
May
10
A neat lawn with healthy plants, shrubs, trees, and an abundance of wildlife is a joy to behold but the aim is to be as green as possible in an environmental sense as well as having green and pleasant land.
Grass is much better for wildlife than concrete but your grass doesn’t have to be all manicured lawn. If you decide that some lawn is essential, and that turning your whole patch over to vegetables isn’t an option, make it as green as possible by using environmentally friendly ways of keeping it trim: Read the rest of this entry »
May
10
Everyone can have a garden of some sort — from the window box on the tiny balcony or window ledge to the community garden shared by the whole neighbourhood; from the allotment hired from the local council to your private garden attached to your semi in the suburbs. Read the rest of this entry »
May
05
Dried or canned legumes and pulses (peas, beans and lentils). Red lentils cook down to a soft porridge consistency, which is great in stews, soups, curries and Bolognese; Puy lentils, however, keep their shape when cooked. Chickpeas and beans such as borlotti, butter, kidney and flageolet, as well as canned mixed pulses, are all useful. If you go for canned, choose the ones canned in water, or drain and rinse thoroughly before use to remove as much salt and sugar as possible. Read the rest of this entry »
May
05
Organic, semi-skimmed milk or a dairy- free alternative such as soya, almond or hazelnut, or quinoa ‘milk’. (Note that all these contain protein, helping to balance blood sugar, whereas rice milk is very high in starchy carbohydrates and has a high GL, so limit or avoid it if your child has blood sugar problems.) Read the rest of this entry »
Apr
08
At the heart of all the arguments for eating locally grown, seasonal produce is the need to cut down on what have become known as food miles. Food Miles is the distance - often thousands of miles - that food travels from where it’s produced to get to your plate. The transportation (by air, truck, or car) results in carbon emissions. Nearly half of our food is imported from abroad and over half of the organic food for sale in the UK is imported. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr
08
`Where does my food come from?’ is really two questions. One is to do with how the food was produced and the other is about where on the earth it travelled from, how it travelled, how long it took to get to you, and how long it was in storage before it got into the shops. If you want to be sure that your food is as green as possible you need the answers to both of these questions.
The fast pace of modern life leads to less cooking at home and more reliance on convenience foods that can be unwrapped and put straight in the oven. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr
08
If you ask many schoolchildren where bacon comes from they will tell you `the supermarket‘. The process of breeding, rearing, feeding, and eventually killing pigs and other animals for food is something many of them know nothing about. Why should they? They live in towns and cities where they may never come across anything to do with farming. If you want to know what you’re eating you need to know what kind of farming methods are used to get the meat you eat from the farmyard to your plate. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb
17
Now you have a waterproof roof. If necessary, you can wait a few days before putting on the shingles, but if you wait too long, eventually a strong wind will tear the paper off and you’ll have to do it all again. Applying asphalt shingles is easy; just follow the directions on the package. Getting the heavy bundles up on the roof is the hardest part. Professionals use some kind of machinery for this; you may want to improvise a block and tackle. Before you start the job, there should be bundles of shingles scattered about the roof so that there will always be some available when needed. Read the rest of this entry »
