The post The 10 Most Toxic Items at the Garden Center appeared first on Big Green Purse.

#1 – Shop Smart

The first trick is to buy what you actually will eat. I’ve gotten pretty good about taking stock of what’s still in the fridge before I go to the store. I never get around to thinking about recipes before I grab a shopping cart, but I have finally stopped buying double or triple of something, just because that’s what I always buy.

Plus, I try not to be motivated by what’s supposedly on sale. Would I buy it if it weren’t on sale? If the answer’s no, I still skip it.

Timesaver Tip: No time to even make a list? Take a picture of what’s inside the fridge or in the pantry with your smart phone.

#2 – Cook Smart 

I usually try to make a bit more than I and my family can eat at a sitting, just to save time when prepping another meal. I’m a big fan of leftovers, either reheated or combined with other ingredients. And if I find stalky veggies, like celery or rhubarb or even carrots, wilting, I just pop them in a glass of water. It only takes an hour or so before they’re revived and ready to eat.

Timesaver Tip: Make twice as much as you need for one meal, then freeze the leftovers for a later date. Check the freezer regularly so you don’t lose track of what’s in it. At our house, I pull out the leftovers  Friday night to eat on Saturday when everyone is busy with household chores, sports, and other family activities.

#3 – Compost Smart

Many communities are dealing with food waste by encouraging people to compost more. Ideally, people would compost their food waste in their own backyards, where they can turn their food waste into beautiful soil like what is pictured here.  If that idea appeals to you, here’s a quick guide to how to get started composting at home.

Timesaver Tip: Using a composting barrel or bin spares you the need to make your own, and it’s pretty quick to spin a barrel rather than have to dig compost into a pile.

If you just don’t like the idea of composting your own waste, maybe you’re lucky enough to live in one of the 180 communities that have started picking up residents’ compost and treating it in an industrial compost facility. My town is going to start picking up our food waste for composting in 2014. I’ll let you know how that goes. You can also check out this directory to see if community composting is available where you live. UCan Products has produced this nifty kitchen compost bin, along with biodegradable bags to put the compost in to keep everything tidy.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, people waste about 30% of the food they buy. That means we’re wastinge 30 cents of every dollar we spend on food. By shopping, cooking and composting smart, you’ll save all that money – and do the planet a little favor, too.

Want more ideas? King County in Washington State has started this Facebook page offering creative tips to help people waste less and recycle more. Why don’t you add your own suggestions to theirs? They’ve also pulled together a terrific list of resources on their web page here.

Related articles

Compost: Crack for the Garden

My Green Goals for 2013: Less Bathroom Plastic, More Home-Made Yogurt, Better Compost

The post Three Best Ways to Reduce Food Waste: Shop Smart, Cook Smart, Compost Smart appeared first on Big Green Purse.

 When you add it to your soil, it makes the earthworms shimmy, the bugs boogie, and plants positively pop.

(From what I’ve read, crack has a similar effect on the people who use it; let me say for the record that I’ve never tried it!)

Just as good, compost strengthens your soil and reduces your need to use synthetic fertilizers or toxic pesticides. If you’re NOT using compost, why are you bothering to garden at all? Really!

WHAT EXACTLY IS COMPOST?

Composting is Nature’s way of turning waste into organic gold.

• Through good old-fashioned biological processes, composting converts kitchen scraps, yard waste, and other organic matter into rich and crumbly, soil-like material that attracts healthy worms, fights disease and improves the fertility of the soil.

WHY IS COMPOSTING SO GREAT?

• Composting saves money by reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemicals.
  
• Composting could save communities money, too. Yard trimmings and food waste together constitute 23 percent of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream. That’s a lot of garbage to send to landfills when it could become useful and environmentally beneficial compost instead!

I compost fruit and veggie kitchen scraps in my backyard. My town picks up our fallen leaves every autumn, lets them biodegrade at a municipal site, and delivers them back to us in the spring to use as mulch on our gardens and around our bushes and trees. You can also buy ready-made compost at most hardware stores and garden centers, or online at places like Amazon (we sell some in our store here). NOTE: If you buy compost, make sure it has been made from certified organic plant sources.

 YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN COMPOST

You can make compost from kitchen waste, debris from your lawn and garden, or both. You can either build your own compost pile, or buy a compost tumbler or bin. You can even get composting bags to keep on your back porch, deck or patio.

Whether you make your own or buy it, the key is to use it. To encourage more gardeners to use compost, on Earth Day, the U.S. Composting Council is launching a Million Tomato Compost Campaign, a program to build healthy soil and help bring fresh food to underserved communities and food pantries. Starting this month, members of the Council will be donating thousands of pounds of compost to community gardens to help them grow one million tomatoes in just one growing season. Nathan Lyon (co-host of PBS’ “Growing a Greener World,” and the author of the best-selling Great Food Starts Fresh, one of the Washington Post’s top 10 cookbooks of 2012) is on board to help get the word out. Here’s how your community can join in.

Now…get crackin’!

 MORE COMPOST SUPPLIES IN OUR AMAZON STORE

We’ve combed through the offerings on Amazon to help you find supplies to get started composting at home. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find:

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide

Odor-free Countertop Compost Keeper

Back Porch Kitchen ComposTumbler

Charlie’s Compost: Concentrated Organic Plant Matter

Note: We earn a very small commission on your purchases. It doesn’t add to the cost of what you buy, but it helps us continue to provide our recommendations to you for free. Thanks.

The post Compost: Crack for the Garden appeared first on Big Green Purse.

This year is going to be different. I’m not making resolutions, I’m setting goals – specific goals that will have real environmental benefits and that I can measure with real “before” and “after” statistics.

Though I hope I’ll reduce my environmental footprint in all sorts of ways this year, I’m only setting three specific goals in the hopes that a narrower focus will lead to broader achievements.

GOAL #1 – MAKE MY OWN YOGURT

I eat two cups of yogurt every single day – plain, non-fat, usually Greek-style yogurt that serves as the delicious base for whatever fresh fruit happens to be in season. It’s a healthy and mostly eco-friendly breakfast – marred only by the fact that I buy the yogurt in big plastic throwaway tubs. When I was in college, I had an electric yogurt maker and made my own yogurt every week. I also made yogurt by mixing milk and yogurt starter in a bowl, then keeping it in a warm oven for several hours until the whole mixture became yogurt-like. Over the years as I was busy raising kids, running a business and writing books, I’ve gotten away from making my own yogurt. But I’m appalled at how many plastic yogurt tubs I throw away every week. If I made my own yogurt using milk I can buy in glass bottles from my local food coop, I would go from three or four plastic tubs a week to zero. So one goal for 2013 is to start making my own yogurt.

Do you make your own yogurt? If you have a recipe you love, please share it!

GOAL #2 – USE NO MORE THAN THREE PRODUCTS BOTTLED IN PLASTIC IN MY BATHROOM

In my bathroom right now, I have various cosmetics, body lotion, hand cream, face cream, make-up remover, shampoo, conditioner, body soap, shaving gel, toothpaste, curl definer, hair straightener, nail polish remover, and hair color – and they’re all in plastic bottles or jars. My kids use different products, so they have almost the same number of products that I have in their own bottles! Beth Terry at My Plastic Free Life has written a great book about ways to reduce the amount of plastic we use in our day-to-day lives. Her personal example has inspired me to figure out how to cut down the number of plastic bottles I use in my bathroom to no more than three. Right away, I can replace the shaving gel and body soap with bar soaps that come wrapped in paper or with no wrapping paper at all. I can buy much larger sizes of products so that I’m using fewer bottles overall. But I’d like to set an even more ambitious goal and figure out how to make my own body lotion, shampoo, hair conditioner, and face cream, for starters. Do you make your own? What do you make, and how do you make it? I can really use your advice!

GOAL #3 – IMPROVE MY COMPOST

My compost is not the best. I use a composting barrel, and ten  months out of the year (March – December), I just collect my kitchen scraps and throw them in the barrel. Then I flip the barrel around a few times and hope the stuff decomposes. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve never been very scientific about adding the right proportions of dry and wet material to it so that the compost heats up the way it is supposed to and turns all that food waste into the black organic gold that would make my garden thrive. Right now, the kitchen scraps from the last several months are all lying frozen in the bottom of my barrel. But as soon as the spring thaw hits, I’m going to empty out that barrel and start from scratch. Do you compost? Do you use a barrel? Please let me know what works best for you. I can easily compost 100% of my kitchen scraps, apart from the occasional fish or chicken remains I have. But what I’d really like to aim for is somewhere between two and three big barrels full of rich organic compost to add to my garden by the end of 2013.

So there you have it: use less plastic by making my own yogurt and personal care products, and enrich my garden by creating better compost. Please share your own goals and resolutions for 2013, and come back often to help me overcome the obstacles I find as I pursue my own.

RELATED POSTS

New Year’s Goal – Shift Spending to Eco-Friendly Products and Services

Environmental Resolution: Do Less, Do It Better

The post My Green Goals for 2013: Less Bathroom Plastic, More Home-Made Yogurt, Better Compost appeared first on Big Green Purse.

“If I asked you to reach into your wallet and grab a couple of twenty dollar bills, and rip them up and throw them away, you’d probably think I was crazy, right?  But that’s essentially what most Americans are doing each and every week!  According to an article in On Earth magazine, “Americans waste 30 – 40% of their food, or the equivalent of about two full meals a day.”

Think about those weeks that you buy food without having carefully planned your meals.  Do you end up throwing away more flimsy produce, expired meats, or moldy cheese? There are high costs to wasting all this food, and they’re not just economic. All this extra food has to be produced and transported before it’s eaten and even after it’s discarded, resulting in higher energy costs and emissions.

What to do?

I’ve found my family can vastly reduce waste and save hundreds of dollars each month by:

* planning ahead for meals and snacks before grocery shopping,

* grocery shopping just once a week,

* keeping a grocery list on the refrigerator for all family members to update during the week so I can stick to shopping just once a week, and

* using up as much leftover food as possible in a final meal or two before doing the weekly shopping.

Start Composting

Even if you do plan your meals and cook at home, you’re bound to have some waste.  Last year my family started composting as a way to reuse some of our waste and reduce the amount of trash that has to be hauled from our curb.

While the thought of composting was a little intimidating, it turns out to be the easiest thing in the world! Each day I collect our fruit and vegetable rinds, peels and ends, along with any egg shells and coffee grounds, in a bowl on the kitchen counter.  At the end of the day I dump the bowl’s contents into a large plastic kitty litter bin I keep under our kitchen sink.  When the bin is full, we dump the contents in a pile in our back yard, rinse the bin with the hose, and start over.  This summer we’ll use some of the compost to enrich our garden, but until then, we can feel good knowing that we reduced the amount of waste that is transported and takes up space in local landfills.

(NOTE: If you want to get a compost bin, Big Green Purse sells them in our store here.)

This month, let’s all commit to saving money and the environment by reducing our food waste.  Please keep me posted on how your family has met or plans to meet this challenge by commenting on The Scramble Facebook page or via twitter(@thescramble) or by email at aviva@thescramble.com. I look forward to learning and sharing how much you save!”

Earth Day Bonus!

Between now and Earth Day (April 22), use the promo code EarthDay12 to get $5 off every subscription to The Six O’Clock Scramble weekly plan. As an added benefit, The Scramble will donate 5% of its Earth Day sales to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Subscribe to The Scramble here.

Aviva Goldfarb is a family dinner expert, mother of two and the author and founder of The Six O’Clock Scramble, an online dinner planning system and cookbook. Her most recent cookbook, “SOS! The Six O’Clock Scramble to the Rescue: Earth Friendly, Kid-Pleasing Meals for Busy Families” was named one of the best cookbooks of 2010 by the Washington Post .  Aviva contributes weekly to the Kitchen Explorers blog on PBSparents.org, and often appears on television, radio, and in magazines such as O, The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Working Mother, Kiwi, Every Day with Rachael Ray, and Prevention.You can sign up for her weekly newsletter at thescramble.com. For more information, contact Aviva@thescramble.com.

RELATED POSTS:

Here’s How You Can Afford to Spend 30% More on Organic Food

Learn How to Compost

The post Earth Day or Any Day, Don’t Toss Your Cash With Your Trash appeared first on Big Green Purse.