Reducing waste

The bloggers at enviromom did a great series on reducing the amount of household waste we produce. They have a challenge to reduce your waste to only one can a month. Actually, Saul and I are pretty close already, but there's only two of us. We end up putting out a can every other week, so there's room for improvement still.

Anyway, what's really nice is that they've gone room-by-room in a typical house, listing ways to reduce waste in each room.

http://www.enviromom.com/getting-to-one-garbage-can.html

I'm thinking about requesting that Edgewood borough put this in their monthly newsletter. Besides the environmental effects, our taxes could be much lower if people didn't produce so much waste. Two of my neighbors, both just couples, somehow produce four trashcans of waste every week. How they do that, I'm not sure. I hear one of the couples has all of their dogs paper-trained, so they toss out lots of no-longer-recyclable paper. Not sure what's up with the other couple though.

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Preserving herbs

Maja asked me about preserving herbs, specifically, freezing v. drying. So, a little late, here's what I figured out.

Last year, I tried freezing some herbs. There seems to be two methods for doing this:

1) Chop and freeze in a bag
2) Place in water and freeze in an ice-cube tray.

I tried both. #2 was pretty bad. Basically, the herbs float to the surface before they freeze, and then they get freezer burned. #1 was ok, but you can't measure it out. Basically, as soon as they thaw, they turn to mush, so you have to put them directly into the soup or whatever.

So, I'm just drying this year. However, I think it works best if you dry the leaves whole, and then crush them later as needed. I think it preserves the scent better.

Unfortunately, you can't smell how amazing my dried parsley is, but here's the photo comparison of the store-bought parsley with my parsley.

Store bought parsley smells faintly of parsley, but mostly of "dried plant". Home grown parsley is the second strongest herb we grow. Saul put some in soup yesterday, and when I walked in the kitchen, that was all I could smell.

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Sustainable cleaning

This book lists home-made cleaning products and a few safe store brands. They've got a cost comparison to the name brand cleaners, and they rate the effectiveness compared to the name brand. My favorite so far is the window cleaner. She suggests club soda, with a little blue food dye so that the house cleaner will actually use it. It works well, leaves no streaks, and doesn't smell like vinegar.

Clean House, Clean Planet

I've found a few other, more recently published books, but this one still seems to be the most comprehensive.

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