Month: April 2015

Eco-Friendly Tips for Your Spring Garden

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Growing one’s own food, herbs, and flowers can be extremely rewarding, not to mention a great way to save money. If you’re thinking about starting a garden this Spring, it’s important to have all the necessary equipment on hand long before the first seedling goes into the ground. To help you achieve a successful harvest, here are nine eco-friendly gardening tools to get you started.

Upcycled seeds starters: The most economical way to grow food is to start from seed, but you can’t just throw those little guys directly into the ground. A month or two before you want to begin your Spring garden, it’s time to sprout your seedlings in a protected environment. Forget the wasteful plastic seed starter flats you see at Home Depot and upcycle your own seed starting pots using this LifeHacker post as your guide.

Bambu garden tools: Bambu, a company well-known for making household essentials out of quick-growing bamboo, recently expanded into the gardening genre. These natural and hand-crafted gardening supplies include a solid bamboo fork and trowel set, along with bamboo gardening stakes. The tools are extremely light and shaped to fit your hand, making them a joy to use.

Gardening gloves: We romanticize the notion of getting our hands dirty, but really that’s only fun for about a minute. After scrubbing them and picking soil out from under your fingernails just once, you’ll be searching for some quality gardening gloves. We’re particularly fond of these recycled plastic mesh gloves by West County Gardener, and these bamboo fiber (biodegradable, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal) all-purpose gloves by Go Greens.

Soaker hose: Irrigation is essential to any garden’s success, but sprinklers and hoses are notoriously wasteful. First of all, they deposit the water on top of the plants and soil, meaning much is lost to evaporation. You’re not trying to water the entire world, just give your plants a drink, right? The best way to do that is to deliver the water right to the roots by using a soaker hose that’s buried just under the surface.

Cork flower pots: Planning a container garden? Corkits are recycled cork pots that are great for small plants such as herbs, spices, and flowers. The pots’ cork construction makes them antibacterial, extremely durable, reusable, and sustainable. Each Corkit pack ships with seeds, coir soil and a flowerpot with an optional drainage hole.

Recycled rain barrels: Another easy way to conserve water in your Spring garden is to collect rain water. Sure, you could just set a bunch of buckets around in your backyard, or you could use one of these stylish recycled plastic rain barrels instead. When it rains, water flows from your gutter through a screen and into the barrel. Then, when watering time comes along, the included spigots make it easy to attach your hose and give your plants a drink without using a drop of municipal water.

Upcycled herb garden markers: Once your seeds have sprouted, you’ll get to think about laying your Spring garden into the ground. Many plants look alike when they’re small, which is why you’ll need to label the rows or pots to keep track of what’s what. These upcycled herb garden markers we found on Etsy are possibly the cutest way to stay organized.

Eco garden tool tote: When heading out for a weeding or pruning session in your Spring garden, it can be hard to carry everything you need. To eliminate unnecessary trips back and forth from garden to shed or garage, stash all your tools in these garden totes from The Hunger Site. Made out of recycled rice and feed bags by female artisans in Cambodia, they help reduce both waste, and poverty.
DIY watering globe: If you’re planning a container garden for your porch or balcony, watering becomes an even more important issue. Unlike plants in the ground, water can collect in the bottom of containers, rotting the roots and killing your harvest. Protect against over-watering by upcycling your own self-watering globes that dispense water as the plants need it. Use this handy tutorial by Rad Megan to get started.

Recent News Stories About Garbage from Around the Country

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For your entertainment, here are four garbage stories that made American headlines recently. You can’t make this stuff up!

Georgia garbage collector gets jail time for pre-dawn pickup: one Atlanta suburb has a city ordinance that actually prohibits trash collection prior to 7am. As a result, Kevin McGill, who’s spent just three months on the job in Sandy Springs, Ga., will spend 30 days in jail for violating the ordinance and picking up trash a few minutes after 5am recently. Chief prosecutor Bill Riley, who pushed for jail time, says early trash pickups are a recurring noise nuisance that routinely inspire 911 calls, reports the Atlanta Sun Times. “Fines don’t seem to work,” he said. “The only thing that seems to stop the activity is actually going to jail.” McGill has opted to serve his time spread out over 14 consecutive weekends so that he can continue working and still come home to his wife, two sons, and four dogs. It remains unclear why he was on the job so early.

Texas man makes a living dumpster diving: Matt Malone has a well-paying security specialist career and owns a promising startup business. Yet if you want to track him down after hours, you’ll need to peek inside a bunch of Texas dumpsters. The 37-year-old Austin man told Randall Sullivan, writing for Wired, that he’s made a killing moonlighting as a dumpster-diver, extracting an astonishing amount of “treasure” that he can either use for his own hobbies or refurbish and resell. He’s gotten it down to a science, creating spreadsheets for inventory, figuring out when garbage day is for each target site, and mapping out particularly lucrative locations, like big-box retailers, college campuses (rich kids throw out lots of stuff, he claims), storage facilities, and stores going out of business or undergoing a remodel. His vocation has paid off big time: He says if he chose to make it his full-time job, he’d make at least $250,000 a year. Malone started what he calls his “for-profit archaeologist” career nine years ago when he had to pick through the trash of a client for a security job. He was amazed at his first haul—a line of discontinued printers from OfficeMax, still in their boxes—and was hooked. He’s picked up plenty of tips along the way from other divers, including focusing on consumables (e.g., paper, toner) rather than just big-ticket items, and knows to “move along” if cops ask him to. He takes special pleasure in offering typically expensive finds for much-lower prices to people who couldn’t afford them otherwise. Sullivan, who went with him on a couple of “dives,” predicts Malone could actually pull in about $600,000 per year if every night was as productive as the ones he tagged along on. So why doesn’t Malone just troll for trash full time? He says he likes his day job.

California man gets scooped up by garbage truck: A man searching for his wallet in a trash bin in Northern California was scooped up by a garbage truck and taken on a long, presumably smelly, ride. The Oroville Mercury Register reports that the man survived the ride in the rear of a truck. Yolo County Sheriff’s Lt. Martin Torres said the man, whose name was not released, was inside a garbage bin when the truck made a pick-up on Tuesday. The man told police he used lumber in the truck to reach the top of the garbage pile to better avoid the compactor. He was taken to UC Davis Medical Center for complaints of back and neck pain. “The man said he was stuck in the truck for about an hour, but estimates show it was more like 3 or 3 1/2 hours,” Torres tells the newspaper. “The truck made several other pick-ups before arriving at the landfill, where the driver saw the man crawl out of his trash pile.

Pennsylvania woman accused of assaulting garbage man: A Pennsylvania woman faces assault and harassment charges over her garbage pickup. The 49-year-old in Lower Saucon Township apparently became enraged when the garbage truck passed her home because her trash wasn’t out in time, reports Lehigh Valley Live. Then followed three not-so-proud moments, according to court documents:

  • She dumped her garbage on her driveway and ordered the trash collector to return and pick it up with his teeth.
  • She said this: “You’re a garbage man, you drive a garbage truck and I drive a Range Rover.”
  • When he tried to walk away, she allegedly smacked him so hard in the face that she broke one of his teeth.

Sarah Hart is free on her own recognizance but facing trial.