When we moved into our current apartment last spring, I read some energy company pamphlet about ways to save energy in your home. Most of the suggestions were old news to me, but one in particular stuck out: air dry your dishes after running your dishwasher. I’m all about green changes that don’t require me to do a lot more work, so I figured I’d give it a try. I was happy to find that air drying was a huge success! When left to their own devices overnight, my dishes dried even better than the heated drying had worked on our old dishwasher.…
Category Archives: Green Living
Save Energy by Letting Your Dishwasher Air Dry
How to Recycle CDs (It’s Easy!)
Before we moved last spring, I did a thorough inventory of all our possessions to determine what we didn’t need anymore. Among the clutter was a rather large assortment of useless CDs. Perhaps you have a similar collection: mix CDs from your pre-iPod days, out of date software, music you no longer care for, and even promotional CDs from AOL and the like. Throwing all those CDs in the trash felt weird, so I decided to do some research. Turns out you can recycle CDs! And not only can you recycle them, but you really should recycle them.
Why You Should Recycle CDs
According to the CD Recycling Center of America, CDs contain a number of recyclable materials, including polycarbonate, aluminum, lacquer and gold.…
Four Month Container Garden Update
It’s been a long time since my last container garden update. I originally planned to do a three month update, but I lost track of time and upon reflection decided that I might as well just wait until four months had passed. As you can see in the picture above, for the most part my garden is still going strong.
Basil
Planting a lot of basil plants was definitely a good decision. We’ve made four batches of pesto and eaten many meals involving basil in other forms (including a lot of hake with awesome). There’s still quite a bit of basil left right now so I anticipate we’ll also be able to preserve some more before the end of the season.…
Drying Laundry Without a Dryer: My Drying Racks and Indoor Clothesline Setup
I don’t own a clothes dryer. Although we bought our first ever washer a few months ago, we decided that we didn’t need to purchase a dryer. Now, nearly three months later, I’m happy to say that skipping the dryer was a great decision. For me personally, not owning a dryer offers a lot of benefits:
Energy savings: I’ve read that clothes dryers are one of the largest sources of household energy use. I’m sure we’re saving quite a bit of energy by not owning one.
Financial savings: No ongoing costs to run the dryer, as well as no upfront cost of purchasing the dryer.…
One Month Garden Update
It’s been one month since we planted the bulk of our container garden! Let me fill you in on how things have been going. First, this is what the main area of our garden looked like after we planted everything a month ago:
Here’s what it looks like now:
As you can see there’s been quite a bit of growth! I didn’t actually realize that it was quite this dramatic. Seeing everything every day like I do makes it harder to tell. 🙂
That whole front row is basil. I think we have just about every option covered as far as how all the plants are doing.…