1. Check the air pressure in your tires. Cooler temperatures lower tire pressure and that, in turn, lowers fuel efficiency. So check your tires and make sure that they are properly inflated.
2. Clean and test the furnace. Did you know that your furnace needs cleaning? Yep … it collects all kinds of dust and debris which not only affects it’s performance but could cause a fire. Before you really need the heat, get out your owner’s manual for instructions on how to clean it. No manual? Check here or call a furnace maintenance company. If you have a gas furnace, have it professionally inspected once a year.
3. Move furniture or any obstructions from vents, baseboard heaters, registers on the floor or radiators so that air moves freely. This is also a good time to vacuum these areas to remove any dust or debris. And here’s a tip if you have a radiator … place a reflecting panel behind it … you can purchase one at a home center or make one yourself with a plywood panel and aluminum foil.
4. Remove window air conditioners for the winter. If they can’t be removed, seal them with caulking or tape and cover them with an airtight, insulated jacket.
5. Vacuum the refrigerator coils to keep the compressor running efficiently. It’s also a good time to check that the refrigerator is level … the door should automatically swing shut instead of staying open. Check the seal on the door … try closing it on a dollar bill. If you can pull the bill out easily, it’s time to replace the gaskets. Here’s another tip for running the refrigerator efficiently … don’t over fill it. Allowing room for cool air to circulate will keep everything at the right temperature.
6. Clean the ducts and area behind the dryer. And don’t forget, clean the filter after every use and every once in awhile, give it a good wash.
7. Check windows for proper caulking. If you have single-pane windows, add storm windows. Even a plastic film over windows will reduce heat loss.
8. Check doors for weather stripping and replace as necessary. If drafts sneak in under exterior doors, replace the threshold or block the drafts with a rolled-up towel or blanket.
9. Check your roof for any missing or damaged tiles or shingles.
10. Clean the roof gutters and make sure downspouts are pointed away from the house. Now would also be a good time to install a rain barrel … rather than allow water to drain into one spot, a rain barrel would allow you to direct the water to where it’s most needed.
11. Electrical outlets, especially on outside walls, and light fixtures are prime places for cold air to leak into your home. Add foam gaskets behind covers and switch plates, and use safety plugs in unused outlets. Be sure to shut off the power at the fuse box or circuit panel before doing this.
12. Install foam covers over outside water spigots to prevent freezing.
13. Check for water leaks both inside and outside.
14. Wrap the water heater in an insulating blanket.
15. If you have a ceiling fan, reverse the direction … the fan should be run in a clockwise direction (stand under the fan and if you feel a breeze, reverse the direction so that air is being drawn upwards). This pushes the air up against the ceiling and down the walls, to gently re-circulate the warm air without creating a cooling “wind chill effect.”
16. Do you have a fireplace? This is a good time to have the chimney cleaned and get vent systems checked.
17. If your home has no sidewall insulation, place heavy furniture like bookshelves, armoires and sofas along exterior walls, and use decorative quilts as wall hangings. This will help block cold air.
18. Bring in any houseplants that have spent the summer outdoors. They’ll help clean the air.
19. As the autumn leaves begin to fall, consider raking them up rather than using a “blower”. Once raked up, use them as mulch to protect plants throughout the winter or add them to a compost pile.
20. Before packing away those summer clothes, go through them and determine which items to keep, which items to repurpose into something else (cleaning rags, craft projects, etc.) and which to donate.

A little effort in the fall will ensure that the chilly months ahead are warm and “green”.

Source

The EGP maintains food gardens on a variety of public and private spaces. As their programs grows, they will be looking for additional garden space. If you have garden space that you do not use, the EGP may want to come and cultivate a food garden.

Check out: The Edible Garden Projects Website for more info.

The Edible Garden Project (EGP) is working to address urban environmental and social issues by creating a network that grows and shares local food and by promoting sustainable regional agriculture.

WThey are working to reduce the reliance on foods imported from afar by empowering residents to grow (and share) their own. The EGP is the result of an extensive community consultation process where food security was identified as a key priority area from both a community and environmental perspective. Adequate access to fresh fruit and vegetables is a cornerstone to good health, but is beyond the reach of many low income community members, and current industrial agricultural practises can be highly detrimental to the environment.

The project aims to bring people together to grow and distribute locally produced food to low-income individuals and families on the North Shore. The EGP is bringing together homeowners with gardens who want to donate a portion of their harvest, people who have under or un-used garden space and would like to cultivate this land for growing food, and volunteers who want to contribute to growing, sharing and learning about locally produced food. They provide information and education in the community to build knowledge and skills around ecological food gardening and urban agriculture.

They also like urban farms…

Their Mission

• Increase land used for fruit and vegetable production on the North Shore.
• Increase knowledge and skills  relating to food gardening, thereby increasing community capacity to grow and share locally grown fruits and vegetables.
• Increase access to fruits and vegetables and to garden space for those most in need on the North Shore.
• Advise on and support policy development around urban agriculture.

Providing opportunities for low-income individuals and families is a priority.

Source

The Royal City Farmers Market Association is a non-profit association dedicated to making a Farmers Market in New Westminster a success.

Their mission is to connect with our heritage of having a vibrant city market, the Royal City Farmers Market Association brings locally grown and produced food to the community, thereby contributing to environmentally sustainable food production, local economic development, healthy eating, and food security.

The market features farm-fresh produce, plants, quality crafts from local artists and artisans, gourmet prepared foods, community information, live entertainment, and more.

For more information please visit their website at: http://rcfm.ca/

It’s that time of year again when seasonal allergies take off. Sneezing, itchy watery eyes, runny nose, blocked-up sensation are just a few of the symptoms.

Seasonal allergies are typically caused by pollen and mould spores in the air. If you have an allergy, your body sees the pollen as a foreign substance and sets off the immune system to defend itself.

Allergies vary by season. This time of year, it is the trees that are causing the symptoms, such as alder, birch, oak, maple elm and poplar. In May, the grasses get allergic folks into trouble and July starts the ragweed season.

Pollen can be spread by the wind, more so when it is dry. Typically, the further north you go, the later the pollinating season starts. But in warmer places, the pollination can happen year-round.

There is a direct relationship between the weather and the allergy season. When the weather is wet and cool, allergies are not as bad. In those weather conditions, the pollen does not move around as much. But as the weather gets warmer and drier, you can be sure that the pollen counts go  up as they travel far more easily.

In some parts of the country, the allergy season has already started and the prediction is that this year will be among the worse we have seen in a while. That prediction is based on the fact that all the rain we have had has encouraged a lot of growth in our allergy-causing trees and grasses. As the weather gets warmer, the pollen counts are predicted to soar.

Our weather in most parts of Canada has been pretty cool — not such a great spring unless you are an allergy sufferer! The cool weather has meant the pollen counts have been lower — but warm weather is just around the corner and experts are warning that with that warmer weather — the allergy season will be a bad one.

If you suffer from  mould allergies, you are likely already in trouble. As the American Academy of Asthma Allergy and Immunology points out, moulds are tiny fungi related to mushrooms but without stems, roots or leaves. Their spores float in the air like pollen. Outdoor mould spores begin to increase as temperatures rise in the spring and reach their peak in July in warmer areas and October in the colder areas. They can be found year-round in the U.S. South and on the West Coast. Moulds can be found almost anywhere, including soil, plants and rotting wood.

The other problem is that with the change in weather, it seems that our allergy season is actually getting longer. Studies have found that ragweed now has a longer flowering season that extends further north than it did years ago. Saskatoon’s season, for example, is now 27 days longer than it was 15 years ago. That’s about a full month more of sneezing, wheezing and watery eyes.

It is helpful to know what the pollen count is in your area. It can help to arm you with information that will tell you if this is an indoor air condition kind of day! I have an app on my Blackberry that I downloaded (for free) sponsored by the makers of a popular antihistamine that allows me to plug in any city and find out what the pollen count is. The iPad has similar kinds of downloads for free sponsored by other manufacturers of antihistamines. One of my favorites is sponsored by the Weather Network.

Treatments range from over-the-counter antihistamines to prescription nasal and eye drops. In some cases, allergy shots or immunotherapy can be used. For individuals with asthma and allergies, a variety of inhalers and oral medications are available to maximize control.

Suggestions from the AAAAI (American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology) for control include:

• Keep your windows closed at night
• Use air conditioning, which cleans, cools and dries the air.
• Stay indoors when the pollen or mould levels are reported to be high
• Don’t mow lawns or rake leaves because it stirs up pollen and moulds

Source

• Start With a Plan. Make a list of the things you want to accomplish with your garden: Do you want to do a complete renovation? Create some space for your kids? Design a place to entertain? Consider these goals before you start any planting.
• Go Slow. Now is the time to start sowing your seeds indoors. Find a sunny window and let the plants warm up to the March weather in the comfort of your living room. These can be both vegetables and flowers and can stay indoors until the frost has completely thawed.
• Only the Best Will Do. Prepare your soil with lots of organic matter, as most gardens’ success revolves around this preparation. Plants will actually take care of themselves; you just need to feed the soil. Add compost and triple mix, especially if the soil is poor to begin with, and let the soil support the plants.
• Mix and Match. Once plants are ready for the outdoors, make sure each one has its needs matched to the environment. Shade-loving plants go in the shade; sun worshippers go in the sun. Watch out for aggressive plants- only choose ones that you know you can keep at bay.
• Lessen the Workload. Choose native plants like Echinacea to round out your space. They reduce your water usage and lighten the maintenance required.
• Patio Party. For those with condo patios or house decks, containers are essential. Buy good quality container soil and don’t use old earth from last year (take it to a nearby park and spread it there). Make sure your containers have drainage access and use a slow release fertilizer, like a “once-in-a-season,” that you only have to apply at the beginning of spring.
• Behave Yourself. Or rather, pick plants that behave themselves. Aggressive plants can create more work than you have time for. Ornamental grasses, for example, are big right now: the travellers, which move mostly by root through the garden, are very invasive, yet the clumpers tend to stay in their place and won’t take over your garden. Choose the latter.
• Stay Away from Chemicals. An easy way to prevent weeds from growing is to overseed your lawn, for example, with fresh quality grass seed. The quality of the grass seed in the bag is the pedigree of your lawn tomorrow. Buy quality grass seeds and you won’t regret it.
• Keep Weeds at Bay: A low maintenance (and natural) way to reduce weeds in your garden is to add finely ground mulch about 5 cm thick. This insulates the soil so that evaporation doesn’t take place as fast. Sun can’t reach down there, so the weeds won’t push through, eliminating the majority of your weeding problems within the first year.

Source

Download Trash Tracking Form here:  NWEP tracking

The Trash Talkers are a group of NWEP volunteers who found they are spending too much time talking about solid waste and decided to do something about it. Rallying together during the 2009-2010 consultations around the Metro Vancouver Solid Waste Resource Management Plan, effectively lobbying the City to consider smaller options when they rolled out the automated trash bins for single-family dwellings, promoting the City’s recycling, composting, and organic waste collection programs at community events, and buoyed by the success of two “Neighbourhood Zero Waste Challenges”, the trash talkers have been doing more than talking in the last two years.

The next project is to take lessons from the Neighbourhood ZWCs, and apply them out in the larger community. One of the take-home lessons of the Neighbourhood ZWC was that people started to think about garbage as something other than that stuff that magically disappears after you take to the curb once a week. This was precipitated by making people actually sort and weight their garbage.

In reality, most people don’t want to weight their garbage. It is time consuming and has a certain “yuck” factor. However, all single-family homes and duplexes in New Westminster now have automated trash bins. That means we can estimate the amount of garbage we produce over a few months just by counting the number of bins that go to the curb. It is hoped that this information will be helpful to the City in planning further waste-reduction strategies, without the expense and hassle of a full trash survey. This is where you come in.

The NWEP have put together a simple garbage-tracking form. It is designed to be either attached or posted next to the garbage calendar you receive from the City. All you have to do to fill it out is make a check mark every time you take one or both of your trash bins to the curb. You can mark if the bin was “full”, about half full, almost empty, or if you didn’t take it out that week. The same for the Green Organic Waste bin.

At the end of the survey, you can scan, e-mail, or drop your tracking sheet off (or we can come by and pick it up from you). We will collect this data, post it on our website (the names and addresses of all participants will remain anonymous) and present it to New Westminster Council and Staff in the Fall.

What do we hope to get out of this?

Many people in New Westminster are already very conscious of their waste stream, and take efforts to reduce the amount of garbage they take to the curb. One of the reasons the NWEP fought to make the 120L garbage bins available as an option (the City was leaning towards 180L or 240L bins) was that the City’s own older studies showed the average household put out less than 75L of trash a week.

If this is the case, then perhaps the 120L bins are too large for many people. If the 75L bin were available (as they are in Vancouver) for people, then perhaps the City will see some further reduction of waste, and the concomitant reduction of garbage collection costs can be passed onto the residents with the smaller bins. Or, with the organics (i.e. “stinky stuff”) now removed from the regular waste stream, perhaps many residents would prefer to only have their trash picked up once every two weeks, or less frequently.

But to change “status quo” of the garbage magically disappearing (the magic part only exposed when you get your annual Solid Waste Utility Tax bill in the mail), we need more than ideas: we need numbers to support these ideas.

Please, download and print off the garbage tracking sheet. If you don’t have a printer, drop us a line and we will get one to your house. Each line on the sheet corresponds with the first day of the week as shown on your City Garbage Calendar. We would like to start keeping numbers in March, mostly to work out any kinks in the system, but if you can’t start until April, that is OK too!

Any questions? Comments? Concerns? Curiosities?

You can email Jane at jearmstrong@shaw.ca, or Patrick at pdjohnst@telus.net.
You can call Jane at 604-524-6112
You can comment to the trash talkers mail list (this is an open mail list, so don’t post anything you would like to keep confidential!) trashtalk@nwep.ca.
Or keep up to date with progress on the NWEP website (www.nwep.ca).

Happy counting!

Call it repurposing, call it recrafting, call it creative reuse, or call it trash transformed. No matter what you call it, this concept of “cradle to cradle” is one of the tenants of green living. It means that a product’s lifecycle doesn’t have to end up forever rotting away in a landfill. It can be endlessly reincarnated into useful items.

We EcoNesters talk a lot about purging clutter, living slower, donating and thrifting, and living minimally. So, this post is going to take a different tact. It isn’t going to tell you that hording some things isn’t such a bad idea. In fact, hold onto those scraps.

But, wait a minute … scraps are junk, right? Not so fast. Scrap items can be put to use and given a “life after waste.” In fact, the end products of materials are often called salvage. That’s a great word for things that are “saved from the ruins” and eventually end up in dumpsters.

If you’re like me, you’ve got all sorts of scraps hanging around just ready for a new practical renaissance of sorts. Think of it as part of the transformation of renewal for living a more resourceful life.

Scrap renewal projects using…

1. Yarn
If you read my posts with any regularity, you know that knitting is my number one DIY project of choice. Yarn scraps abound in the needle world, and this pin cushion from Craft Leftovers via the Craftzine blog is perhaps one of the best uses I’ve seen for small amounts of yarn scraps.

2. Wood
Keep those wood scraps out of the burn pile and make a beautiful and unique scrap wood cutting board from Instructables.

3. Fabric
I love wrapping gifts using fabric. Here is a pattern from Purl Bee to make an easy, little drawstring bag that could become the perfect packaging for gift giving.

4. Paper
While cardboard furniture has been making the DIY design rounds lately, I’m not sure how comfy these things are to sit on. This bowl, by A Little Hut that is created using scraps of magazine cuttings seems more useful.

5. Plastic
Not being much of a plastic user or a soda drinker, I don’t have a lot of plastic recycling hanging around, but this is truly one of the post amazing things I’ve seen using tossed plastic: This plastic kayak shown here at Gizmodo with DIY instructions from Instructables is outrageous!

6. Glass
I’ve had a case of severe chandelier envy. You can read about it here and here. So, when I found this outdoor glass chandelier over on Casa Sugar crafted from recycled glass jars, it lit my fire.

Source

Ronnie Citron-Fink is a writer and educator. Ronnie regularly writes about sustainable living for online sites and magazines. Along with being the creator of www.econesting.com, Ronnie has contributed to numerous books about green home design, DIY, children, and humor. Ronnie lives the Hudson Valley of New York with her family.

Zero Waste

Zero Waste maximizes recycling, minimizes waste, reduces consumption and ensures that products are made to be reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or the marketplace.

Zero Waste:

Source

It’s around this time every year that I get the bug to get my garden cleaned up, planted, do spring cleaning, store away the extra winter blankets, sweaters, snow boots etc and get outside!

The following article is from H Bishara who shares with us a greener way to tackle Spring cleaning – enjoy!

H Bishara’s top five eco-friendly things to do this spring:

1. This year I’m eliminating any chemicals from my garden and planting all organic plants. It’s a little more expensive and a little harder to find, but it’s a lot healthier for your kids if they play in your yard to get rid of those awful fertilizers full of chemicals.
2. My spring cleaning will be done with lots of vinegar, baking soda and plant derived cleaners. Get rid of those old cleaners that are made with petrochemicals, unnatural fragrances and use products that bring a healthier environment to your home. Did you know that your indoor air could be causing health issues to you and your family?
3. Open your windows and let the fresh air in. Wash your windows with a mixture of half vinegar and half water, usually this will improve your indoor air quality and leave your windows spotless.
4. Is it time to clean out a few clogged drains? Here are some helpful tips for a more natural way to clean drains. Throw away those chemicals; they go straight to our water supply.
5. Time to go green with your hot water heater; your water heater uses a lot of energy to keep water hot 24/7. Check out tankless water heaters or called hot water on demand systems.

For starters just do one task in an eco-friendly way and then pass this list on to a friend and encourage her to do the same. We can create a better planet one step at a time.

February 5th at Holy Trinity Cathedral will be a great night in New Westminster for anyone interested in reducing their waste, contributing to their personal health, and networking with other like-minded folks. The Royal City Farmers Market is pleased to be hosting the Annual General Meeting at the church’s hall.
Doors open at 5:30pm for citizens to register and purchase their annual membership.

As a special nod to Royal City Farmers Markets supporters, show your 2011 Membership and receive admission to
the film for only $3! Regular admission is $5-$10. All are welcome at the film screening – tickets are available at the
door and will sell out.

The film starts at 7:30. (you can come for the AGM, come for the film, or come for both) Poster attached.
Please help us spread the word!