Clean and green
October 19, 2009
Posted in Green tips, Lifestyle
Keeping your home sparkling and clean could be damaging the world around you. Each day we pour untold amounts of chemical cleaners and solvents down the drain adding to the growing toxicity of our city water. The good news is that there are many things you can do to reduce your impact on the environment next time you’re cleaning.
Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), for example, makes an easy all purpose cleaner which can be used to clean kitchen and bathroom surfaces. So too does ordinary white vinegar. Bicarbonate of soda and vinegar together form a mildly explosive mix and can be used effectively to clear blocked kitchen and bathroom drains rather than pouring litres of toxic drain cleaners down them.
Getting serious about seeds
October 6, 2009
Posted in Garden
It’s been a month since I launched Project Green, an occasional series of posts on my still-developing gardening skills and things have progressed well. So much so that I have now built a fairly serious “seedling table” out of pieces on wood I had in the garage for another project that never materialised. At first glance the seedling table is … um … fairly large. Even I had my doubts about my ambitions when I first looked at the finished product. But, after just a couple of weeks the table is packed to capacity (at least on the top bird-proofed section) and many of the first seedlings have already been transplanted to the garden, having outgrown their seed trays.
The idea for a seedling table was partly from some online reading I did and partly from the fact that the little old table I was using wasn’t really big enough. And that to protect the seedlings from birds I had to rig up an awkward system of netting that just got in the way.
The new seedling table has everything: netting to discourage birds, built-in sprinklers for water and enough room to store a good hundred-odd seedlings. The top shelf of the seedling table stands around one meter high which is a good height to work with without having to bend over the whole time. The bottom shelf is half as high and the table is 1.5m long and 0.8m wide. The two shelves are made from chicken wire pinned to the shelf beams. The chicken wire is not the best decision I made. It has a tendency to stretch under weight and it is surprising how heavy a few seedling trays can become. I will probably replace the chicken wire sometime in the near future, either with significantly stronger wire or perhaps even some wooden slats. But for now I’m going to leave it.
The sprinkler system is piped into the seedling table and uses the common garden sprinkler attachments you find in most hardware stores and nurseries. When I made the table I braced opposite corners of the “shelf beams” with a square block of wood to add rigidity to the table. Only once I’d done that did I realise how handy these would be to mount the sprinkler heads. Drilling a hole into two corner braces I mounted the sprinklers on high-rise poles inserted into the corner braces. With two 90% sprinkler heads the entire table gets a gentle watering in one go.
Successes and failures
The most successful seedlings we’ve grown to date on the new table are sweetcorn and basil. Basil grows just about anywhere and we’ve had to thin it out substantially over the past weekend. The sweetcorn seeds were also highly rewarding. Within days of planting them shoots appeared and they grew so fast that it seemed that if you checked them twice a day you could actually see them growing.
My first lettuce seeds, planted before the protection of the new seedling table, were pretty much wiped out by the birds the moment they appeared. Coriander, watermelon, cucumber and a variety of other lettuce seeds, on the other hand, sprouted quickly on the seedling table and are well on their way to being transplanted to the herb and vegetable gardens.
My attempts at growing lavender from seed are still largely unsuccessful, though I do have one or two promising looking shoots appearing this week. All the reading I’ve done suggests that lavender is an exercise in patience and that they will likely appear when you least expect them. So, I’m holding on and hoping.
The one thing we’ve no shortage of is tomato plants. We don’t actually plant these, they simply appear wherever we use our compost which is obviously laden with seeds. Gradually we’ve been moving a selection of the better of these to their own pots to be grown further.
We also have a selection of chili seeds planted in trays but so far the only chili bushes appearing this season are those that have seeded themselves around the garden.
Saturday shopping at the Jozi Food Market
October 5, 2009
Posted in Lifestyle
Looking for something to do on Saturday morning we headed out to the Jozi Food Market in Parktown North this past weekend. I had been hearing good things about this year-old market and, although it’s not on our side of town, thought it worthwhile to take a drive out and take a look for ourselves. It was a trip well worthwhile, and one we’re likely to take again soon.
The market, held in the Parktown Quarter on the corner of 7th and 3rd avenues in Parktown North every Saturday, is a food-lover’s paradise which makes it hard not to overspend just a little. Not expecting much, we were pleasantly surprised by the fantastic range of organic, homemade foods on offer and the pleasant Saturday morning bustle around the market. The market has everything from honey to bread to organic wines to herbs, vegetables, cakes and pies on sale, all of it homegrown and homemade.
Our personal haul included a piece of real honeycomb and enough bread, cheese and pate to last us the weekend. The kids, meanwhile, enjoyed decorating their own Gingerbread men while we shopped. The stall owners were exceptionally friendly, almost falling over themselves to tell us exactly how they smoked their bacon, grew their herbs or harvested the honey. Which makes for a pleasant change from shopping in the local supermarket where everyone is sulking and just wants to get out.
No monkeying around with recycling
September 18, 2009
Posted in Lifestyle
The three-bin system for collection our household recyclable materials.
Regular readers of Treevolution may know that towards the end of 2007 we signed up with Resolution Recycling to collect recyclable materials from out home every two weeks. At R360/year it was a good deal for us, especially as they recycled everything in an environmentally-friendly way. Unfortunately it seems it wasn’t such a good deal for Resolution and they filed for liquidation in June this year.
The result was that we had a 40L dustbin full of recyclable materials with nowhere to go. And over the next two months the collection grew rapidly. Despite wanting to recycle we had no easy way of doing it. Until I spotted a Resolution Recycling bin in our neighbourhood with an Ecomonkey sticker on it. We’d heard of Ecomonkey but as far as we knew they didn’t operate in our area. I phoned them that day and it turned out that they had started a collection in our area on that very day so we signed up.
Ecomonkey also collects standard recyclables (glass, paper, plastic and metals) every two weeks but the service costs more than Resolution’s did but at R79/month it’s not unaffordable.
Unlike Resolution, Ecomonkey encourages members to separate out the individual material into different bags before put out for collection. You don’t have to, apparently, but we do, using our three-bin system down the side of the house.
Ecomonkey does appear to be expanding fairly quickly and adding new collection areas to its service so it is worth taking a look to see if they cover your area. We’ve now been signed up for a month and so far everything has worked out perfectly.
First signs of life
September 18, 2009
Posted in Garden
The Garden Cress is very happy in its rich compost mixture.
It was just day four of the project when the first signs of life started poking through the soil in the seedling trays. The garden cress was remarkably quick to sprout and by the end of the first week had more than a handful of leaves to show for my efforts. Which boosted my confidence in my gardening skills no end. This was easy.
Boosted by my new-found confidence I scratched around for a few small pots and splashed out on a few more seed trays and got to planting some more seeds. One of the things I am keen to grow is Lavender. We have a narrow pathway down the one side of our house and after seeing a few good examples of lavender-lined stone pathways decided that something similar would be a good way to decorate an otherwise ugly piece of garden. To do this we need a lot of lavender so rather than buying it from the nursery I decided to try and propagate some from a few existing plant branches (largely unsuccessful so far) and plant a packet of seeds.
The table. The three trays in the forground are the newest plantings and the lavender is is the green pots and the trays at the back left.
Lavender
The first thing I learned about lavender is that there is not such thing as “just lavender”. There are literally hundreds of different types of lavender, each with their own flowers, leaves and habits. In the end I settled on traditional English Lavender because it seems ot be the most popular so if I have problems with it I’m likely to find help relatively easily. I planted the lavender seeds (which are infuriatingly small and difficult to work with) in a couple of loose pots and two large seed trays.
Potting medium
Up until now I’ve been planting these seeds in trays and pots filled mostly with compost that we’ve produced at the bottom of the garden and a little sand. I’m now worried that this may not have been the best idea but I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. At least the cress is enjoying their new rich home.
As a test I planted a few more trays of seeds over the weekend. These extra three seed trays are planted with watermelon, sweetcorn and cucumber seeds. The test part is that I planted these in trays filled with a mixture of finely sifted compost mixed with a healthy dose of river sand. This guide suggests a seed-starting medium or potting soil. Maybe next time I’ll look at potting soil but for now river sand and compost it is.
Herbs, day 1
September 7, 2009
Posted in Garden
Monday morning and the first day of the new gardening project. I only had six seedling trays to hand so I filled them all with seeds for chillis, sweet basil, coriander, lettuce, dark-leafed basil and garden cress. I’m thinking of building a more permanent structure on this side of the garden for growing seedlings but I want to test out how they fare here before launching on the building. When they do start to come up I’ll need to have something to protect them from birds but that’ll come later in the week. I also need a higher table. The current one is made from old scraps including an old wooden walkway which we replaced some time ago.
Seedlings: Getting started
September 7, 2009
Posted in Garden
This is the start of a series of regular posts tracking my gardening skills. I’m not a professional, I’m not practised, and I’m pretty clueless when it comes to growing plants. Over the past ten years I’ve spent more time behind a computer screen being a geek than I have in the garden. But recently I started enjoying gardening and I’ve decided that the best way to hone my skills is to give gardening a shot while documenting the (no-doubt countless) mistakes I make on this blog. The one thing I’ve learned over the years is that one of the best ways to learn from mistakes is to write them down. That way they are recorded and can be used as a measure of progress.
So, pitting a geek against a garden, let’s get started with Project Green.
Treevolution’s new, improved newsletter
March 20, 2009
Posted in Green News
Today we launch a new way to keep up to date with environmental news and issues. In addition to the regular news headlines, newsletter subscribers can now also download an extra electronic newsletter. This newsletter, in PDF format, goes beyond just Treevolution’s weekly headlines and looks at issues in a little more detail. We’ve designed it to be both easy to read onscreen and printed out (if you must). Read more
Nokia tops eco-friendly chart
September 18, 2008
Posted in Green News
Thanks to its expanding cellphone take-back programme Nokia has reclaimed the top spot in the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics. Second and third place went to Fujitsu Siemens and Samsung respectively.
Bringing up the rear of the guide were Nintendo and Microsoft. Nintendo scored just 0.8 out of 10 as the company had made no progress on dealing with e-waste and it still had no timeline in place for eliminating PVC in its products. When burned, PVC releases dioxin, a well-known carcinogen.
In 17th place Microsoft scored just 2.2 points for its failure to deal adequately with toxic chemicals and a timeline of 2010 for eliminating phthalates – a toxic chemical – in its products.
The major PC makers including Dell, Toshiba, HP, LG, Acer and Panasonic all scored less than 5 points in guide.
Further down the list are Lenovo and Apple. Lenovo was rewarded for its e-waste programme while Apple was marked down for its failure to put in place a proper e-waste programme.
Apple did, however, gain good marks for energy efficiency along with Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung.
Greenpeace says that to date no company has released a computer completely free of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and PVC, though several are restricting the use of the neurotoxin. Last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the new iPod line will be free of BFRs, PVC and mercury, following the lead of companies like Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
“This is a great step by Apple towards its commitment to eliminate these toxic chemicals from all its products by the end of 2008,” said toxics campaigner Casey Harrell. “They should continue this positive work and improve their ranking by announcing a free, global recycling programme.”
In related news Intel this week released its new Xeon 5400 processors that use Hafnium which allows them to avoid using fire retardants such as BFRs.
E-waste in numbers
August 21, 2008
Posted in Green News
Green IT was the theme of this year’s Gartner Symposium Africa, held this week in Cape Town. Over the course of the event speakers rolled out facts and figures on e-waste and the impact information technology is having on the environment. Here are a few of the many stood out for us:
460 000 – The number of PCs that reach “end-of-life” every day.
550 million – The number of mobile phones that reach “end-of-life” every year.
2% – The contribution of the IT industry to global carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the output of the airline industry.
60% – The percentage of toxicity in landfill sites due to e-waste.
2%-3% – The percentage of landfill sites that are e-waste.
95%-98% – The percentage of PC materials that can be recycled.
6 ounces – The typical yield of gold from 1 ton of PC boards.
1 ounce – The typical gold yield from 1 ton of rock.
