About a year ago, I was out in my garden doing battle with weeds when my neighbor casually suggested that I use Roundup so I didn’t have to work as hard. Once I figured out that he wasn’t joking, I was shocked and horrified. Since then I’ve followed the ups and downs of Roundup, Monsanto, Bayer, scientific studies, and court cases.
Everything is connected on this blog, and this week’s topics are no exception. In order to maintain my pollinator garden cheaply and sustainably, I wanted to set up a greywater reclamation system to use wastewater from my laundry, and in order to ensure that only plant-safe compounds were winding up in my garden, I had to do some research on biodegradable laundry detergents.
I recently came across a link for “Plastic-Free July” in my Facebook feed. As the name would suggest, the mission is to reduce or eliminate plastic use during the month of July. I have kept up with a lot of my habits from my zero-waste Lent this past spring, but, I thought this new challenge was worth a look.
Getting a new roof is (hopefully) not something you have to think about more than a handful of times in your life, and this is certainly the first time I’ve ever been in this situation. While I’m not thrilled about the expense, I am excited about the prospect of learning about our options and making an environmentally-responsible choice.
Our third night in the woods of Virginia met with some interesting effects on my brain in particular. How much of it was a legitimate effect versus my expectation of finding something unusual? I can’t answer that, but I can say that I did feel better (physically, emotionally, and spiritually) while camping and plan to make time for more of it in the future.
Our Memorial Day weekend adventure continues with day two of camping in the mountains of Virginia. Question: what happens when you get curious, introspective people out of their daily lives and into the forest? Apparently you get discussions around philosophy, psychology, anthropology, brain chemistry, culture, society, and unexplainable phenomena tied to the nature of reality. And s’mores. You get s’mores too.
After reading Florence Williams’ The 3-Day Effect, I wanted to experiment on my friends and see what benefits we experienced on our upcoming Memorial Day camping trip. Our little group had an amazing weekend in the mountains of Virginia from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. We had a lot of conversations about how our minds and bodies were adjusting to our return to nature.
We know anecdotally that time spent in nature is beneficial, but there are scientific studies demonstrating various positive impacts on health, cognitive function, stress, and emotional wellbeing. I recently finished a book on the effects of three days in nature on the human mind and body, and this post is set to publish while I, myself, am camping in the mountains for three days.
A few weeks ago I came face-to-face with some termites in our garden wall. We were not thrilled about the prospect, but I researched some alternatives that are more environmentally friendly than calling an exterminator. We did some things that will hopefully prevent the situation from getting worse and introduced a beneficial parasite that will hopefully eliminate some if not all of the colony.
About three years ago I could no longer stand the thought of sending a full grocery bag of used kitty litter to the landfill every week or so. At that point, I started researching how to compost pet waste in order to offset our kitties’ carbon footprint. It is possible to do it as long as you do your research and follow some very specific guidelines.