Thursday, April 26, 2012

Earth Day, Green Week

Towns around us are celebrating Earth Day. Our celebration "Earth Day is Our Day" is this Sunday. I'm on the organizing committee, and we've assembled a plethora of activities and opportunities to celebrate and learn about green living. There will be local experts and citizens who will answer questions about their electric or hybrid cars or solar panels. (I wrote a promotional article about that for our local paper you can find it here.) You can learn about bee keeping or learn to knit. There will be zumba and kids' games, seed planting and rain barrel sales. And amazingly, a local guy will bring his carousel band organ just back from repair in England.

All this inspired me to get greener around my house as well. I finally caved in and bought an outdoor laundry dryer. I've been contemplating for 2 years about where to hang our old lines from tree to tree in this yard, but nothing seemed to work. So I spent about $50 on a good one. We set the base in concrete last Saturday and yesterday it made it's trial run. Excellent!




While the laundry was drying I mowed the lawn.



I must have spent a bit too much time in the yard out in the grass. Doug removed a tick from my leg last night. I won't show a photo of that. But here's photo evidence of a much less pesky little neighbor:


The lawn definitely looks dry for April. We had a two week run of hot weather with no rain until last weekend when we got a couple inches over a short period. Since we'd planted seeds in the garden, I had nearly used up the filled bottles of water from previous rains, and the rain barrel was empty. But it's full again (along with many jugs and buckets) in case of another dry spell.


While Earth day is inspiring me in a good way to green my life, fear is also a motivator because of the the unprecedented high temperatures, early spring, news of seal pups on the beaches two months early, and April wildfires rather than April showers.

Here's one more green activity from the week. I turned some free, holey rummage sale sweaters into mittens for next year. I used this tutorial and did pretty poorly on the first bluish green pair. But that brown pair with the embroidery turned out great. I'll be making more, and as will any new skill: practice makes (closer to) perfect.


What new green activities are you trying this beautiful spring?

5 comments:

Kaat said...

You have to show my how to do that with the mittens.
And wow on your fancy solar dryer! I'm getting one too.

Andrea said...

check out the tutorial blog link. I did the pattern with just one sweater. There's a rummage sale in Sudbury on Saturday. Maybe I could get some more sweaters there and have a mitten party!

KarenLR said...

Your mittens are FAB! Love the idea of using old sweaters for such a clever up-cycle. We've been air drying laundry forever. Wooden drying racks set up indoors are a great alternative when the weather's bad, adding moisture to our house in the winter heating season. We use a rain barrel, too. We've installed low flow toilets and shower heads. We've also used cloth napkins since we got married 33 years ago. Next week we are having an energy audit done to see what else we can do to conserve energy around the house. It's been so encouraging to read of all the things folks have tried this Earth Day...every little change, both big and small, does add up!

Andrea said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andrea said...

Karen thanks for commenting. Yes, it's so important to feel like there are lots of people trying to help the environment. Here's a post about insulating our house after an energy audit. We saved 30% on use and bills afterwards.

http://escleali.blogspot.com/2010/02/insulation-and-keeping-warm-new.html