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There’s such a thing as treating some herbs too well. If you’ve ever taken conscientious care while growing herbs like oregano, sage, and rosemary, only to be disappointed with their flavor, it’s because nature didn’t mean for them to be grown that way. Most Mediterranean herbs originated in areas with stony ground and little water, so they taste better when they’re “grown hard” without the use of fertilizers (even organic ones) and daily watering. Conversely, tropical herbs like ginger, turmeric, and lemongrass require extensive fertilizer and daily watering. Try this site for more information on how your should treat specific herbs.
Although we don’t store anything that needs to be refrigerated here in our warehouse at Clean Air Gardening, our super-insulated warehouse door helps keep our indoor temperatures regulated without raising our energy bills.
In our last location, we had a plain metal door to our warehouse that got extremely hot in the sun. It got so hot that it radiated heat and made the warehouse and box packing extremely hot. Us Texans might be able to withstand some extreme temperatures, but we still need a break from the heat and a break from the cooling bills.
This door is typically used in meat packing warehouses where everything inside needs to stay below certain temperatures. Here at CAG, it works the same way and keeps us nice and cool during the hot Texas days without us having to crank up the air conditioning.
Although you probably don’t have a warehouse that needs cooling attached to your home, if you plan a green renovation, consider a heavier insulated garage door.
Modern houses are deliberately built to be airtight, which makes them more energy-efficient in the long run. However, good ventilation is critical for health reasons, so it’s necessary to vent stale air outside and introduce fresh air on a constant basis.
One unfortunate side effect of this practice is the fact that in the winter, you often vent your heat outside along with the stale air. One way around this is to install a heat recovery ventilator (HRV).
Instead of expending energy to heat fresh air, an HRV uses the heat in the stale air to warm up the fresh air, resulting in up to 85 percent energy savings. An HRV might cost you up to $2,500 to install, but it’ll pay for itself in a few years — and it’s good for the planet.
Most of us know that printing on both sides of our office paper is a great way to save money and resources, but another very simple way to help is by increasing the margins on every piece of paperwork you print. Simply by narrowing your margins from one inch to half an inch, you can save about $5 a year per person.
That may not sound like much, but that’s $500 per year for a 100 person office — and wouldn’t you rather use that money for a nicer office Christmas party? If you’re not sure how to change your margins, here’s how to do it in MS Word, the most popular word processing program.
As we’ve mentioned before, here at Clean Air Gardening, we don’t just tell you how to live a greener, more sustainable life. We’ve gone through our office and warehouse space and made green renovations to help us lower our impact on the environment while also keeping our workspace clean for us to use as well.
That’s why we purchased a used electric forklift. It cost less to purchase than a brand new forklift and doesn’t emit any harmful fumes. Although propane gas is one of the cleanest burning fuels, we don’t want to breathe in any fumes or put them into the atmosphere. This also contributes to our good indoor air quality.
Here at CAG, our warehouse is attached to our offices, so any fumes or smells in our warehouse can permeate into our office space, which could make people feel sick…or just grumpy.
Another benefit for our small office is that electric forklifts are also much quieter than gas forklifts. The only time it is audible is when it is in reverse…you know, the typical warning “beep beep beep beep” sounds!
We work happily and fume-free with our electric forklift!
If you’ve just decided to join the organic gardening community, welcome to the fold! Most of us start out by growing our own veggies, and we’ve got some suggestions we think are ideal for the new organic gardener.
Ideal vegetables for starting out include radishes and arugula (both of which mature in as little as two weeks!), squash, cucumbers, zucchini, turnips, collards, Japanese eggplant, and tomatoes.
If you live in a warmer climate, both sweet and hot peppers will thrive. Just be sure you keep everything watered and weeded, and you’ll end up with more vegetables than you can handle.
If you’ve ever tried to grow asparagus, then you know it takes a lot of patience. Among other things, you can’t hoe it because the spears pop up all over; it’s hand-weed or nothing.
Luckily, there’s an easy, organic way to work around that: start by seeding your asparagus bed with Dutch clover the fall before you plant.
The next spring, plant year-old crowns in a narrow trench eight inches deep. Backfill the trench halfway, and wait until the tips of the spears are peeking above the lip before filling it up the rest of the way. Then seed the bed with more clover.
You should end up with a thick clover cover, and you can easily pull any weeds that make it through just a couple of times a season. The clover will reseed itself, so all you have to do is add a little seed each fall wherever it seems thin.
Clover’s a legume, so not only will it provide an excellent green manure for your asparagus, it’ll also replenish the nitrogen in the soil.
Here at Clean Air Gardening, we don’t want to just tell you about how to be green and do your part to improve our environment. We want to make sure we do our part as well, so we’ve done a number of things in our office and warehouse to make sure we make as little impact as possible.
One of the first tenets of green building is indoor air quality. No one likes to breathe in harmful, polluted air. That’s why we’ve painted our entire office with No Volatile Organic Compound, or No VOC paint.
EPA’s Total Exposure Assessment Methodology (TEAM) studies found levels of about a dozen common organic pollutants to be 2 to 5 times higher inside homes than outside, regardless of whether the homes were located in rural or highly industrial areas. Additional TEAM studies indicate that while people are using products containing organic chemicals, they can expose themselves and others to very high pollutant levels, and elevated concentrations can persist in the air long after the activity is completed.
Does that mean that the air outside your home is better quality air than the air in your home or office? Well, if you use harmful chemicals and paints, it might be. Like the EPA says, these chemicals can linger for several years after the paint is dried and doesn’t smell anymore.
Low VOC or no VOC paint is easy to find, although not everyone is aware of its name. If someone at your big box store doesn’t know what you’re talking about, try asking for the “low fume” paint, and then look for the Green Seal.
This paint is just as good quality as the high fume paint, can be made any color just like the higher fume paint, but it improves your indoor air quality. We love it here at Clean Air Gardening because we know it will benefit us now and in the future while we work!
Is this a prank? Perhaps this night stalker was merely a trained monkey on his way to a costume party. But, just in case there really are garden gnomes out there, why not get your own gnome statue? These are highly effective at deterring the little pranksters from your yard - on lawns where we’ve tested garden gnome statues, we’ve had no problems with the tiny vegetable crooks.
By some reports, gnomes don’t have the best eyesight, and they aren’t very social creatures. So, if they think your yard is already home to another gnome, they’ll give the area a wide berth. And, if that doesn’t work, you can warn them off with gnome killers!
If you’ve got an aquarium, then you’ve got an excellent source of liquid fertilizer that’s perfectly natural (assuming you don’t overdo the algaecides). The next time you clean out your aquarium, save the water in a bucket; it’s full of nutrients that your plants will welcome. Use it to spot feed your flowers or leafy vegetables like lettuce, cabbages, and their relatives. You can also put it in a spray bottle and use it as a foliar spray. While you won’t be able to apply aquarium water every day, it makes for a nice organic treat your plants will appreciate, and it allows you to conserve a small amount of water for other uses.
