Welcome, please login or register

Get Eco-thrifty With These 5 Easy Tips…

At rubbingnickels.com, we often have the feeling that the “green” movement has stalled a little in the era of the economic downturn. Some of the actions we take to be more green cost money, for example, purchasing a hybrid car or installing solar panels. But what many forget is that “eco” and “thrifty” often go hand in hand. Think along the lines of things your Grandma might have done that you thought were strange: i.e. re-using margarine tubs as tupperware or sewing crazy quilts out of leftover scraps of fabric. Here are a few tips that will help you save the planet and save some cash at the same time (just like Grandma used to do).

  1. Tighten up your gas cap. Yep! According to the Car Care Council, we lose 147 million gallons of gas each year, evaporated into the atmosphere, due to loose gas caps.

  2. Use bar soap instead of pump soap. If you buy bars in brown, biodegradable or re-usable wrapping (like the soap in our picture), you decrease your waste from 20 pounds of plastic each year to zero.

  3. Cool your water in the fridge. Running the water into a pitcher until it is cold can waste many gallons of water. Run the water into the pitcher at room temp (not letting the faucet run first) and then cool it in the refrigerator.

  4. Re-use your scrap paper. It never fails that when you try to print a document, you end up with tons of extra pages with tiny bits of print in the corners or bottom. Don’t recycle this in the bin! Instead, us it for kid’s homework, grocery lists and gift wrap.

  5. Use a toaster oven for baking whenever possible. According to Country Living magazine (April 2009), toaster ovens use half the amount of electricity as electric ovens and they don’t raise the temperature of the kitchen nearly as much.

Get Eco-thrifty!

Darcy Ratner and Julie Arnheim
Founders, Rubbingnickels.com

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Plant a Rainbow This Spring!

We all know how important it is to have your child eat well balanced meals, especially when it means including vegetables. Aside from french fried potatoes and buttered corn, is your child getting a full range of the nutritionally rich vegetables that are considered the “Rainbow Foods”?

It used to be we encouraged children to eat their greens: broccoli, spinach, zucchini, beans. Now we can expand this color palate to include healthy veggies, all in rainbow colors. We are blessed to live in an area so agriculturally diverse: fresh, organic produce is available at your local farmer’s market, and “U Pick Farms” can be a wonderful day trip for your family. Don’t want to leave the house? You can participate in a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture and produce will be delivered to your door.

Perhaps the best way to encourage your child to eat a variety of vegetables is to put them to work! Have them help plant their very own garden. Many of these vegetables can easily be grown in containers, too. Just 1 tomato, zucchini or cucumber will produce a significant amount of food. Warning: if you send your child out into the garden to harvest beans for dinner, don’t be surprised if they get eaten before making it into the kitchen!

Sample of Rainbow foods to plant this Spring:

Red: red tomatoes, red peppers, beets
Orange: orange peppers, carrots, beets
Yellow: yellow tomatoes, beans, squash, peppers, corn
Green: beans, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, peas
Blue: potatoes
Purple: purple beans (which turn green when cooked), eggplant, peppers

Happy Gardening!

Debbie Togliatti has her own gardening business: Weed It and Reap: Garden Restoration and Design and is a teacher who gets young children involved in gardening and nature experiences. She lives in the Bay Area of Northern California.

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

GARDEN ESSAY


I’m back with more thrifty gardening tips.

H2O

Water is scarce – and costly – in the southwest, so I do what I can to recycle it. I keep plastic bowls in the kitchen and bathroom sinks – also in the shower – to trap the precious liquid, which I then transfer to watering cans. I used to hose down my garden twice a week. Since I’ve started the catch-it-in-a-bowl system, I’ve been able to eliminate one of the weekly hosings.

Also, I keep a pitcher of left-over coffee, which I feed to acid-loving plants. This is cheaper and more ecological than buying chemicals at the nursery. Your azaleas will thank you for that cup of Joe. Word of caution: don’t use coffee grounds – they bring nasty bugs.

Most of my soil is in the shade, so I buy huge pots on the cheap at yard sales, fill them with tomatoes, basil, and wild strawberries, and place them in a sunny spot near the garage.

LAWN-O-PHOBE

I don’t get the American obsession with green, grassy lawns. I suspect it’s based on an unconscious nostalgia for British country mansions. Maybe a big grassy plot makes sense if you live in a wet climate and have to throw tea parties for a few hundred dukes and duchesses, but most of us common folk only use our lawns when we’re mowing, watering, or fertilizing them.

Depending on where you live, between thirty and sixty percent of our water usage goes to lawn care. I wonder how many gazillion gallons of our precious H²O that adds up to. Also, lawns use more pesticide and herbicide per acre than just about any crop grown in America. We pay good money for these poisons, which are then introduced into our water supply. Plus, those gas-powered noise-polluting mowers and trimmers help deplete the ozone layer. Then there’s the esthetically: the grass lawn that used to be a symbol of aristocracy is now the image of ticky-tacky suburban conformity.

So let’s see now: grass lawns are costly, toxic, and boring. Not this baby’s idea of a bargain. If you can’t eat it, smell it, put it in a vase, or smoke it – why bother?

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

HOW DOES MY GARDEN GROW?

Gardening is a low-cost pleasure. There is something meditative about being in nature, making things grow. The only problem is, I’ve never been very good at it. I’ve even been known to plant things upside-down, with the roots swaying in the air like the audience at a rock concert.

My cousin Gordon, on the other hand, keeps a dwarf lemon tree in his sunny Connecticut dining room, and artificially inseminates the plant by pretending to be a bee: he gently rubs the center of each blossom with a cotton swab. I’ve seen bright yellow lemons on Gordon’s tree on a snowy winter’s day. To a brown-thumbed dolt like me, this is magic!

I became a more successful when we moved to L. A., because everything grows here, even for lazy incompetents like me. Our house is a rental, so I haven’t invested in serious landscaping. I just have a Hodge-podge of vegetation from various inexpensive sources.

FREE AND ALMOST/FREE

Some of my plants were cuttings or exchanges from friends. Every gardener has surplus plantings. I myself have given away enough agave to make a case of tequila. I’ve also been on the receiving end of other people’s surplus, like some heirloom tomatoes: L. A.’s trendiest veggie. And – since zero is my favorite number – I’m about to follow up on a Craig’s List ad for free bromeliads. I also got around 20 bags of free mulch on Craig’s List, which saved me a bundle.

Other plants were bought at farmer’s markets, where the prices are much lower than at the stores. I just paid seventy-five cents for a six-pack of impatience, which would have been $2.50 at the nursery.

I’D LIKE TO THANK MY AGENT

My greatest gardening triumph was my Creative Artists Agency geranium. I was walking past the CAA building in Beverly Hills, which was adorned with many bright red geraniums. One four-inch stem had broken off and was lying on the pavement. I rescued it, and stuck it in the ground when I got home. It grew into a thick, healthy shrub.

Then my landlord decided to put up a six-foot-high chain link fence along one side of the house – creating all the cozy charm of a prison yard. I cut a dozen stems from my CAA shrub, and planted them along the noxious fence. Today, what separates us from the house next door is a 6-foot-high wall of thick greenery dotted with sunny red flowers. Cost to me: nada. Plus, I have the added prestige of having the only fence in Los Angeles that is represented by the Creative Artists Agency.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Our Reusuable Bag Giveaway

Our best tips come from you, our readers. Each week during October, we will be giving away a RubbingNickels.com Reusuable Tote Bag in a random drawing. To qualify, simply share your best eco-thrifty tip with us at RubbingNickels.com.

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

The Good Garden Helps Kids Understand Hunger


The Good Garden helps kids understand world hunger and the challenging issue of food security.

Stories about poverty, famine, and food shortages are often in the news. Can one person, even one child, make a difference? A new children’s book, The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough (Kids Can Press), gives kids a way to understand these stories and learn what they can do to help. Written by author and non-profit consultant Katie Smith Milway, the book raises kids’ awareness of the important global issue of food security, one of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals to end poverty by the year 2015.

The Good Garden is the story of one poor farming family in Honduras, who, like their neighbors, cannot be sure they will have enough to eat. When a new teacher comes to town, young Maria learns new farming methods and ways to sell the crops at market that help give her family greater food security. As Maria’s neighbors see the success of her family’s “good garden”, the new practices spread through the community. The Good Garden is a fictionalized story inspired by the work of teacher Don Elías Sanchez, who devoted his life to improving the lot of small farmers in Honduras.

Seventy-five percent of the poor in developing nations are farmers like Maria and her family. Without food security, these farmers not only lack food — they also lack money for necessities such as health care and school uniforms and often become trapped in a cycle of poverty.

In addition to Maria’s story, The Good Garden includes facts about world hunger and information about non-profit organizations that help poor farmers. Kids also learn how they can make a difference by volunteering, fund-raising, creating their own gardens, and taking political action. Learn more at www.thegoodgarden.org, an interactive website built in partnership with educational nonprofit One Hen Inc.

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Great Sites to Recycle Your Stuff

You might be surprised to find out that there is actually a brewing debate over whether and how soon we will run out of space in our landfills. The debate is quite similar to the global warming debate, with the conservatives taking one side and the liberals taking the other. In the great landfill debate, environmentalist claim that the more we increase our landfill size, the more likely we will all get to have landfills in our back yards. The conservatives claim that landfill technology will save us, even as the landfills grow out of control.

I have to land in the environmentalist’s side on this one and for that reason, I have done a little research on what we can do with our extra “stuff,” so that we can decrease the volume that goes into the landfill. It is amazing how many great sites there are for recycling. Here’s a sampling of what I found in a book called The Virtuous Consumer, by Leslie Garrett. I highly recommend this book as a resource for reducing, reusing and recycling:

  • Dressforsuccess.org – Recycles gently worn business clothing, coats and briefcases.

  • Wildize.org – Collects hiking boots through their Boots for Rangers program for African rangers who patrol park boundaries and wilderness areas.

  • Nikereuseashoe.com – Turns your old running shoes (they can be gross and nasty, even!) into athletic surfaces.

  • Worldcomputerexchange.org – Recycle your PC to be used in a school in a third world country.

  • Suitcasesforkids.org – This site helps give foster kids a place to keep their stuff as they move from place to place.

  • Lions International – Donate your used adult and kid’s eyeglasses for use in third world countries.

Darcy Ratner and Julie Arnheim
Rubbingnickels.com

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Plant Some Sunflowers!

Sunflowers!

They can be tall, short, or in between, yellow, orange or red, ornamental or edible. It’s a summer favorite of young and old alike and hopefully there’s room in your garden for at least one helianthus annuus, more commonly known as the sunflower.

Sunflowers are easy to grow to from seed. Simply sow them directly into the soil where you want them to grow. Give them rich soil, ample water and with plenty of sunshine, they’ll do the rest. If you don’t want to go the seed route, many nurseries offer sunflower seedlings, some already in bud.

Sunflowers can be categorized by ornamental types or those with edible seeds. Ornamentals, those best suited for cutting, are generally more compact and branching with a wide range of colors and names: Lemon Eclair, Prado Red, Velvet Queen and Cinnamon are just a few available for the home garden.

When selecting flowers for cutting, choose blooms that are barely showing any color as these will last longer. Cut the stem at a 45 degree angle anywhere between 1 and 1 1/2 feet from under the flower head. Immediately place in a vase of water. Once cut, sunflowers can last in water from 6 to 12 days providing the water is replaced every 3 days and the water level kept full.

The giant sunflowers, aptly named Mammoth, grow from a single stalk with big faces of golden yellow petals, brown centers and gray and white striped seeds. To harvest the seeds, wait until the petals drop and the seed kernels swell. Preserving the flower head is crucial: provide some kind of covering around the head such as a mesh or paper bag so the birds and squirrels don’t make off with the seeds! Cut the stalk at the base when the seeds have a hard shell. Let the seeds completely dry before eating or using in a bird feeder.

Debra Togliatti has her own gardening business: Weed It and Reap: Garden Restoration and Design and is a teacher who gets young children involved in gardening and nature experiences. She lives in the Bay Area of Northern California.

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Get “Eco-thrifty” With Your Water Consumption

Do you like to take long showers and run the faucet while you brush your teeth or do dishes? If so, you might need to take a look at your Household Water Consumption. Water consumption isn’t just about YOU, it’s about the Earth’s fresh water supply. In California, for example, we’ve had an extremely wet Winter and Spring, but that doesn’t mean we should let up on our diligence about water use. You never know. Next year could start another 7-year drought so it’s always good to keep our reservoirs as full as we can.

If you’re willing to take a good look at your water use, the CSG Network’s website has a handy water usage calculator. It is designed to give information about where and how much water we use. It will help you track your water use both outdoors and in by asking questions like “how many daily showers are taken”, “how long are the showers”, “how many times a week is the lawn watered” and “for how long”. If this tool does nothing else, hopefully, it will increase your awareness of the patterns of water usage in your home so that you can begin to implement some cutbacks.

Once you get motivated to cut back, Save20gallons.org is a great site to visit for tips on decreasing water use. Don’t forget that decreasing your water usage, especially those long showers, can help save money on your utility bills as well. We hope you learn something and save some money. Let us know what you find out about your household water consumption.

Darcy Ratner and Julie Arnheim
Founders, Rubbingnickels.com

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Grow Your Own Lettuce for Fresh Summer Salads

I’m not much of a gardener (I’ve been accused of having a black thumb) but I’ve been tempted lately to get the family involved as the price of my favorite organic lettuces gets higher and higher. It’s clear that growing your own vegetables is one of the best ways to save money on your grocery bill but what about the opportunity cost of spending time in the garden? There are two answers to this question. The first is that there are reasons to garden other than saving money. The feeling of fulfillment that you and your children can get by growing your own food is wonderful. The answer to the time issue is that I’ve searched the internet for small gardening projects that are very low maintenance and take a small amount of effort to get them going. This “lettuce in a planter box” is the perfect project to help you find out if you have a green or a black thumb. :)

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Do a Household Plastic Purge!

After a recent storm in Los Angeles County, it was estimated that at least 2.3 billion individual pieces of trash floated out into the Pacific. I read about this in an article in Sierra Club magazine that talked about the “flotillas” of plastic and trash that are currently floating in the Pacific Ocean and how they are killing the sea life and polluting our oceans and beaches. As consumers, we can help remedy this situation, family by family. Here are five Eco-thrifty ideas that you can incorporate into your household to help decrease your contribution to the trash “flotillas”.

Plastic Water Bottles – JUST SAY NO to plastic one-time-use water bottles. It does take water to clean the reusable bottles but if you have a filter on your fridge or a Britta filter pitcher, the water you drink will be perfectly safe and taste great. This will also save you a lot of money.

Laundry Soap – Consider going back to a traditional powder laundry detergent. Tide HE Detergent is a highly rated powder and works in the new front-loader machines. You can recycle the cardboard box which is already made from post-consumer cardboard.

Plastic baggies and zip-style food storage – In our house, we try our hardest to use a tupperware or other reusable container to store leftovers and or freeze foods. For packed lunches, we use gladware rather than baggies whenever we can for sandwiches and snacks. Reach for the reusable first and save money!

Plastic Milk Cartons and Bottles – When we lived in Colorado we had a milk delivery service that brought milk in old fashioned glass bottles once a week. What a treat! No plastic coated cartons or plastic gallon bottles were being used to provide our milk. If you can get a service like this in your area, give it a try! The bottles are completely reusable.

Plastic bags in the produce section – Once again, JUST SAY NO to these bags. They are a complete waste! Do you really care if your produce gets mixed up in the bottom of your grocery bag? If you are completely addicted to these bags, you can re-used them many, many times if you pop them into the bottom of your reusable grocery bags after you unpack your groceries.

Keep cutting back on the plastic and the world will be a better place…

Darcy Ratner
Rubbingnickels.com

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,
about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.
123Next » (29 total posts)