Archive for the 'Greenery' Category

Shower, downpour, or drizzle?

Friday, March 12th, 2010

I’d seen a number of adverts for aerated showers. The idea’s simple – just replace your existing showerhead (a five second swap) and you can significantly reduce your water consumption every time you shower. The claim is that aerated showers give the same ‘feel’, but use much less water. For around £20, it seemed a [...]

Digging for victory

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Inspired partly by the Transition Town meeting last night – but more so by the lovely spring weather – we decided it was time to start turning the gravel bed at the back of the house into four productive raised beds for growing veggies. But what would we find under the stones? had the previous [...]

Kendal – Transition Town no. 271(-ish)

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

At a public meeting last night, Kendal was formally announced as the latest Transition Town (there are apparently around 270). South Lakes Action on Climate Change, a local pressure group, announced they had successfully passed the audit to achieve TT status. The town mayor and local MP were there to add their congratulations.
TT’s grew as [...]

Wanted – a tea cosy for our house

Monday, March 1st, 2010

We bought our new house in January with the intention of ‘greening’ it as a retirement project. We’d been reading resources such as the Green Building Magazine, the Green Building Bible, T-Zero, the Energy Saving Trust, etc. High on the list was improving the insulation of the walls. The house was built in the 1920s, [...]

The Ecologist – Green and now forgotten

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

I’ve just finished reading the last edition of The Ecologist magazine, which is now continuing as a website only. From time to time the magazine hit the spot with a piece of solid investigative journalism. However, most months I skimmed through it out of a sense of duty rather than out of enjoyment. It invariably [...]

Heroes and Zeroes

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

An interesting article in The Guardian today prompted me to draw up this little quiz. Each Ethical Hero in the left hand column has ended up selling out – literally if not figuratively – to a Corporate Zero in the right hand column. Can you match the correct pairs?

Ethical Heroes
Corporate Zeroes

a. Ben and Jerry’s
1. Cadbury [...]

Green is Good – is Good Green?

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

By carefully monitoring how we use electricity in the house, we’ve got our consumption down to around 550W average over the year (down from a peak of 1.75kW five years ago). With our urban location, generating our own power isn’t an option, so after shopping around the ‘green’ credentials of the various companies, we were [...]