Beehive Water Butts Sale
August 26, 2008 by Matt
Filed under Blog, Saving Water
Beehive Water Butts blend into the garden beautifully – and they’re on sale here: £59.00
Water butts are environmentally friendly and save you money – but sometimes they can be unsightly. This 150L capacity beehive style water butt is different. It’s made from terraccina, a resin material that looks frighteningly like clay, so it will blend in beautifully with your home or garden. Complete with tap and lid (which includes an indented cutting mark for those wishing to slot a down-pipe directly into the top).
Dimensions: 150L capacity, 58 cm X 78cm
Please note: The matching Terraccina Stand is sold separately. Click to view the Terraccina Water Butt Stand.
On Sale! £59.00 CLICK TO BUY
Bokashi for quicker composting
Want to compost ALL your organic kitchen waste fast? Try a bokashi bin for quicker composting, plus get all the added benefits while you’re at it.
Sound familiar? I’d love to recycle my food scraps, but my garden’s too small for a compost heap… or, I haven’t got time to sort through what I can and can’t compost, so my food waste ends up in the rubbish bin.
Recycling ALL your food waste quickly – it can be done
Composting organic kitchen waste (plate scrapings and the rest) especially when you only have a small garden is not easy, but it is possible. One solution is to purée your scraps in a blender each day and bury the pulp in the garden. It will compost and it won’t attract pests, but it will take months to break down.
I’ve tried lots of different composting contraptions developed for home gardeners and I’ve found that indoor compost buckets don’t really work. A composter needs to be big enough to generate the required heat. Without this critical mass, stuff just becomes slimy and smelly and instead of rotting down, it just rots. Worm bin devices work well, but only for plant-based scraps, and they take up more room than a lot of people would like.
A simple composting system from Japan comes to the rescue
Thankfully, a composting system developed in Japan means you can now recycle all your organic kitchen waste including dairy, meat and cooked foods. The process uses bokashi bran, wheat bran that has been inoculated with effective micro-organisms (EM). EMs contain good bacteria that help ferment the organic material and transform food waste into rich compost in just 4 to 6 weeks.
Bokashi composting works much faster than ordinary composting. The bokashi bran helps to pickle the organic material and speedily break it down into enzymes and amino acids, which plant roots love. The fermentation period takes about two weeks, and the composting stage takes about a month. That’s why bokashi bins are usually sold in sets of 2; it takes the average household about 2 weeks to fill one bucket, so while one is being filled, the other can be fermenting.
Using the bokashi bin system
The system is very straightforward and if adopted will quickly become part of your kitchen routine. Simply put your non-liquid food scraps into the bucket and sprinkle one handful of bokashi bran to every 3 to 4 centimetres of waste. Press the mass down lightly and reseal the container. The mixture will produce a liquid by-product called bokashi juice, which should be drained using the tap at the base of the unit. Repeat this layering process until the bucket is full, then leave it stand for 2 weeks to ferment, but make sure you regularly drain off any excess juice.
Once the first load is ‘cooked’, the waste will smell like sweet pickle and can be directly buried in the garden, or in a large container of soil (at least a cubic metre), or, if you have one, tipped on the compost heap.
After about 4 to 6 weeks the bokashi waste will be unrecognisable; the waste will have converted to a rich compost, perhaps with the odd avocado stone or piece of bone still detectable. You can now plant straight into it, or move the compost to other parts of the garden. See Bokashi and your garden for more information.
Satisfaction guaranteed – especially if you’re a plant
The beneficial microbes present in bokashi compost go to work as a nutritious soil conditioner encouraging healthy plant growth, whilst bokashi juice can be used as a liquid fertiliser for plants indoors and out (simply dilute it with water), or used as a probiotic cleanser and poured down the sink to keep the pipes clean.
The bokashi bin system fits perfectly into your low-impact lifestyle. You can vastly reduce the amount of waste you put out for the dustmen, and at the same time, quickly produce bokashi-enriched compost to give your garden a boost.
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10 must-haves for the low-impact home
August 12, 2008 by Matt
Filed under Low-Impact Living
Transform your home’s green credentials in a single weekend. Our list of 10 must-haves for your low-impact lifestyle covers essentials from washing lines to compost bins.
1. Washing Line
A washing line can make a huge difference to your home energy requirements. Tumble driers are massive consumers of electricity, so whenever the weather allows, dry your clothes on a line outside.
A retractable washing line takes up very little space and is a convenient option for a smaller garden or courtyard. Portable clotheslines are ideal for drying clothes outside in the summer months and inside in colder periods. For low-impact drying on wet days, you might also consider putting up a permanent drying rack in a room in the house. ecowashinglines.co.uk have lots of good quality options.
There are also options if you live in a flat and have no garden or balcony. Apartments all over Spain and Italy use wall-mounted pulley washing lines and you can easily make your own from a couple of wall-mounted pulleys and a length of washing line. You can buy washing line pulleys from most hardware stores and ironmongers, or online from Avenue Supplies. Alternatively, Robert Dyas has a good range of drying lines including Barbantia washing lines and Vileda retractable washing lines. Australian company, Austral Washing Lines, have just released the Retractaway 40 retractable washing line, which comes highly recommended and makes the most of any garden space that you have, or equally, it can be mounted between two indoor walls.
Read leangreenhome’s Retractable Washing Line Reviews.
2. Compost Bin
Making your own garden compost is an easy and very satisfying way to help the environment, and enrich your garden’s soil while you’re at it. There are many different types of compost bin on the market from plastic bins (often available at subsidised rates from local councils, or cut-price from the Recycle Now scheme) to more attractive wooden bins, or alternatively, you could build your own.
3. Bokashi Bin
Some household waste can’t go straight on the compost heap. But now, meat, fish, dairy scraps and cooked food, which might otherwise attract pests, can all be safely composted using a Bokashi Kitchen Composter. This is great news when, according to research carried out by Wrap (Waste & Resources Action Programme), a third of the food we buy ends up in landfill, producing methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Have a look at our ‘Bokashi Explained’ page to find out more.
4. Wormery
Worm bins quickly turn organic kitchen waste like old banana peels and egg shells into worm castings; wholesome and clean-smelling compost. For convenience you can keep the wormery in the garage or outside the back door, add your organic kitchen scraps and the wrigglers housed within will keep working for you all year round. Find out more about Wormery Composting.
5. Water Butt
To reduce the demand for piped and purified water, rainwater can be collected in water butts – large containers – fitted to your gutter’s downpipes around the outside of your house. The water can be used to water plants or wash the car. Water prices are set to increase significantly over the next decade, so the message is simple: save water, save money.
6. Energy-saving light bulbs
Save the planet and your wallet by replacing standard incandescent light bulbs with low-energy compact fluorescent bulbs. Energy-efficient light bulbs use 80% less electricity than standard light bulbs, last between 6 and 15 times longer and now come in a range of shapes and sizes.
8. Curtains
Windows, even if double-glazed and draft-proofed can contribute to up to 20% of the total heat loss from your home. Hanging good quality curtains that fit snugly to walls and keeping them closed when the heating is on, could help reduce heat loss by up to a third.
9. Wireless Power Meter
This clever little device is the only ‘gadget’ in this list and that’s because it really helps you think about and reduce your energy consumption. Wireless power meters, or smart meters visually display actual energy consumption in the home in terms of pence per hour. You can see exactly how much energy you’re using in real time. Boil the kettle or turn on the oven and watch the reading rise, turn the plasma telly off at the plug and watch it dive. Simply having this information to hand is a real motivator and can help you make some big energy savings.
10. Grow Your Own
Forget bags of limp salad selections, a great way to help the environment and your wallet is to harvest fresh leaves from your own garden all throughout the growing season. Rocket Garden supply a range of ‘grow your own’ salad and vegetable solutions to suit your needs and available space. Their Instant Salad Garden, for example, contains 155 young salad plants, ready to grow. You’ll need around 6-10m2 of space and a few hours to plant them all up. If you don’t have much outside space, however, you could take a look at their Instant Windowbox.
10. Earth-Friendly Cleaning Products
Using eco-friendly and natural cleaning and laundry products is a great way to help minimise your home’s environmental impact. Method, a San Francisco based company produce some of the world’s best green cleaning products including all purpose sprays, polishes, stainless steel cleaners and glass cleaners. We can recommend them because we use them everyday, and unlike some, they really work. Method All Purpose Spray, for example, is a powerful surface cleaner which works by absorbing dirt rather than chemically breaking it down. It comes in Lavender and Go Naked (fragrance free) and is sold in a 100% recycled and recyclable plastic bottle. Method’s products don’t contain parabens, phthalates, animal by-products or triclosan, and Method do not test on animals.
