BiG TeA PaRtY Sustainable Living

BiG TeA PaRtY is back from our 2010 “Vegetable Awareness Campaign” at Playa Del Fuego. Check back next week for our report and photo essay. For now, take a look at last year’s event:

BiG TeA PaRtY Sustainable Living at Playa del Fuego, Odessa Delaware — Spring 2009

Posted by Elizabeth Fiend

Enjoy some photos of our event, a tea party for 150 people featuring tea that BiG TeA PaRtY’s host Elizabeth Fiend made from herbs she grew in her garden.  Read some of the sustainable tips that BiG TeA PaRtY editor VaLerie K, BiG TeA PaRtY music/sound designer Allen Fiend, and fellow campers Susan and Chip promoted at our Sustainable Living Camp.

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Natural Pest Control:

Keep Mice Away Without Cruelty

by VaLerie K

Got mice?  If, like me, you are not happy with the idea of killing or maiming mice to get them to vacate the premises, or if you are more callous and just don’t like the risk of them dying in your walls and stinking up the joint, I am thrilled to tell you that there is another way. 

Peppermint oil - an essential oil, meaning it contains the essence of peppermint leaves - is reputed to be utterly repugnant to mice.  Lore has it that in the essential oil form, it is too powerful for their sensitive noses.  Whatever the case, there are loads of testimonials out there from people who claim to have used this method with great success in garages, kitchens, basements and boudoirs, so I was eager to give it a try. 

Though I have not found an actual scientific article on using peppermint oil to repel mice, when I went to buy peppermint oil from my local natural foods store, and mentioned somewhat sheepishly why I was buying it, the saleswoman said, “Oh we sell more of it for that reason than anything else!”  And peppermint oil does garner a list of health benefit claims as well as the breath-freshening qualities we have all come to know.

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HOW TO SNEEZE

A Public Service Announcement By Elizabeth Fiend

If you have advance notice: Sneeze in to a tissue and discard it in the trash immediately.

If there’s no time to grab a tissue – Sneeze into your elbow. You heard it right, the correct place to sneeze is in the nook of your elbow.

The worst possible place to sneeze is into your hand. When you sneeze into your hand your hand gets covered with germs, then everything you touch becomes germy and the germs spread to other people.

Sneezing straight out into the air — just plain rude.

DON’T BE A JERK, SNEEZE INTO YOUR ELBOW.

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Quick Tip: Make Your Own ‘Enhanced Water’  by VaLerie K

Now that it’s summer where I live and the sun’s rays are steeper so we sweat and lose fluids, it’s more important than ever to drink plenty of water each day.  There is really no substitute, all the sugar and added ingredients in enhanced waters do NOT provide extra benefits that you can’t get from basic H2O (and you know soda is a terrible thing to drink, regular or diet, right?  If not, click HERE and HERE). 

Plus you can probably save yourself some cash (water may not be free, but it’s still relatively cheap, especially if you filter your own water at home).

But wait, I have a confession to make.  I drink a lot of the stuff, but even to me, sometimes water seems kinda boring.  Maybe these tricks I’m about to share will help you discover a latent love for the liquid of life, or like me you will enjoy the variety and have renewed zest for drinking good ole WATER.

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Compost your Kitchen Scraps
Posted by VaLerie K

Save your uncooked food scraps and turn them into super-effective plant food. Reduce your garbage load… why toss all that good stuff that is nutritious for the earth into a plastic bag that ends up in a landfill?  Biodegradable garbage is still just trash if it’s busy biodegrading inside a plastic bag, stuffed between a styrofoam cup and a ball of aluminum foil.

If you don’t have a garden in your yard, find a local community garden and donate your compost.  They’ll love you for it (and maybe even slide you some tomatoes when they’re ripe.)

Here’s the video by BiG TeA PaRtY Sustainable Living that outlines the composting process, followed by written step-by-step instructions. Host Elizabeth Fiend tells you what you can and can’t recycle in your compost pile and how to start one.

Composting —Nature’s Way of Recycling
A How-To written by ELIZABETH FIEND

We need to reduce the amount of garbage we create. Most household garbage is burned, which creates air pollution, or dumped into landfills which produce toxic gases. Obviously neither way is good for the environment. By composting leaves, grass clippings, and kitchen scraps you can greatly reduce the amount of trash your household makes.

Composting is a natural form of recycling where plant matter is turned into a soil-like material that’s full of nutrients and very beneficial to your backyard soil and garden plants. Insects, earthworms, bacteria and fungi help out in the process. But it’s up to you to get it started!

Starting a Compost Pile:

INSIDE:
1.) Begin in the kitchen by saving uncooked food scraps like carrot tops, lettuce cores and banana peels. Coffee grinds, tea bags and egg shells can also be saved. NO cooked food, meat or dairy products should be added to the compost pile.
2.) Store the scraps in a lidded container or small bucket you keep in easy reach of the cutting board.

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Reduce Your Staple Use  By VaLerie K

Staples - so tiny, so innocuous, so ubiquitous.  Who would think they are a big planetary pollution culprit?  But they are. 

According to Practical Environmentalist website, common office staples “gobble up energy at every step of their production and use”.  The ore to make the galvanized steel has to be mined, transported, smelted to form staples one at a time, the staples are re-heated and coated with a layer of zinc, cooled and assembled into stacks, packaged, transported again to be sold in stores, many are thrown out during use (I don’t know about you, but for every successful staple, I often blow through a couple that don’t work out), and on top of all that they put a strain on the paper recycling stream by jamming machinery and necessitating industrial magnets and screening filters to get the little buggers outta there, and after they are removed they are too tiny to recycle so they end up in a landfill anyhow.  SHEESH!

…Solutions?

There are commercial ’staple free staples’ out there, which punch a hole through the pages and fold back the punched-out bit at the same time - a brilliant idea.  But I’ll do you one better.  I learned a ridiculously simple technique when I was little (I must have had a hippie teacher way ahead of her time).

1.  Fold back the corner of your stack of papers to form a triangle, like so:

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Inspired by Earth Day? Start riding your bike.

Worried about flat tires? There’s a great tip in this video

by BiG TeA PaRtY

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SUSTAINABLE LIVING TiP: Put a Lid On It.

Save Energy When Cooking

When cooking soup, stew or boiling water for pasta or rice put a lid on that pan.
By keeping the heat in you’ll use less energy to cook your food.
Bonus: you’ll get to eat sooner. Love, Elizabeth Fiend

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Recycling Tip: T.P. Rolls are Recyclable!

or: Sometimes it’s good to sweat the small stuff

by VaLerie K

I have noticed a peculiar thing when I’m visiting friends’ houses and I use their bathrooms.  I keep seeing the empty toilet paper roll in the trash.  And these are environmentally conscious people, who recycle, try to conserve water, seal their windows in the winter… all that good stuff. 

I’m guessing it’s a slight case of recycling burn-out, mixed with a subconscious yen for the bathroom to be the last bastion of convenience and comfort.  Somehow, when you’re sitting on the can and it’s time to unwrap a new roll and remove the old roll,  it just seems like a little bit too much effort to put aside the empty roll to take downstairs to the recycling bin.  You recycle everything else, what’s a little squashable roll of thin cardboard matter?  I get it.  Every now and then, we all get tired of being so diligent.  Suddenly, something so easy feels like way too much to bother with.

But think about it.  I myself go through almost a roll per week, so let’s round that off to 50 per year.  There are about 20 houses on my block, so the whole block probably uses up at least 1,000 rolls a year, probably more because houses with families would use more, and that’s just one block.  I don’t know how many households there are in Philadelphia, but you can see where I’m going with this.  Try imagining how high the rolls from Pennsylvania alone would go if you placed them end to end - to the moon?  to the sun?  Ok, ok, I have no idea, but just imagining a pile of 1,000 + rolls at the end of my block is enough of a deterrent for me

So that’s it, that’s my big little tip: put your empty T.P. rolls in the recycling bin, it really does add up.

Or…….

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