It's Easy Being Green

I’m not sure whether it’s the hot summer nights or the copious amounts of backyard barbecues happening about now but I sure have noticed both possums and raccoons out on the prowl late at night. In fact, I almost ran over two raccoons who were fully engaged in trash can debauchery when I was coming home the other night.

If you’re experiencing nightly raids on your trash cans, you can tell what kind of thief your dealing with by looking at the leftovers. Dogs knock cans over and rip into bags to get at the delights rotting away inside and they’ll strew the mess everywhere. Possums tend to leave a trail of half-eaten food as they picked through what they wanted and munch on it while walking away with their take.

Opossums will leave a trail of food behind them after making a raid on your garden or trash can.

The most cunning trash thief of them all is probably the raccoon. The smart nighttime prowlers can carefully let themselves into trash cans. They’re known to pick through the garbage, pick out what they want, clean it off and then dine on their new found smorgasbord.

Raccoons are smart and nimble. They can make well-thought out raids on your garbage.

So how can you go about protecting yourselves from those trash thieves without trapping them or poisoning them(both terrible options if you ask me)? If you have the money to buy yourself predator proof trash cans, that’s a fantastic way to go but one household chemical also apparently acts as a pretty good trash thief deterrent: ammonia. Just put a teaspoonful in your garbage can and maybe even some in the bag of trash before you tie it up. Also sprinkle some around the base of your trash cans. Those late night thieves will come across the ammonia and won’t be too excited about what might await them inside.

Let us know if you have any tips on how you’ve been able to ward off late night trash thieves or what your experience has been with the four-pawed, neighborhood crooks.

Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s already coming up on mid-August but there is still plenty to do out in the yard. This week my Mammoth Sunflowers started blooming, so there is now an array of happy faces greeting us all around the back of the house. Many of them have reached 8 feet or taller and continue to grow even taller with each passing day.

One of our many Mammoth Sunflowers that started blooming this week has a special resident. If you look closely at the bottom of the bloom, you'll see a Praying Mantis waiting in the shadows.

Now that they’re blooming, I can start my bee survey. It’s all part of the Great Sunflower Project run by Gretchen LeBuhn at San Francisco State University. The project was started to help understand the challenges that one of our most important pollinators, bees, are now facing. After all, scientists say every third bite of food you take is the result of bees doing their good work.

A Bumblebee makes his way around the blooming sunflower, collecting pollen.

I set myself up in my lawn chair this morning, grabbed a cup of coffee and sat and observed one of my sunflowers for a few minutes to see how long it took for 5 bees to visit one bloom. The maximum wait time allowed by the study is 30 minutes but I didn’t even get close to that amount. As it turns out, just six minutes into my sunflower observation I had reached 5 bees visiting and happily pollinating.

That’s good news! Not only do the bees pollinate the flowers but also the bountiful harvest growing in our own backyard vegetable garden. I’m hoping just a few minutes spent helping their research will help develop some solutions to dwindling bee populations. While small, they’re so important to our life.

I’ve even considered doing some home beekeeping at some point in time. My yard is way to small to even think about it now but in the future when I have a few acres under my belt, I’m hoping I can get some hives going.

If you’re interested in learning more about The Great Sunflower Project or want to know how to conduct your own bee survey, just click that link and head to their website.

Happy pollinators hard at work on a Mammoth Sunflower

Popularity: 6% [?]

We’ve had a lot of rain here in the Midwest this summer.  Because of that, there have been some continuously standing pools of stagnant water which of course, breed those pesky mosquitoes we so fondly hate when we’re outdoors.  Getting rid of the pests is very simple though and doesn’t require the harmful spraying of chemicals.

First, take a survey of your property.  Look for any type of container that could hold water (either from your sprinklers or from rainfall) and make sure you dump it out and store it upside down.  Water bowls for pets are a common breeding ground for mosquito larvae but if you dump it out ever day and re-fill it, you shouldn’t have a problem.  Make sure items like open-topped water barrels have a fine mesh screen on top that mosquitoes can’t penetrate.  Get rid of old tires laying around your property and fix any drainage issues you might have that are causing standing pools of water on your property.

Secondly, install a bat house either on your home, barn or some other outbuilding on your property.  A single bat can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes in one night!  That’s a pretty amazing and effective control without the use of any type of chemical!

There is a duck pond behind our house but every night we hear bats chirping late into the night.  Consequently, we don’t have a mosquito problem when we go out and enjoy the cool night air on our back deck.

For more information on how to build an approved Bat House, head over to the Batcon website.

Popularity: 3% [?]

My two zuchinni plants have grown to encompass probably about four square feet of garden space a piece now and are popping out some whoppers!  The zuchinni plants really seem to suck up all the rain water they get which in turn produces some that look like they’re vying for world domination.

This week's harvest from the backyard zuchinni plants

This picture shows this week’s total take.  We’ve been eating a lot zuchinni and are skulking around for some more recipes.  Usually we just saute it up with some butter, herbs and wine and eat as a side dish.  I know I’ve seen recipes for stuffed zuchinni that looked pretty good so I guess I need to go track that down again.

Do you have any great zuchinni recipes?  What do you currently have a bumper crop of in your garden?

Popularity: 2% [?]

This Memorial Day of course marks the beginning of Summer and what better way to celebrate the season than to fire up your grill, right?  Well for me anyway, it’s my preferred method of cooking when it heats up.

Grilling has it’s benefits, especially when it comes to trying to keep your home cool during the Summer months.  By cooking outside, you’ll reduce the heat output of your kitchen which of course will make your air conditioner run harder trying to keep you comfortable.  It will keep your cooling bill lower and easier on your pocketbook.

While grilling over propane is the cleanest burning way to cook up some food on the “barbie”, I’m a charcoal purist.  I like the tast charcoal provides that I just can’t get on a gas grill.  I used to exclusively use charcoal briquettes until I ran across a produce that I think is a little more natural: lump charcoal.

You may have noticed lump charcoal is popping up in more and more stores.  My local Schnuck’s recently introduced their house brand of lump charcoal called “Full Circle” and bill it as a natural product.  Most lump charcoal is pure, unadulterated wood scraps that are fired at high temperatures to develop the char.  That’s it!  Nothing else is added.  Lump charcoal burns cleaner than briquettes and hotter.  Sometimes it can be more expensive than briquettes and not burn as uniformly or long.

Charcoal briquettes however are a different story.  They’re made from charred wood as well but are pulverized and compressed with saw dust, borax, starch, sodium nitrate and limestone.  For more on what each of those fillers do, click here.  If you begin grilling before the briquettes are ashy, it’s possible they can release a chemical type flavor into your food.  The added chemicals, while claimed to be unharmful, are enough to drive me to use just natural lump charcoal.

So what if you currently have a charcoal grill and you’d like to reduce your emissions by grilling with a cleaner fuel?  You might just run out and buy a brand new gas grill but that of course is wasteful thinking.  I just ran across an interesting new product on the net that could be the way to convert your old charcoal grill, to a lean, green grilling machine.

The Flame Disk is billed as a "clean burning" fuel to use in your charcoal grill.

The manufacturer says the product is made from 100% ethanol, a renewable biofuel made from corn.  They also claim that the emissions include a small percentage of carbon dioxide (less than charcoal) but is mostly made up of water.  Plus they say it’s as easy as peel, light and grill.  This seems like a great idea to me and would be willing to try it out sometime, especially on a camping trip when fumbling with a bag of charcoal and lighter fluid might be a total pain.

What’s your view on grilling?  How do you make your experience more eco-friendly?  Share your comments with our other readers!