SECONDHAND NATION

37 Green Things To Do In Spring

 

1.  Pee into your compost bin.

2.  Walk around neighborhood and pick up all the recyclable trash revealed by melting snow.

3.  Start bean plants in half cartons of milk.

4.  Hang laundry on the line.

5.  Fill the air in the tires of your bicycle.

6.  Cruise college campus dumpsters for furniture and other cast-offs ditched by whimsical collegiates.

7.  Make home-made iced tea.

8.  Eat asparagus.

9.  Have kids wash the cars with hot water and soap in buckets.

10. Host a cook-out in the backyard (easier than cooking and great before the mosquitoes get really thick!)

11.  Pull out all your winter clothes you haven't worn all season and donate them.

12.  Wash all the rugs in your house and hang them out on the line.

13.  Plan a butterfly garden.

14.  Pick up dog poo and see if you and your dog-loving neighbors would want to make a doggie composter.

15.  Turn off the television and sit outside after dinner.

16.  Change your winter bedding to lighter blankets.

17.  Dust off the ceiling fans

18.  Clean out your coffee pot with vinegar.

19.  Make a bat house.

20.  Make home-made blowing bubbles.

21.  Wash and donate all winter gear your children have outgrown (boots, jackets, caps, mittens)

22.  Buy some sunblock and a sun-hat.

23.  Clean out and install (or buy!) a rainbarrel.

24.  Ask your city or community to improve recycling services.

25.  Find a park near you and acquaint yourself with its hours, amenities and programs.

26.  Get out your hammock.

27.  Bring your yard waste to a compost site.

28.  Collect dryer lint and leave it in the yard for nesting birds to use.

29.  Use the e-File option when you file your taxes.

30.  Join a CSA (find one in your area here).

31.  Look up farmers' markets near you to see their opening dates.

32.  Replace one car trip with a walk or a bike ride and see how you like it.

33.  Wash all your sheets with borax and line-dry them for that lovely sun-dried scent.

34.  Plan one energy free meal per week:  sandwiches, wraps, salads, anything that tastes great and doesn't need heating, grilling, baking, or frying.

35.  Make your own exfoliating scrub to scour off all that dry winter skin.  This can be as easy as using regular sugar or as complicated as some of these recipes at Craft Gossip

36.  Download and make this cool egg design felt book for an Easter gift for kids in your life.  

37.  Sit outside for 30 minutes a day doing nothing but soaking up the Vitamin D and thinking about how long you've waited for winter to end.  

Image via Library of Congress.  

Reader Requests: Spring Fever Edition

It's hitting 30 degrees here in Minnesota.  Which means I'm infected with spring fever and am fitting to burn all my wretched foul weather gear in a witches' pyre on my front lawn. 

A couple of requests, though.  Send me an email or leave a comment about any of the following:

Seed Starters!  I'm extremely interested in hearing from people who are starting seeds indoors.  What's your process and methods?  What kinds of plants do you start indoors?  What equipment do you use, if any?  And what have been the results?

Home Yogurt Makers!  Bring it!  Which model do you use?  Do you use an appliance or a different set of equipment?  Any recipes you'd like to share?

Thrifters!  What's the best thing you've ever bought secondhand? Send me the story of the item and photos if you've got them.

Thanks in advance!

Make Your Own! Laundry Soap

I used to buy Mrs. Meyers Clean Day liquid laundry detergent.  I thought it was superior because of the delicious essential oil scents.  Then I realized:  this shit is 11 bucks a bottle! Boo Hiss!

And it's a plastic bottle!  Double Boo Hiss!

So I went to my best homechickens over at Recipezaar, thinking that someone would have a good home-made recipe for laundry soap.  Sho' nuff. 

The ingredients are things you can find a decent grocery store and perhaps Target or K-Mart.  (Please don't go to Wal-Mart.  It's bad for your complexion.) 

I did a bit of experimenting and augmented this recipe.  I used a mixture of Fels-Naptha and Kirk's Castile for the shredded soap flakes, which is a gorgeous bright yellow and white blend.

You can also add essential oils of your choice, but this is sorta wasteful, as the fragrance doesn't last through the washing cycle, which is the edge that expensivo brands like Mrs. Meyers and Caldrea offer.  They've got chemists doing a whole lotta fancy footwork to preserve those lovely scents, so they can  hype up how pleasant housework ("homekeeping") can be if everything smells like lemon verbena. 

For my money, I'd just rub the damn oils on my pulse points and then go do housework.  This way, I can experience transportingly sensual olfactory effects whether I'm on my hands and knees scrubbing the toilet or splayed out on the sofa reading back issues of Life & Style Weekly.

I used a grater I bought at a church rummage sale for a quarter, but you can surely save time with a food processor.  Break the soap up into a little chunks so you don't destroy the machine's blades.

    

For larger or really dirty loads, you'll need more than a tablespoon of this detergent;  I've found a quarter cup works nicely in these cases. 

More on MYO laundry soap:

The Simple Dollar

Groovy Green

Modern Cottage

The Frugal Shopper

Consumer Disobedience

MAKE zine

The Family Homestead

Instructables Homemade Laundry Detergent

Make Your Own: Hydrating Mist for Your Hair

Figure 1:  Not at all what I remotely look like, especially after the past three days of rain. 

If you're still using a wall-mounted telephone with a cord and have a computer as big as a washing machine, you might not be familiar with top-blog She Finds, which is a breathless, shopping-crazed consumer-driven blog that helps females (and fashion-minded males) by high-lighting must-have products and trends on the web. 

Finally! you might be thinking, as you step into your stone underwear.  I can't be expected to do all that shit myself!

But if you're like me and strive to reduce all the packaging waste you can, you'll see that their latest "Eco-Find" is just more bullshit - should you have the non-oily genetics or live somewhere that requires you to hydrate your hair, it's possible to MAKE YOUR OWN hair-hydrating spray that will cost much less than $16.

To wit: 

Step One:  Boil up a gallon of water.  Or buy a gallon of distilled water.  Or use the water you filter into a pitcher.  Whatever.

Step Two:  Add like 10 drops of lavender essential oil to the water. 

Step Three:  Put mixture into a clean spray bottle.    The End.

Jesus.  Life doesn't have to be this hard.  Further, I don't know why anyone would want to hydrate their hair.  I personally own a mane that foofs up to the size of a hot air balloon with the slightest change in the dewpoint.  If I hydrated it, I'd look like fucken Yahoo Serious and wouldn't be able to get through my front door. 

Image via Wikipedia.

Make Your Own! The Story of Crackers

Since I read Michael Pollan's book, every time I go to the grocery store, I view the aisles as great stacks of corn destined to give me fat rolls and diabetes.  It enrages me how little of the food proffered in grocery stores is worth one goddamn. 

Last week I got annoyed with the fact that I am not skilled enough yet to disconnect from the industrial food chain.  Like crackers, for example.  I don't know how to make them  My kid likes to eat crackers, on occasion.  And this is still America, why shouldn't she eat some goddamn crackers, right?  I figured it was time to get off my duff and learn how to make them.   

Crackers evolved from Hardtack which evolved from Ships Biscuits.  Ships biscuits were terrible, nearly inedible cakes of meal designed to survive a long sea voyage.  Well, that doesn't sound any grosser than some of the other tom-foolery I've managed to drum up in my kitchen. How hard could it be to make crackers?  If the Keebler elves can bluff their way through it, so can I.   

The anticipatory punsters must be positively tingling: "She's going crackers, so why not make some?!  Har har har!"   

Oh, shut up. 

Here's what happened.  I used a recipe from an early edition of Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook for Sesame Crackers, which I picked because it required exactly zero weird-o ingredients that I'd never use again. (The recipe is here if you're interested.) This was also my big chance to use sesame seeds - who ever actually uses these things?  What is a sesame, anyway?  A pressing dilemma that could keep you up at night, yes.

Anyway, I sifted the flours and dry stuff twice, which was fine, except my sifter makes a spine-curdling metal-on-metal scratching noise which made my hair stand on end after a bit. 

 

After the sifting, I did a little baby-knead (I added some flour - it was way too sticky to handle) and then rolled out the dough to cut into boring club cracker shapes and then poked holes in them with a fork - the holes are called "docking holes" and prevent air pockets from forming. 

Finally I schlepped them on greased cookie sheets and baked them.  I let them cool on baking racks and was beaming mightily at my work when my daughter walked in and asked me if they were dog treats.

Nevermind her tendency for dead-on observations and the fact that they resemble Alpo Liv-A-Snaps.  What's important is that I was able to use my flour sifter and rolling pin I bought at a yard sale a million years ago.  Best of all, I have a new skill:  making crackers that are so ugly nobody would eat them but pets. 

For the record, I did sample Liv-A-Snaps in my day (I was five) and believe me, they have nothing on my Sesame Crackers.  For one thing, my Sesame Crackers weren't produced by Big Ag Ghouls who shred chicken feathers and pig buttholes all under the guise of "Animal Nutrition."   

Perhaps now I'll be more comfortable whipping up the staple food items in the future.  Perhaps my next batch will look more cracker-like than this one.  Perhaps we'll put them in the glove box in case we're stranded in the car in a blizzard. 

Perhaps I'll be able to use all my dreamy thrifted enamel ware the way my great-grandmother would have wanted.  (Even though probably really thought melamine was much much groovier than enamel. And probably bought her crackers in a bitchin' tin to boot.) 

Perhaps it's a small finger in the Cyclopian eye of Cargill, but hey - it's my middle finger.