catapult magazine

Amy and I will be taking possession of our first home in two weeks. We are very excited and nervous. We’ve been looking at appliances to try to find the most energy efficient/affordable ones that will work for us. We are also planning a garden and are trying to look into more ways to be frugal and kind to the environment. Does anybody have any ideas?
I believe I remember Dan knowing something about composting. Any advice for a beginner?
Outside of basics like having a garden, hanging our laundry and using nice light bulbs, does anybody have any tricks of the trade?

My experience with outdoor composting is that you pile your foodwaste in a corner of your yard along with grass clippings and leaves. It pretty much takes care of itself.

Indoor worm composting is a little more tricky, but very fun, especially if you like to gross out your guests.

Ah, composting. A topic near and dear to my husband’s heart. He had a huge garden at our old house. Now we’re waiting for a new lawn to grow, so a garden will have to wait.

Anyhow, check out gardening/composting books from the library. They’ll tell you how to construct a simple pen for ye olde compost out of cheap material, like discarded lumber. I recommend containing the compost pile in some fashion in order to avoid crossing the line into “garbage heap.”

As for other suggestions … if you bought an older house, they are generally, because of their age, not the most energy-efficient, etc. So, look into caulking and wrapping your windows in the cold months.

in doing research for our church’s earth sunday last week, i found a statistic that a Maytag Neptune washing machine (a front loading model) can save as much water in three months as an average human being drinks in a lifetime.

doing that service (which was themed around water) made me realize how much we consume just through our daily activities. an average toilet flush uses more water than most people in the world get all day—for cooking, washing and drinking. there are all sorts of “equipment” we can use to curb our water consumption like water saver toilets, low flow shower heads, on demand equipment for your hot water heater (which means you wouldn’t have to let the water run for it to get hot)—some of which cost some money, some of which are pretty cheap and easy to do.

a good excercise in this regard is finding out your ecological footprint (or how many acres of the earth you would need to live your current lifestyle). it’s at http://www. myfootprint.org. you answer a bunch of questions (it only takes about five minutes) and then it calculates how many earths we would need if everyone lived like you do. you can get a lot of ideas for areas in which you can improve just by answering the questions.

okay, sorry for the long post. i’m just bursting with information after that service!

Apparently, using a dishwasher conserves more water than washing by hand. I forget the actual numbers, but it’s kind of a big difference.

Maytag Neptunes are expensive!!!!