You know how there are some things that you just can’t imagine living without? Maybe it’s an appliance, or your phone, or a favorite food? I was thinking about a few of these things today and I thought it would be fun to list some of my favorites – in no particular order. I would love to have you join in and provide your favorites – but since my blog gets way too much spam if I open it up for comments, I think I’m going to suggest that you add your favorites on Facebook (www.facebook.com/GardenGirlSkinCare). If you aren’t already a fan (or whatever they call it now) – please do click on the “like” button so you can be a part of the community.

Anyway -  here is my random mix of favorite things. Clearly it is not comprehensive or exhaustive, but it was fun to create!

• My family (I know that’s obvious but this list wouldn’t be complete without it)
• My friends (see above)
• Garden Girl products (of course!), my personal “must have’s”: You’re Fresh, Even Stephen, Break Free, Nature Nurture, Super Hero serum, Eye Can’t Believe It, Chill Out lotion, Alive body wash,  Simmer Down bath salts, Hand it to You hand cream and Zippity Do Dah peppermint foot cream
• My new VitaMix!
• Our SodaStream soda/seltzer machine
• White vinegar (for cleaning and laundry)
• My tumble composter from Costco (so easy!)
• My husband’s old (2003) Prius – such a great car
• My BlackBerry
• My laptop
• Facebook
• Mineral makeup
• Greek yogurt
• Chocolate
• Banana Bread
• Smoothies
• Gooey brownies
• Hot fudge
• Ice cream (Brigham’s Mocha Chip or Chocolate Chip are 2 all-time favorites)
• Broccoli (seriously)
• Spinach (again, seriously)
• Juicy tomatoes in the summer – especially with fresh mozzarella and basil! (and crusty bread)
• speaking of bread….CARBS (but I try to squeeze in whole grains whenever possible) – especially chewy, crusty bread and pasta
• A big salad with tons of stuff in there – especially if someone else did all the chopping
• Shortcut dinners like all natural frozen potstickers from Costco, Mama Rosie’s spinach ravioli, Bell & Evan’s chicken, Trader Joe’s mandarin orange chicken, Trader Joe’s frozen brown rice, quesadillas, omelettes
• My rice cooker
• My Kitchen Aid mixer
• My favorite cookbooks: America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Gourmet cookbook, and King Arthur Flour Cookie Book
• Cooking Light magazine
• Epicurious.com and other online recipe databases
• Food Network
• Any good workout I can find that’s 20 minutes or less and that I can do at home
• Our Weber Grill
• My latex mattress
• Central air conditioning (i know – VERY un-eco-friendly but we do keep it on the warm side)
• Caribbean Sol sunblock
• Caribbean Sol all natural self tanner (nice!)
• Trader Joe’s Powerberries (DO NOT BUY these if you are not already addicted – they are so yummy that they are pure evil…)
• Our pizza stone
• Pizza dough from Russo’s
• Actually – Russo’s in general, along with Trader Joe’s (can’t imagine life without it), Costco, and Whole Foods
• Reusable grocery bags (just seems like an obviously good idea, doesn’t it? and now I have finally gotten the hang of always having them in the car…)

I could do an entire list of my favorite food from Trader Joe’s – actually I think I have in the past? And I know I’ve done a “favorite finds at Costco” Facebook posting. Those are always fun!

Anyway – that’s my random list, for better or for worse. It makes me laugh that it is mostly food – apparently I have a one-track mind…

I’m looking forward to hearing what some of your favorites are!

It’s back-to-school time and EWG came out with their list of eco-friendly tips for buying products for your kids – including:

1) Look for pencils made from sustainable wood or recycled newspaper, without any paint or coatings

2) Look for hand soap and hand sanitizers without triclosan, triclocarbon or fragrance

3) Avoid buying polymer clay (the kind that stays soft at room temperature and hardens in the oven because it is made from PVC and has phthalates.

Check out the full list on the EWG and happy back to school!!

As I posted recently, I have been checking out The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen. It’s a very handy paperback book filled with helpful and (most importantly) EASY tips to save energy, reduce waste, and generally act more responsibly.

This week I thought I’d share some of my favorites from their Travel chapter. They have all kinds of suggestions for planning your trip, getting there, staying at a hotel, sightseeing and eating out. There are a bunch of things in there that I hadn’t really thought much about, and some which are just worth repeating. Here are my top 5 from this chapter:

1. Linens. Use the same linens and towels in your hotel room throughout your stay.  The average hotel room consumers more than 200 gallons of water per DAY, or as much as your entire household typically uses in a day. Trimming the amount of water used by washing sheets and towels can save up to 40 percent of a hotel’s water use.
2. Suitcases. Pack lightly – every additional ten pounds per traveler requires and additional 350 million (!!) gallons of jet fuel per year, which is enough to keep a 747 flying continuously for ten years. As a serial over-packer – that one hit home for me!
3. Guidebooks. Research your travel online and print out only the pages you’ll need to reference. You’ll save time, money and paper waste. More than 800,000 travel books go to waste every year!
4. Toiletries. Pack your own shampoo, soap and toothpaste instead of relying on the ones provided by most hotels (and of course then you can pack your favorite Garden Girl products!). You’ll get the product you want and you’ll creaste less plastic waste. A single 300 room hotel in Las Vegas uses more than 150,000 plastic bottles of shampoo per year.
5. Water bottles. Use and refill as single (preferable stainless steel or BPA-free plastic) water bottle when you travel. The average person in the United States drinks 8 oz. of bottled water per day (how did that ever happen??). It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to annually satisfy America’s demand for bottled water (the bottles for which are derived from petroleum). If that oil were converted to gasoline, the total could fuel 500,000 station wagons to take their families on coast-to-coast road trips. Considering the ongoing and unspeakable tragedy in the Gulf, we need to do whatever we can to reduce this country’s insatiable appetite for petroleum. And drinking from a reusable bottle is an easy way to start.

Let me know if you have any favorite eco-friendly travel tips – I’d love to hear them! Happy trails!

When I was at Kohl’s of all places, I grabbed the book called “The Green Book”. I know – how did they POSSIBLY come up with such a clever title?? Anyway – I figured it would be a fun and helpful book to have around. It’s listed as “the everyday guide to saving the planet one simple step at a time.”

So I started reading it bits at a time. It’s an easy book to just pick up and read for a few minutes – check out a few tips. And while I’ll say I don’t think all of the tips are necessarily 100% thought through (don’t consider the total environmental impact) and they are certainly simplified, it is still overall a pretty good and handy and thorough list of tips and tricks. It’s broken down by subject, and even some of the more “obvious” tips still offer a tidbit of something new/interesting (see the Farmer’s Market tip below).

The other thing that I like about the book is it has a very extensive reference list at the end of the book. The sources are well-known, recognizable and credible.

I thought I’d share a few tips and then continue to periodically post others that I find interesting. For now, I’ll focus on food shopping tips:

“Farmer’s Market vs. Supermarket

Try doing some of your shopping at a local farmer’s market. And if you can, walk or bike there. Of the total energy used in the United States per year, 4 percent is used to produce food, and between 10 and 13 percent is used to transport it. On average, U.S. supermarket food travels 1,500 to 2,500 miles before it reaches the family table. Buying local food can reduce the amount of petroleum consumed to transport your dinner by as much as 95 percent.

Meat

If you have the option, choose your meat at the butcher counter and purchase only as much as you know you’ll use. You’ll reduce food waste, save money, and conserve resources. The average person wastes over twenty-two pounds of edible store-bought meat each year. Given that it takes five pounds of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to make one pound of beef, that’s more than one hundred pounds of wasted grain and 55,000 gallons of wasted water per person! If all households decreased their beef purchases by just one pound per year, 250 billion gallons of water would be saved. It would take five days for this amount of water to pour over Niagara Falls.

Organic

You can lower your exposure to pesticides by 90 percent just by choosing organic varieties of certain fruits and vegetables. If just 1 percent of the nation’s farmlands converted to organic (non-chemical) agricultural systems, it would remove twenty-six million pounds of pesticides per year from the food we eat and from the environment. If you buy organic, you’ll encourage this type of farming.”

As I said, some of the tips – like the ones I highlighted here – are ones you have probably heard before. But they are able to add a new twist to make you think even more about making the change. And most are fairly simple changes. I will offer more of their green ideas in a future post, so stay tuned! And if you are interested in getting your own copy, just click on the book picture above and it will take you to the Amazon.com page.

A few posts back, I mentioned that I had used the website www.alice.com and among the products I had ordered, was something called the BathroomStone. Well I have been using this for a few weeks now, and it is definitely a pretty cool tool.  And earth friendly, too!

You’re probably wondering what exactly it is.  The packaging probably says it best:

” BathroomStone is the most powerful scouring product available. It easily cleans even the toughest hard water, soap scum and mildew on porcelain or tile and grout. It will not absorb odor causing bacteria.”

The thing that is so different about this is that it’s made from recycled glass! It’s wild. The company’s founder, Andrew Ungerleider, was determined to stop the destruction of New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains from the mining of pumice stone. So instead, he developed a technology that creates a glass “foam” from recycled beverage bottles. According to the site “The waste stream of crushed bottles that would end up in the landfill is converted into products with green qualities that have desirable physical properties and cost benefits.” Pretty clever!

I have to say, it’s something that you have to use very carefully. It clearly could scratch the heck out of surfaces that are not “safe” so it should only be used on porcelain or tile and grout. I used it in the shower and in the toilet bowls to get rid of hard water stains. It worked amazingly (and relatively effortlessly) well on the hard water stains that I couldn’t get to budge before. You need to use it either under water or with water, and scrub in a circular motion to make sure it doesn’t do any damage.

The company also produces similar products for use on porcelain-coated pots/pans in the kitchen, on the grill (definitely want to check that out), and in outdoor pools. They can be purchased online or in stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s.

A friend of mine (thanks Mira!) tipped me off the other day to a fun new website – Alice.com. It’s kind of a strange place where you can go to buy basically a bunch of products for the home, apparently at great prices, and with free shipping. They have automatic coupons so you don’t have to waste time searching for coupons or clipping them. And they can help manage a lot of your “staples” shopping.

At first I just checked out the site to see what it was all about – then I noticed that you can filter your product searches by specific things like “premium”, “bargain hunter” and….(my personal favorite, and my reason for making my first purchase on the site)…”green/organic”. So I soon found myself loading up on toilet paper, paper towels, toilet bowl cleaner (still love that GreenWorks one), and a funky thing that I wanted to try – the Earthstone Bathroom Stone (more about that in a future post!). They have all of the Seventh Generation and Green Works products.

If you find that it’s hard to find eco-friendly products this site makes it easy and painless. My question (to myself) is whether I will continue to make the effort to order online and plan ahead like that. But if I can get in the habit, this seems like a great service. Delivered to your home, so you don’t have to lug the bulky packages of this stuff from the car to the house. Plus – I think the prices really were lower – at least lower than my local grocery store.

Oh – and I nearly forgot to mention – they have product reviews as well, which I always love to read. The range of products they sell  is substantial: cleaning products, paper goods, some food items (including the full range of Kashi cereals), makeup, office supplies and more. Pretty cool! And the shipping is fast – it ships the next day and arrives in 3-5 days.

Check it out- it’s free and you might find that it fits nicely into your life!

Have you ever noticed how many products there are to freshen the air in your home, make rooms smell nice, and make your laundry smell good? Candles, sprays, plug-ins, weird gel crystal thingies, potpourri – the list is endless. So much money is spent on these products – but the worst part of it is not the wasted money, it’s the fact that most of them are actually harmful to your health. Just think about it – you spray these products all around your home and then breathe the chemicals. Not great!

Do you love those scented candles? I admit – I used to be addicted. I had Yankee Candles all over my house. Until I learned more about what burning the candles does – emitting soot and other airborne micro-particles in the air that can cause long term harm. Not to mention the phthalates from the artificial fragrances used to scent the candles.

But I think the room sprays are even more of a concern. I just read that Americans are expected to spend 1.72 billion on air fresheners this year. Yep – 1.72 BILLION dollars! Crazy. Are our houses that stinky? Yipes. But again – it’s not just the money wasted, but the health impact. A study done at the University of Bristol found that “frequent use of air fresheners and
aerosols during pregnancy and early childhood was associated with higher levels of diarrhea, earache and other symptoms in infants,as well as headaches and depression in mothers.” Uh oh.

So – I thought I’d share a few natural ways to make your home smell fresh and clean – naturally! Many of these options use essential oils, which can be purchased in natural food stores or online.

1) Toss some spices like cinnamon stick, nutmeg, cloves in a pot with some water and let it simmer. Or add a few drops of essential oil to simmering water. Just don’t forget about it!

2) When you are cleaning with vinegar and water – add a couple of drops of essential oils. Lavender is nice – it is calming and it also has a strong enough scent that it will linger awhile.

3) Put a few drops of essential oil on a cotton ball and put it in a small dish. Hide the dish behind something if you don’t want it to be seen. Putting it behind the radiator in the winter will help spread the scent faster.

4) When doing laundry, instead of using a dryer sheet, put a few drops of essential oil onto an old face cloth and toss it into the clothes dryer with the load of laundry. Again – lavender is a good choice, as is rose geranium.

5) Use the old tried and true box of baking soda. Remove the top of the box of baking soda and leave it in the room to absorb the odors.

6) The next time you have a cup of green tea – don’t throw away the tea. Dry the leaves – then toss some on the carpet and vacuum it up. It will refresh the carpet and also deodorize your vacuum bag. Also – toss the tried leaves into the kitty litter box – it’s a great litter deodorizer too!

7) Mix 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of baking soda and 2 cups of hot water in a spray bottle. Shake well until mixed and dissolved. This can be used as a great air freshener just like the expensive ones you can buy at the store! (just avoid spraying above wood furniture)

Those are just a few options-get creative! And toss out those harmful, chemical-laden “fresheners”.

I was trying to explain to my boys a little bit about the problems with all of the “stuff” we accumulate. How our world only has so much space to put our old stuff that we throw away. I tried to keep it simple but in a way to explain why it’s important not to just keep buying more stuff without a good reason. We have SO MUCH stuff in our house – it’s crazy. I was talking with a friend about how amazing it is that we can just fill up a trash bag of total junk out of the toy closet every few months – stuff that doesn’t work, random pieces that used to go to something etc.