DIY Dryer Lint Fire Starters

January 18, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

By Finn Clark

We live in the Northwest where the winters are long and wet. Like most 9-year-olds, I’m interested in (and learning about) fire and what my parents call “combustibles.”

Our home is heated almost entirely by wood and since we forage for our own wood in our forest, it’s often pretty wet. I decided it was time to make some fire starters for cold wet nights when nothing wants to burn. These things will definitely help start your wet wood burning, especially if you use 2-3 of them. Here’s how:

Gather together:

Lint

Egg Cartons

Wax Scraps (we melt ours into pie tins for easy re-melting)

Wick String or Just Plain String,

Shredded Paper, Paper Scraps, and/or Sawdust

Matches

Next, you’ll need to melt down your wax scraps. I place our previously-melted wax scraps in a pie tin with another pie tin underneath and place the double-layer pie tins over our pilot light on the stove. That’s enough to melt the wax in the tins and it’s safe for little hands like mine that could get burned by the wax. Dip your string in the melting wax to make a true candle wick. They burn more slowly and readily with the wax infusion.

While your wick is drying, mix all your lint with shredded paper and you can add sawdust and small wood chips if you have them.

I think I like the mixing part the best.

Now that your wick is dry, you can cut it into small 2-3 inch wicks for each fire starter.

Now you can stuff your lint mixture into the egg carton cups. We take a small handful, wrap it around a wick, and then jam it (with the wick standing up in the middle like a candle wick) into each cup.

We then pour our melted wax over the top of the paper/lint/wick-filled egg carton. I let my mom do it because even though we have 2 pie tins under the wax, it could spill and hurt me.

Do you see little matches standing up in the back row there? That’s my secret ingredient. I like to use matches dipped in wax as my wicks. They’re actually home-made water-proof matches but that’s another post for a later time. They work really really well as wicks, too.

When your wax has solidified and cooled, the fire starters are ready to be used. Simply rip off a single cup at a time and light your wick when you’ve placed your fire starter where you want it in your well-laid fire.

Now we get to enjoy a warm winter wet wood fire.

How To Wash Clothes In A Bathtub

January 17, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

If you ever have a power outage and need to do an important load of laundry, consider the bathtub! We’ve done bathtub laundry all over the world, mostly because you can do it in any location that has a tub, and this simple practice saves a bundle of money if you’re traveling.

How do you do it and get your clothes dry in time?

There are 2 ways to tub-clean your dirty togs. If you’re taking a shower, you can always conserve water and throw your dirty clothes in the bottom of the tub to benefit from your shower water. I know it doesn’t sound glamorous, but it works if you just need to get your clothes clean quickly. Otherwise, here are a few steps involved in the bathtub method:

1) Run the water and plug the drain. Be sure to put enough water in the tub to just cover your clothing. I simply use the hotel soap, but you can always bring your own biodegradable laundry powder or laundry bar soap if you think ahead. On expeditions, we always have a little bio-soap on hand to hand-wash clothes in rivers.

2) My friends in Nepal let the clothes soak for a few minutes. Then you can rub it all over the clothing, and scrub around the really dirty areas.

3) Next, get your children in the tub and let them walk all over your clothing. It’s a fun game for them and massages their feet. If you have no children around, do it yourself or you can “agitate” your clothes by hand, too. One reader told me she does bathtub laundry at home and uses a spare toilet plunger for her “agitation cycle.” Be sure to hand scrub your dirty areas by hand with your soap.

4) Drain the dirty water and run more water over your clothes to fully rinse them out. You might need to rinse twice if you’ve used a lot of soap.

5) Wring each piece of clothing out and then hang them to dry over the tub. Depending on your climate, you should have dry clothes in a few hours, almost as long as it would’ve taken you to take your clothing to a laundry service to do it for you.

And the price is right.

I’m no fan of doing laundry, mostly because I know in developed countries we do way too much of it and our microplastic-laden clothes are contributing to our toxic shorelines. Hand-washing means you’ll really only wash those clothes if you absolutely have to, not just because you wore them once.

We like this system because it’s cheap, it didn’t require any plastic, we get a little exercise doing the laundry, and it conserves water when we use our own shower water for the first part of your washing cycle, to just get the clothes wet. For a family of 4 traveling in the Himalaya, hand-washing is a regular part of our routine. Try it for a week, and you’ll start thinking about the water, the soap, where it goes, and how often it actually needs to be done. Do you hand-wash when you travel? What tips can you share?

DIY Kitchen Compost Pails

January 16, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 12 Comments

My new favorite kitchen thing is a thing I’m reusing for something else.

Ta da! My new swank kitchen countertop compost holder! It’s a Romertopf oven turned compost collector that actually looks nice on the kitchen counter and it has a lid, too.

This new beauty is a replacement for our last counter compost container that was made of plastic and do you know what it did? It cracked. No surprise, right?

I was determined to find a non-plastic container and the terra cotta Romertopf is perfect for the job. Here’s other wonderful thing about this compost container:

It fits in a little spot we designed inside the trash/recycling cupboard where we can store our compost under the counter most of the time. It’s the perfect size for said slot.

Done.

No need to buy a compost container (I’m amazed to see that compost pails cost anywhere from $20 t0 $60!)

And, what’s with the charcoal filters the store bought compost holders have? If you just empty your compost pail into your compost every day, there’s no need for odor control, right? And, lining it with a plastic bag? Just. No. The whole point in having a compost pail is to tip the thing over in your compost, take it back into the kitchen and wipe/wash it out. Enough said.

Did you know that if you compost your food scraps (and the other things we know can go into a compost), you can reduce your waste by 60%? That’s a great reduction in your trash bill. Between our chickens, guinea pig, dog, and worms, our compost is reduced by 2/3 each day as these critters get first dibs on the kitchen scraps.

I looked around on the internet, and found a few other innovative reuses for a kitchen compost caddy. My favorites were a vintage ice bucket and a, get this, mason jar.

What do you hold your kitchen scraps in, destined for the compost bin?

Roadside Bottles: The Great American Beverage Crisis

January 15, 2016January 15, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 5 Comments

Our nearest store is less than a mile away. Occasionally, my kids and I take a walk or bike ride there so they can have an ice cream. We run down a long hill and always bring a bag to collect the roadside trash. Each time we do this, we pick up more than 100 beverage containers. Why do Americans spend so much money on drinks when water out of the tap is, most often, clean and free? And why do we throw our drink containers out on the road? Here’s a general inventory of the kinds of beverage bottles we pick up:

We find glass bottles including large and mini wine bottles, aluminum cans, box wine, plastic water and soda bottles, plastic cups with lids and straws, and single-use coffee cups. Why the need to have a drink while driving? If you’re on a long road trip, I can understand why you’d have a beverage by your side. But we live on an island 2 miles wide by 6 miles long and no single trip is very long. Why is the car the place where beverages must be consumed and then discarded? Surely, the beverages are not coming from pedestrians.

The Keep America Beautiful campaign conducted a study of 240 roadways across the country and determined that there are approximately 6,729 pieces of litter per mile of roadway (on each side) in the United States. My road is certainly no exception and we could likely come up with that many pieces of litter along our little roadside. The study also found that the majority of roadside litter comes from motorists (53%) with pedestrians contributing some 23%.

My theory is that it’s less about the car and more about the road’s proximity to a convenience store. The shop is stocked with juices, sodas, coffee, and alcohol, so our road is hit with the litter from those who’ve just purchased a convenient drink. The Keep America Beautiful study found that roads near a convenience store tended to have 11% more litter. No surprise. And beverages figure high in the overall item percentages.

Here’s the depressing statistic: 40 – 60% of roadside waste comes from beverage containers. Why? We live in a country where tap water is readily available and quite drinkable. If you’re not convinced, go to any developing country and you’ll see how water out of a tap can threaten your life. Most of those containers are also recyclable, so if recycling were truly working in our great nation, we wouldn’t see any drink containers on our roadsides, right? The Environmental Working Group published a study that claims, “Every 27 hours Americans consume enough bottled water to circle the entire equator with plastic bottles stacked end to end.”

Litter, furthermore, costs taxpayers a hefty sum each year. According to the Keep America Beautiful stats on roadside litter, litter cleanup costs the U.S. almost $11.5 billion each year.

Perhaps we need to require that each state has a bottle bill. At Oregon.gov, the statistics for the state’s beverage containers found along roadsides since the introduction of a bottle bill there are impressive: “In 1971, litter control was a primary reason for initiating the bottle bill. Since then, the percentage of beverage containers among roadside litter has dropped from 40 percent to 6 percent.”

Kicking the convenience store single-use beverage fix is likely the best step an individual who wants to make a difference can take. That’s what I’ve done. When you discover the environmental impact of single-use beverage containers on the environment, a.k.a. the amount of energy , toxins, and virgin materials needed to produce that bottle or can that will likely go unrecycled, you might reconsider the need for that beverage. Bring your own bottle and fill ‘er up at the tap. Water is what your body needs. Save the wine and beer for your home, or dinner with friends, not your car. And if you’ve been out with your buddies and just want to get that stash of wine and beer out of your car to cut the clutter, find a dumpster or recycle bin, they’re usually right next to the convenience store where you bought the wine in the first place.

Single-use beverages and their containers are only benefiting the companies who manufacture them. American kids are over-consuming over-sweetened single-serving drinks and we have a juvenile obesity crisis to prove it. Who can blame kids, when according to this infographic, in 2008, Coca-Cola spent over $2.67 billion in advertising? Kids are their prime target.

I can tell you, from first-hand experience, that these roadside bottles are ending up in our watersheds and floating down into our oceans. Cars run over them and break them into smaller plastics, which also become part of our ocean ecosystem. The roadside ditches are filled with every kind of plastic and we know what’s in them washes downhill to our rivers, streams and seas. In my family, we consider recycling a last resort for our stuff as recycling requires more virgin materials to actually close the loop for things like plastic. We’re more about the other R’s, especially reducing and reusing. Reducing means refusing single-use disposables, taking action to pick up those that we find in the environment and bringing attention to them so others see their impact. Help curb our collective disposables habit by refusing them in the first place. Then move on to the next R and keep your reusable cup and bottle with you in your car for yet another laudable and sustainable R: Refill.

30 Toothbrush Reuses Plus Options Plastic-Free

January 14, 2016January 14, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

Brushing Your Teeth With Plastic:

OK, we’re not going to try to wean you from using toothbrushes…well…sort of. Although most toothbrushes of the world are made of plastic, we have to admit they’re very handy and, for the most part, do the trick. But once we started seeing a lot of toothbrushes lying on our favorite beaches, my children and I had to look into whether there are any environmentally-friendly alternatives. First, why are toothbrushes found on our beaches? Think, seeping sewage. Around our lovely little island, there are some old sewage pipes that are known to dump right into Puget Sound. And, you guessed it, people are flushing their plastics down the toilet. You can only imagine what other plastics we find, like tampon applicators and those single-use plastic floss applicator thingies.

Why are we concerned about brushing our teeth with plastic? Many toothbrushes are made with PVC and Bisphenol-A, known toxins that, frankly, should be banned from all toothbrushes. If you’re considering reducing your plastic footprint in the toothbrush department in the future, I found this great guide to BPA and PVC-free toothbrushes that might help you choose one less toxic. I also like to see what Beth Terry has to say on the subject, as she has put a lot of care into her research. Here are 4 less plastic alternatives that my family has tried:

1) We first got ourselves some bamboo toothbrushes and have enjoyed them immensely. Combined with our zero waste toothpaste, they’ve been getting our teeth and gums clean in a plastic-free way. When we’re done with the toothbrushes, they’ll be used as kindling for the fire or could even go into our compost!

2) My toothbrush before the bamboo one was a Radius toothbrush, made of recycled wood with a replaceable head. I love it, used it for years, replacing the head periodically until a crack developed where the head meets the handle. It was a good half-way alternative, but the large size did prove a bit cumbersome for travel. (However, on expeditions, just bringing the head was perfect for cutting down on weight)

3) Toothbrush before Radius, and a travel alternative that I used, was the Preserve toothbrush which I bought in a mail-back pouch that I promptly lost. Preserve takes back their toothbrushes when you’re done with them and recycles them along with other #5 plastics through their Gimme5 campaign. Many Wholefoods Markets have bins where you can drop off your toothbrush, along with dairy tubs like yogurt containers produced by Stonyfield Yogurt. These cradle-to-cradle practices are growing and we applaud Preserve, Wholefoods, and Stonyfield for making this a reality.

4) But (you knew I’d say that), plastic is plastic (it’s hard for me to imagine that there are zero health concerns about putting plastic in our mouths, now that I’ve been keeping up with the latest toxicology reports on plastics and the additives put in them.) And once you go down the plastic-free-living path, you start looking around for ALL your options and inevitably discover how people lived and kept their teeth clean long before plastic was invented. Which leads me to….”the traditional natural toothbrush”: Peelu miswaks.

Miswak Sticks are the New Toothbrush in Our Home

Now, these things are cool. And if you want to impress your next guests, rather than handing them a guest toothbrush to use, slip ’em a miswak stick and let ’em start chewing. Just as Native Americans once used bark for teeth cleaning, in Pakistan the peelu tree has for centuries been the traditional teeth cleaner of choice. I won’t pretend to be an expert, here, but after I read this fantastic article by Nourishing Treasures, I had to get me some miswak sticks.

The kids and I enjoyed them for many months. And it’s no wonder since they’re reportedly known to entice the companionship of angels, aid in digestion and even improve eyesight. These things leave my teeth feeling cleaner than they’ve ever been! And then I read this clinical study which proves that the use of the miswak outdistances toothbrushing in terms of removing plaque and overall gingival health. I quote, for you, the study’s conclusion:

“It is concluded that the miswak is more effective than toothbrushing for reducing plaque and gingivitis, when preceded by professional instruction in its correct application. The miswak appeared to be more effective than toothbrushing for removing plaque from the embrasures, thus enhancing interproximal health.”

Now to just get that “professional instruction” and we’ll be laughing all the way to the dentist. Any professionals out there, feel free to provide instruction in our comments section below. Yes, the miswak sticks are sealed in plastic, but for argument’s sake it’s less plastic than in a traditional toothbrush.

Reuse Your Toothbrushes

Unable to throw things out because of our zero waste lifestyle, we’ve accumulated quite a few plastic toothbrushes in our day. But it turns out old toothbrushes can come in handy. Here are 25 wonderful things that can be done with that little versatile brush (once you’ve retired it from use in your mouth):

1) Use it to clean hard-to-clean places.

2) Pass it on to your dog for brushing his/her teeth. (Yes, sanitize it first!)

3) Keep one with your craft supplies to be used as a special stiff paintbrush for art projects.

4) Clean corn.

5) Use as a grout scrubber.

6) Keep one under the sink for scrubbing around faucets and sink edges.

7) Label another one for use as a fingernail cleaner after gardening.

8) Keep one in the car glove box for emergency assistance like brushing off battery terminals.

9) Put one in your child’s “scientist backpack” for archaeology outings. A toothbrush is a critical artifact cleaning instrument. I can attest to the fact that my son’s spare brush packed in with his archaeological brushes has come in handy for our team of scientists in the excavations we’ve done in the Caves of Mustang.

10) Stash one in your foyer or mud room for cleaning mud from shoes. Keep one in your shoe shine kit for sprucing up drab shoes.

11) Keep one on your tool bench for assisting in cleaning tools.

12) Store one in your cleaning supplies bucket for spot cleaning carpets and furniture.

13) Save one for the laundry room for spot cleaning grease stains, etc.

14) Put one in with your makeup to brush away mascara clumps and to be used as an eyebrow brush.

15) Another one will be wanted on-hand as a back scratcher.

16) Use one for cleaning your bicycle chain.

17) Save one for cleaning jewelry or silverware.

18) Use one to clean out brushes and combs.

19) Some people swear by them as excellent fish tank algae cleaners to scrub algae off the glass.

20) Here’s a reuse idea from our favorite repurpose/reuse website: “For all you fishermen, and women out there, cut the head off the toothbrush, and then drill a hole in either end, attach a swivel to one end and then the hook at the other end, make great spinning lures as they are often bright and multi coloured and the bodies make the perfect shape.”

21) Lift the lid and look at the hinges of your toilet seat. Pretty gross. Use an old toothbrush to make it look (and smell) as good as new.

22) Use as a bottle cleaner for those vintage bottles you collect.

23) Make a toothbrush bracelet.

24) Use your toothbrush as a tool to make a rag rug.

25) For some serious fun, visit Evil Mad Scientist and learn how to make a bristle bot. Decapitate the toothbrush (off with its head!), and affix a teeny, tiny pager motor or (get this) battery-powered toothbrush motor (the sort that make your toothbrush vibrate), as well as a battery (and maybe some LEDs), and of course any googly-eyes you might have lying around and you’ve got yourself a buzzing little bot, bouncing around on bristles.

26) Use one to clean the grooves on your horizontally-sliding windows.

27) One reader wrote in to share that she uses four toothbrushes glued side by side to brush fleece sweaters and blankets after they are washed. It helps to make them look and feel like new.

28) Use one for a hair dye applicator.

29) Use your old toothbrushes to clean your dryer lint trap. Residues can build up and the brushing helps clean that off.

30) Dust and clean the crevices and ledges on hardwood molding with your old brush.

You’ll see the comments section is below. We’re hoping to find some further great ideas, links, instructions, even photos if you have ’em, for toothbrush reuse or waste-free alternatives to tooth-brushing.

The Thing About Breadmakers

January 13, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 9 Comments

I was once a breadmaking fanatic, because my breadmaker meant 4 minutes of prep and 3.3 hours later I’d have delicious wholesome organic bread that the whole family would devour. Unlike most breadmaker owners, we actually used our machine regularly. We’d been making bread from it non-stop for years, until this week.

An artisan-style bread from a bread-maker that will please all. Photo © Liesl Clark

Here were the obvious benefits of this delicious bread:

1) No plastic packaging.

Bread bag with a little plastic bread clip.

2) Saves money. Our locally-baked bread costs about $5.00 per loaf. We buy our ingredients in bulk and each loaf costs us less than $1.00.

3) Nothing better than the smell (and taste) of home baked bread coming out of the oven.

But, truth be told, this bread has fluoropolymers leaching into it.

Let me back up a bit. A few years ago, I purged all things plastic from my kitchen. Especially plastic containers and Teflon-coated pans. I took our breadmaker to Best Buy for recycling because it had pans made of Teflon. I noticed, too, that the pans would peel this weird-looking plastic coating from them every year or so. That was the fluoropolymer coating that Dupont makes for all Teflon coated pans. This alarming article in The New York Times can fill you in on just how toxic fluoropolymers are.

So, I thought I would be clever and find a Teflon-free breadmaker, one safe for my family. Enter Zojirushi. Zojirushi makes what they call a Teflon-free breadmaker that we switched to after reading all the negative press about the potential health hazards of cooking with Teflon. We converted our entire kitchen into a Teflon-free zone, with the one exception of the breadmaker because we were ignorant. This machine is NOT teflon-free. In the product description it states “non-stick coated pan.” They coat it with a generic polymer that is….Teflon, but it’s just given a different name, fluoropolymer, the new fancy substitute that is an endocrine disruptor known to cause all kinds of cancers. It’s a sad state of affairs. I don’t believe there’s a bread machine out there that doesn’t have fluoropolymer coating.

Alas, if we want Teflon-free bread, we’ll have to make it sans breadmaker, in our clay or enamel-coated cast iron pans, with a little more care and attention to the process which might just make the bread taste even better. I grew up on homemade Teflon-free bread, and I’d like my children to have that privilege, too. I wonder if our local bakeries are using Teflon-free pans? It might not hurt to ask.

If you’re interested, here’s the recipe my family has eaten for years. Now they’ll have to enjoy it when I have more time to bake. It’s a whole wheat raisin and walnut bread that toasts perfectly, is moist, and has just the right amount of crunch in the crust.

Teflon-Clad Zogirushi Pans. Photo © Liesl Clark

Whole Wheat Walnut Raisin Bread

1 Cup warm water

3/4 Cup combination of liquid ingredients (we use 1 egg + milk and a little yogurt)

2 Tablespoons flax seed oil (you can substitute another nut oil, but flax seed oil is excellent)

1 Heaping teaspoon salt (we use a celtic sea salt)

3 Cups flour (we prefer one cup whole wheat and 2 cups white, all organic)

4 Handfuls walnuts (this is also excellent with flax seeds)

3-4 Handfuls raisins

1 Tablespoon honey

3/8 Teaspoon yeast (we add more as our yeast ages since we buy it in bulk)

If you like a little body to your bread, add about 1/4 cup shredded zucchini or carrot which we do when those veggies are in our garden.

I think I’ll try to simulate a breadmaker next time and just add all of these ingredients in this order, making sure the yeast is added near the honey so it can react to the sugars in it and place the whole thing near our fireplace to activate the yeast with honey so it can rise in a breadmaker-like simulation, but using a big bowl. Then, mix the dough and let it rise, punch it back down, knead it, and let it rise again in a plastic-free bread pan, then bake. This recipe makes a 2-3 lb loaf of bread. Might make sense to double it so you get 2 loaves for your effort.

Cheap. Healthy. Homemade. Plastic-Free. Photo © Liesl Clark

25 Uses For Coffee Grounds

January 11, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 4 Comments

25 Wondrous Things to do With Your Coffee Grounds. Photo © Liesl Clark

We all love our coffee here in the Northwest, but where I live, on Bainbridge Island, we love our coffee grounds perhaps even more. Nowhere else will you see farmers, home gardeners, landscapers, and vermiculturists fighting over the grounds produced by local cafes. Let’s face it, coffee grounds and plants go well together. I can assure you they’re all using them for #2 and #3 below as coffee grounds fertilizer and worm food, but the other 23 uses are also worth looking into. Some might even surprise you:

1) Turn Your Hydrangeas Blue: Hydrangeas can be blue or purple depending upon your soil Ph. Acidic soil begets blue hydrangeas. Coffee grounds, when brewed, are acidic. Use them as a top dressing on the soil around your hydrangeas, making sure to scratch the coffee grounds into the soil and you’ll enjoy blue bursts of color. I prefer purple, but my soil is acidic anyway, so we get blue.

2) Feed the Worms: We have a worm bin and those squirmies tend to thrive on 80% coffee grounds 10% eggshells and 10% dried leaves.

3) Coffee Grounds in Your Compost: Everyday, we use our coffee grounds as fertilizer. Most people put them in their compost along with their kitchen scraps. They’re a great source of nitrogen, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur.

4) Coffee Grounds Provide Shine to Your Hair: I haven’t tried it, but word is out that if you work some wet grounds into your hair they’ll help create a beautiful shine. They’ll also give you some great brunette highlights. Cover up the grays? Let us know.

5) Coffee Grounds Construction Play: This homeschooling family uses coffee grounds for play with small construction vehicles. The grounds are an interesting replacement for sand or dirt.

6) Coffee Grounds Abrasive Dish Scrub: Use grounds as your scrubbing agent for dirty dishes. I’m serious. When we ran out of scrubbies one day, I just used some grounds to get a scrambled egg pan all cleaned up. It’s like when you’re camping and use sand as your dish-cleaning abrasive.

7) Deodorizer: If your freezer or fridge are smelly and you can’t find the source, put a bowl or 2 of dried coffee grounds in there and the grounds will absorb the odors. Add vanilla for a different scent.

8) Facial Scrub: Just apply slightly wet coffee grounds to your face and exfoliate. Coffee grounds are found in some skin care products. I haven’t tried this yet, but I think my daughter and I will try it on our next natural spa day and post the results.

9) Furniture Scratch Remover: Cover up furniture scratches by rubbing them down with wet coffee grounds that match your furniture’s color. I’ve done this and it works!

10) Easter Egg Dye: Dye your eggs with coffee grounds for a pretty rust brown color. “But they’ll just look like our brown eggs,” you might say. Nope, this brown color is really pretty and looks great when you use it on eggs that have had crayon designs drawn on them.

11) Ant Repellant: Ants don’t like coffee grounds. Sprinkle them along their path. We do this under our deck where the ants live and it really bugs them. (See what I did there?)

12) Coffee Grounds Body Scrub: Scrub them over your body as a gentle exfoliant. But be sure to cover your drain with a mesh drain catcher or towel.

13) Drain Cleaner: If you dilute them and let them go down the drain every once in a while, they reportedly make an excellent drain cleaner.

14) Tool Cleaner: Coffee grounds can help clean up your tools as an abrasive rub and gunk remover. I love this one. While my husband is away, the kids and I are going to do some tool cleaning.

15) Coffee Ground Fossils: Here’s a great tutorial for making cool fossils or pretty imprints with the kiddos.

16) Ice Remover: Use grounds to “salt” your icy sidewalks. Then take your shoes off before treading on your fancy carpets.

17) Blueberry Food: Save your grounds in a bucket all winter long, then make a soup to cast the lot over your blueberries. They love coffee grounds! Spruce and evergreens do too.

18) Dust Buster: Another fave of mine — Sprinkle over your fireplace ashes when cleaning them out to dampen down the ashes.

19) Seed Spacer: Add dried coffee grounds to your tiny seeds like carrot seeds when sowing as they help spread out your seed dispersal when doing it by hand.

20) Slug Repellant: Some slugs are reportedly coffee ground haters. Not ours. But I don’t want to deter you from trying to put a ring around your favorite slug-devoured plants. You don’t likely have enormous slugs like we do that’ll slime their way through a fire pit filled with ashes. They don’t call them banana slugs for nothin’.

21) Mosquito Larvae Killer: I can’t verify this one either but some people say if you pour some grounds into your puddles it’ll kill mosquito larvae. Hmmmm….kill? Doubt it.

22) Vintage Wood Stain: Here’s a simple wood stain recipe using coffee grounds. Good luck.

23) Cockroach Trap: This Old House has an interesting-looking coffee-bait roach trap for you.

24) Treasure Map Paper: Dip some blank white paper into a bowl or sink-full of grounds and some water. Pull it out and let it dry. Then have fun with your map-making.

25) Cat Repellant: Cats apparently don’t like coffee grounds so you can put them around your spots (like your sand box?) where you don’t want cats to, um, do what they do in dirt.

Don’t stop at 25!

26) Meat Marinade: Add a teaspoon of coffee grounds to your steak marinade and impress your favorite coffee lover.

27) Secret Brownie Ingredient: If you’re the boss, add a few grounds to your brownies to give everyone (not for kids!) a boost at work.

Lastly but definitely our favorite, my friend Rebecca’s Grandma Inge’s best coffee grounds reuse tip is to put a bowl of grounds in the car to keep you (and the car) refreshed and perky throughout the day.

How do you use your grounds?

Off the Grid Toast

January 9, 2016January 9, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

The Stovetop Toaster You Always Wanted

Our toaster oven stopped working two years ago and, coincidentally, I found a camp stove toaster a day later. I had wanted one of these for years. They’re the foldable lightweight stovetop toasters that enable you to toast your bread right over your burner. Coleman makes them and they cost less than $5 at Walmart. But if you’re patient, you’ll likely find one at a yard sale or in your Buy Nothing group.

These toasters are perfect for the homebody interested in downsizing and getting rid of their small electrical appliances that just take up room and leave you with no options when the power goes out.

One by one, we’ve offloaded the little electrical appliances we rarely use, and our cupboards are so much easier to deal with. But more importantly, we’re making hand-made food again, and it ain’t no chore. We’re finding alternative ways to make things off the grid, like yogurt, and are rediscovering the pleasures of simplicity and mindfully-made food. No, we aren’t poster-children for the farming life made simple, and we certainly aren’t feeling deprived. We don’t miss our toaster oven at all, thanks to our trusty Coleman camp stove toaster. I keep our new toast-maker on our stovetop day and night because toast is a staple around here since we bake our own bread. But it’s also foldable, so this gizmo won’t take up much room in your cupboard.

Not only are we saving electricity, we’re convinced our toast tastes better as it’s toasted lightly over a diffused flame over the course of a few minutes, the same amount of time it would take in an electric toaster. I do believe Bagels are much better toasted with this thingy. And when the winter storms come and the power is out — we have toast! (Our stove is natural gas.)

Oh, and I’ve found the small base plate with holes on the toaster makes an excellent chili pepper roaster, too.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover Batteries

January 8, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 8 Comments

The average American has at least 10 batteries in their possession at any given time and throws away 8 batteries per year. That statistic feels low to me. Members of my household blast through many more than 8 every few weeks. We try to use rechargeable batteries, because they’re reusable, but in some remote parts of the world where we work, we just need to bring disposables with us because the charging of batteries requires power.

Should we recycle batteries? Absolutely! The mercury and cadmium in our batteries can wreak havoc on the environment. According to the Environmental Health and Safety Organization, “In landfills, heavy metals have the potential to leach slowly into soil, groundwater or surface water. Dry cell batteries contribute about 88 percent of the total mercury and 50 percent of the cadmium in the municipal solid waste stream.”

By recycling batteries, we’re ensuring those heavy metals are captured again and kept from our watersheds. Whether they power our cell phones, laptop computers, or flashlights at night, batteries are an essential part of our everyday lives. Finding the nearest place to dispose of them is now easier, through your municipal recycling transfer stations and facilities like Ikea for alkaline batteries and Staples for rechargeables and cell phone batteries.

Here’s an amazing resource from Environment, Health and Safety Online that will clue you in about all of the different types of batteries and how they impact the environment. They also highlight how to safely dispose of them. For example, those tiny little button batteries that go in your watch or in some toys should go to your household hazardous waste facility. Them things are toxic!

In Nepal, where we travel each year, batteries are what enable us to make our documentaries for National Geographic and NOVA. Without that stored power, we couldn’t run our film equipment. Batteries, whether rechargeable, alkaline, gel cell, or lithium, are essential to our mission. Each one is carried back down from the mountains and reused on future expeditions. The spent batteries are taken home with us for safe disposal since there’s no battery recycling in Nepal. In the Himalaya, we’ve seen batteries regularly discarded outside villages in the rivers and streams.

Over the years, we’ve worked to set up a battery recycling program in the kingdom of Mustang, one of the highest watersheds in the world. We’re trying to inspire villages to collect their batteries and stockpile them. Trekking agencies heading out of the kingdom with their clients can take a bag or 2 of these batteries downhill to be disposed of responsibly in Kathmandu or Pokhara, two of the largest urban centers in Nepal. Better yet, trekkers could take batteries home with them to recycle them in their home countries. The crisis of battery waste building-up in the pristine wilderness needs to be addressed by everyone who lives and travels through these fragile environments. We pick up batteries in the villages we stay in, and do a cleanup with villagers whenever we can.

The next time you see a battery lying on the ground, whether it’s in a parking lot, on a trail in the wilderness, or outside a rural village, think of our planet as one interconnected ecosystem. All water, and whatever might have leached into it, travels downhill. If we address, globally, the most toxic materials first and then work our way down the waste chain to the more inert ones, we have a place to start and a set of priorities to follow.

Batteries found in just a few minutes of searching amidst the town dumping site just outside the walls of the royal city of Lo Manthang. © Liesl Clark

If you’d like to help us, please donate, even a few dollars, to our battery rescue operation through the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation.

Embracing Ugly Veggies

January 7, 2016January 7, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 21 Comments

Digging around in the garden, today, I had to run into the house to look up a stunning fact. Here it is: Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year, approximately 1.3 billion tons, is wasted. But here’s the hitch — The Food and Agricultural Association claims:

Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food.

Fruits and veggies top out the list, not grains, dairy, meat and legumes. It’s the perishables that contribute to (in this country) the over 33 million tons of food each year that ends up in the landfill.

I posit that much of it is ugly veggies, like ours.

This time of year, the veggies in our garden are downright repulsive.

The ceaseless rain and a recent freeze, has waterlogged the cauliflower.

Browned Cauli Still Tastes Great © Liesl Clark

Thanks to a few thousand slugs that share the land with us, the slender kale has holes in it.

The finger potatoes and sun chokes cling to the sodden earth like black clods of nutritious grit.

Never fear, friends, just lower your standards, and don’t let your ugly veggies get you down. They’re still food. Hideously delicious food.

Gone are the days of showing off our succulent crops in beautiful baskets on long lost sunny afternoons. No, tonight’s dinner was wrestled free from the muck and slime of a New Year’s dark garden of primal growth that only the diehard will eat. We eat the foul-looking foodstuffs because snubbing our nose at them would contribute to the EPA’s wasted food bottom line. No, we’ll whip up dishes from weird days where clouds and wet shadows prevail over the sheepish sunlight.

We triumph, quietly, when the kids eat the ugly veggies.

Pizza with Kale and Red Pepper Flakes © Liesl Clark

So, why be ashamed of the slug holes and dark spots on your rotting heads of cauliflower or snail-slimed leaves of kale when you hear this confession and bear witness to our homely ingredients? Embrace your ugly veggies. They’re food after all.

Washing the Grit From Sun Chokes © Liesl Clark

No one’s watching. No one’s comparing their Instagram-perfect patches of deep solstice greens with yours. Bon appetit! Go ahead, share your vile veggies with the fates that befall all winter gardens. Welcome them into your kitchen, unsightly as they are.