Green Your Home and Garden

Compost kitchen and garden waste, or give it to a friend who can.

Spring / Sumer Energy Tips!

Look for ENERGY STAR air conditioners. They are the most energy efficient models on the market.
Replacing your old central air conditioner with a new ENERGY STAR qualified model can reduce your cooling costs by 20 percent.
If possible, keep your room air conditioner out of the sun. Room air conditioners work best when kept cool. Installing one in a north-facing wall is usually ideal.
If you have central air conditioning, keep your thermostat at 78 degrees. You can also save approximately an additional six to seven percent off your cooling costs for each degree above 78.

Five Green Home Tips, Under $100

The economy is rough right now. Everyone is scrambling to save money and going green is a good way to do that, but a lot of us can't scrape the capital together to install triple pane windows, a complex rainwater storage system or radiant floor heating. Those folks who renovate their houses on the various Planet Green television shows have a lot of going-green dough. Many of us are just happy to get the bills paid on time. How can people living in these hard economic times go green without going broke?

2009 Home Tax Incentives, From Hot to Cold

STILL looking for ways to lower your taxes? Greening your home means you can get more greenbacks in return. The stimulus plan approved by Congress in February offers tax credits for making your home more energy efficient. For tax tips, the Green Home turned to Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit group that advocated some of these credits.

Your Organic Garden

It is a good reason for organic healthy gardening. Risks to pets, people and the environment are just beginning to be understood. It takes a little planning to become an organic farmer. Typical garden problems need to be proactively managed as opposed to correcting them after they happen. Toxic chemicals and pesticides can build up in your system or have long-term effects on your health. For example, pesticide exposure has been linked to nerve damage, cancer and birth defects.

California Legislator, Growers Prepare Dueling Plans to Prevent
E. Coli Outbreaks

State Sen. Dean Florez plans to introduce a bill Feb. 1 that calls for a system to track produce from fields to store shelves and forces growers to further protect crops from contaminated water and stray animals that can spread bacteria. The legislation is proving to be a hard sell to state farmers who could have their crops condemned if they're caught violating its rules.

Making Your Home Green

Everywhere you turn these days, there go those buzzwords again: green, eco, organic, sustainable, renewable, alternative, recycled, reused. And it's not just Al Gore and Whole Foods Market and Mother Earth News and a bunch of long-haired, tofu-loving guys wearing Birkenstocks and obsessed with Armageddon doing the talking. The conversation now has entered bastions of Middle America - places like Target, The Home Depot and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., all of which are making a major green push. Add to that an ever-growing buzz over global warming, carbon footprints, China's thirst for oil, a nuclear renaissance and the plight of the polar bear. But what's the average homeowner to do to make any sort of difference?

At Home & Garden

Tips From The EPA

Making small changes in your home and yard can lead to big reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and can even save you money. Explore our list of eight simple steps you can take around the house and yard to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: Change a light, and you help change the world. Replace the conventional bulbs in your 5 most frequently used light fixtures with bulbs that have the ENERGY STAR qualified options and you will help the environment while saving money on energy bills. If every household in the U.S. took this one simple action we would prevent more than 1 trillion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

Montana will lose all the glaciers in Glacier National Park by 2070 if their retreat continues at the current rate.

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