So you find yourself with a whole bunch of bananas that you got on sale at the local grocery store and you know that despite how much you love them you won't be able to finish them all before they go bad.  You have a couple options you can freeze them which works good if you are saving them for bars, smoothies or banana bread.  The other option of course is to dehydrate them.  The easiest way to do this is with a home dehydrator.  They are very cost effective and can be used to dehydrate many of things produced from your garden.  That of course is assuming you have a garden if you are interested in starting one there are many resources at your disposal including many pages dedicated to to the topic on this site.

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Disposing of your Christmas Tree In a Sustainable Way

Like many of you out there I put up a Christmas tree to celebrate the holiday season. But when the holidays are done it is time to dispose of the tree and there enters a conundrum. Some communities offer a eco friendly option for tree disposal in the form of a composting or chipping service that will turn that tree into a useful product for the garden. But in many town across the nation that does not hold true. So if the only obvious option you have left is to send your tree to a landfill sealed up in a plastic bag then its time to consider lessobvious options.

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Firewood

If you have a wood stove, fireplace or grill that you can cook with wood in then the first solution is a easy one.  With a simple camp saw you can buck a Christmas tree into usable chunks fairly quickly. I really like this option because I will take my Christmas tree and cut it up and then save that firewood to grill my 4th of July meal over.
There is a certain balance to that I really like. The limbs can be saved for excellent kindling as well, once they have had time to dry out.


Compost Material

This option is another great one if you have pile set up or want to create one. Cut branches are excellent for this as they provide a continuous source of carbon to the pile and they add lift to the pile which lets in more air to help the compost along. You could add the trunk sections to the pile as well but the larger the chunks the longer they will take to decompose.


Arts and Crafts

I like to take chunks of my tree and turn them into little wood carvings, coasters, trivets for hot pans and things like this. To use a tree for this purpose you would want to the trim the branches off and put it somewhere it can season for awhile. This is crucial as members of the pine and spruce family are prone to cracking if worked before they are properly seasoned.

With a little thought you can turn the chore of disposing of the Christmas tree into a opportunity to cook good food, enrich your garden, or surprise your family with your artistic side. The choice is yours but if I was you how could I turn down a opportunity to turn some simple wood into a beautiful item.

Christmas is a wonderful time of year full of cheer, good humor and a deluge of commercial purchasing that comes in all sorts of one time use packaging.  As great as Christmas is it comes with all sorts of pitfalls that can make it difficult to be green and environmentally friendly as you want.  To that end I am reposting a couple of articles about how to avoid some of the pitfalls of this time of year.

When you decide to plant a tree there are many different things you must take into account before you purchase the tree.  You will need to answer a few key questions before you can figure out what type of tree you should plant in that area.

·         Will this tree be planted near a structure?
·         Will the tree be planted underneath utility lines?
·         What type of soils do you have at your site?
·         Do you have enough rain or supplemental water to grow a tree successfully?
·         What is the primary purpose of the tree? (shade, aesthetics, food production etc.)

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