A few weeks ago, I started to collect milk bottles for growing a herb garden.
A friend looked at me curiously when she asked what all the bottles were for.
She is now collecting milk bottles & passing this easy recycling tip on.
If you get a plastic milk bottle, ( cut out as pictured below ) & put a few holes in the bottom by sticking a sharp knife into the base, you can get plant propagators with carry handles for free.
Also if you have the handles South facing, the plant can enjoy extra warmth from the sun shining through the plastic handle.
Another advantage of using these recycled milk bottle pots, is that you can easily see when the roots are well established enough to plant out.
With the left overs of the empty milk jug, you can cut strips for labelling your pots.
Today was the first time I ever tried blowing an egg. It was a fun & grubby experience.
Firstly, I gently stuck a pin in the top and bottom of a fresh egg.
Then I blew, and blew & blew
Until all the white & the yolk had come out of the egg.
I wanted to dye my egg naturally, so I chopped half a red cabbage & boiled, then drained off the liquid.
Then, I put a sticker onto the egg shell to identify where the dye had taken more easily. After trying this, it is obvious that this could work making any kind of pattern you wanted on your egg.
How to get the dye to cover all of the egg? :- Well, an empty egg shell floats doesn’t it.
So…….. I put the cooled down red cabbage water into an empty jam jar, filled to the very top, put the egg in and screwed the top on. This was left for a couple of hours.
When I took the egg out of the jar, I was happy to see how well the dye had taken. I peeled of the sticker to reveal the true colour of the egg in it’s original form , pre dye.
If you use a sticker to keep some of the egg undyed, you can write on the space that is not dyed & use these for place settings at a dinner party. If it is a drunken party, you can always have a fun food fight after by throwing these at each other!
All in all, I was happy with this experiment. And no explosions or accidents.
My blue eggs turned out o.k 1st attempt.
The red cabbage was not wasted either. Some was mixed into cous cous & the rest went on top of my compost bin.
This is an actual advert from the Soda Pop Board of America.
It looks a bit shocking now, but soda companies have not improved on their ugly marketing techniques. There just not quite so blatant about how they push their products on kids, to get them hooked for life.
Below is the text on the poster.
How soon to start?
Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the last few years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and “fitting in” during those awkward pre-teen and teen years. So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of sodas and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness.
Nestlé is singled out for boycott action as monitoring shows it to be responsible for more violations of the requirements than any other company. ( Copied from Baby milk action.org )
Last night a friend had put a comment on facebook ” Why have a break with a Kit Kat, when you can have a break with a pint for 8 less calories”. Fair point. But I commented on liking his rationale, & that Nestle should be boycotted anyway & it is far better to support your local brewery.
My brother sent me a link today to a CNN report. “Greenpeace, Nestle battle in kit kat viral”.
(CNN) — A video clip which shows an office worker opening a Kit Kat chocolate bar and finding an orangutan’s finger has been re-posted on video-sharing Web site YouTube, a day after it was removed at the request of food giant Nestlé.
The viral campaign, which parodies a Kit Kat television commercial, was intended by Greenpeace to highlight how Nestlé buys palm oil — a key ingredient in many of its products — produced from the destroyed rainforest homes of the last orangutans in Indonesia.
Here is the video:
“The Greenpeace campaign will continue until Nestle has cut the Sinar Mas group from its supply chain. –John Sauven, Greenpeace UK
After watching this video & noticing that the Kit Kat on the video had a FAIR TRADE logo on the wrapper, I went to my nearest outlet for said confectionery, I found that YES INDEED, Kit Kat wrappers do display a FAIR TRADE LOGO. ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING!!!!!!!
I do of course intend to find out how & why they can get away with this. Perhaps Kit Kats are made using fair trade chocolate ( or some similar thing that would qualify them for the logo useage ),? but using palm oil from grossly deforested area’s is o.k. then?
I will do a seperate blog post on this when I have investigated this issue on what the rulings are for qualifying something to proudly boast an item as being fair trade.
You can’t really blame people for thinking that a Kit Kat, was perhaps an ethically o.k. chocolate snack to buy as bearing the fair trade logo, would OR SHOULD make you think that the ingredients were ethically sourced. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and people will consider the logo & probably see how many calories it contains to help them decide if that should be their snack of choice that they want to buy.
The 60-second clip ends with a play on Kit Kat’s famous slogan: “Have a break? Give orangutans a break.”
Give us a break as well. Give us decent laws on food labelling & advertising & let us then, be able to make an educated & informed choice on what we eat, what is in it & where it comes it come from.
Recently there has been plenty of talk & debate on the subject of carbon emmissions, electric cars e.t.c, & all the positive aspects being outweighed by negatives. Electric sounds o.k. at first, but how much extra electricity woud your household bills incurr by charging your car battery & if the battery will only get yo 50 miles or so, would you consider changing your car to an electric at this time. Not me.
Could this car be a role model for future thinking in car manufacturing?
