71% of the earth is covered with water, but only 3% is drinkable. Here are some easy ways to reduce the amount of water that you use.

1. Turn off the water when you brush your teeth, shave and wash your hands.

2. Install a low flush toilet or don’t flush each time. My mother is fond of saying “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. ” A regular toilet uses 3.5 – 5 gallons per flush, so this can quickly save quite a lot of water.

3. Take a shower rather than a bath. Generally a shower will use 1/3 the water of a bath (as long as you don’t take those marathon showers I did as a teenager!)

4. Make sure your toilet isn’t leaking. Put a few drops of food coloring, dark colored fruit juice or instand coffee in your tank. Put in enough so that there is a deep color in the tank. Make sure no one uses the toilet for 30 minutes. Check the toilet bowl. If any color is in the bowl, you have a leak. A silent leaking toilet can waste 30 – 500 gallons of water a day!

5. Mulch your garden. Mulch not only reduces evaporation of moisture from the soil, it will also help cut down on weeds.

Small, easy changes can make a big difference in the amount of water we all use.

On Saturday, October 17th at 10:00 AM at the Royal House Slave Quarters, preservation specialists will talk about Old House Homeownership Basics. Bring photos of your house. This is the place to ask specific quetions you have about your home.

Interested in making your older home more energy efficient without changing its character? Then mark your calendar for Saturday, January 16th at 10 at Springstep when the topic will be Greening the Older Home.

You don’t have to own the home you live in to qualify for the free energy audit. Renters are welcome to use the program as well.

This is a win/win situation – you can save money, lower your energy usage and the audit is free!

Check out the full information on the recycling event to benefits Council of Social Concern – Woburn, MA

As you can see, our peach tree has produced so many peaches this year (this is only a small amount of the peaches we’ve picked) that we’ve started to jar them to enjoy during the winter.

We’re enjoying cucumbers, cherry peppers, jalapeno peppers, cherry tomatoes and one of my favorites, string beans. This year we’re also having great luck with basil. The jars in the back are sun dried tomatoes (bought since it’s too humid here to dry them ourselves) sandwiched with our fresh basil under oil. This makes a great snack with a nice hunk of bread. The top jar is full of seeds from our amazing dill plants. Unfortunately our favorite organic farm didn’t get a good crop of pickling cukes this year, so it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to make pickles.

We’ve also started jarring gardiniera or pickled vegetables – a great Italian appetizer. There’s nothing like opening up a jar in the dead of winter and enjoying the taste of fresh vegetables that we grew in our garden.

Talk about low carbon footprint for our organic food!

Even with this summer’s almost continuous rain, our garden is still doing well. Our big excitement right now is our plum trees. Last year was the first year we were able to taste any plums. 2 plums to be exact. Wasps laid eggs in the small plums and ate them from the inside out. This year we research kaolin clay (the base for Kaopectate) and mixed the powder with water to create a barrier so the wasps would decide to lay their eggs elsewhere. As you can see from the photo, it worked! We have a plethora of plums.

We’ve taken to calling them “plurries” since they are small plums but bigger than cherries. They may be small, but they taste just as delicious as those plums from my childhood and I’m having a ball eating them while the juice drips down my arm!

Earth Hour is this Saturday at 8:30 PM. It doesn’t matter where you are, just from 8:30 – 9:30 your own local time, turn off your lights. The goal is to have 1 billion people participate and switch off their lights. There’s been a lot of talk recently around the word “billion” but this time it’s not about money and the result will be positive!

This year we’ve decided to shut off the main breaker to our house so that we will have zero energy usage. How are you going to participate in Earth Hour?

Medford is part of the Minuteman Library Network which means that you can go online and search through all of the books available at 35 public libraries and 6 college libraries. A few weeks ago a client of mine (thanks Jen!) recommended I read The Not So Big House. I went to the Medford Public Library online and put in a request for the book. In less than a week, I received an email letting me know the book was waiting for me. The Sudbury Public Library had shared the book with me! This is a wonderful book showing that bigger isn’t always better, especially when it comes to creating a home that feels like a sanctuary at the end of the day.

Right now Medford is holding its first Community Read project where people are encouraged to read and talk about a book. The city choose Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo. I’ve just finished reading the book (I took it out at the library, of course!) and found it fascinating. I knew that there had been a molasses disaster in Boston, but that was about all that I knew. Stephen not only brought the people involved to life, he also did a very good job explaining the political and social issues going on both in the U.S. and Europe and how everything from the slave trade in the 1700′s to World War II contributed to the disaster.

Libraries have been green since the first official lending library was opened in 1598 in the U.K. Books are “recycled” and read by countless people. Go visit your local library so you can read and go green!

Sean O’Connor, a 6th grade teacher at the McGlynn (an all around great guy and client of mine!) was just featured on WBZ while teaching his students about wind power.

The wind turbine will supply about 10% of the school’s energy needs, saving the city of Medford approximately $25,000 a year.