Yes, that romantic and (sometimes dreaded) holiday is upon us again, when restaurants, candy and flower shops get ready for a very profitable day! Not that there’s anything wrong with that, who wouldn’t want to dress up and go to a fancy restaurant for dinner rather than slave away at home? Who wouldn’t like to receive a big bouquet of fresh flowers or a box of sweets? Well, for the romantic-at-heart, you don’t have to give up your traditional Valentines treats to keep green.

Simply follow some of these tips below:

The Card
Instead of buying a store-bought Valentines card, the most obvious choice is an E-card, which is free (or very cheap), immediate and doesn’t use any paper or delivery energy. If you must go for the paper variety, opt for one that uses recycled paper. Tiny Prints has some adorable ones, which are easily ordered online. So while I’m sending my husband an e-card this year, I’ll get the kids to use some of our leftover computer paper, draw, paint and embellish, and voila!, Dad and Grandma have lovely keepsake cards.

The Flowers
Not that I’ll be sending flowers to anyone (this is actually a hint to my husband), but nowadays one can get green flowers. Florists who specialize in this will have their products come with special certified stamps, like Sierra Eco, which lets you give twice through fair trade or Veriflora. If you don’t have a green florist in your area, here are some key questions to ask your florist or vendor:

Where do these flowers come from?
Were pesticides used?
Do you know who were the workers involved? Were there child labourers involved?

Next: The Romantic Dinner and Sweets for your Sweet

To start off, hopefully you would have used the pumpkin “pulp” to make a pumpkin pie, curry, fry, soup or whatever you fancy. And now that Jack has done his job adding a festive spooky atmosphere in our homes, he can still do more good in our garden.

According to our friends at Earth 911, there are more than enough reasons:

” Every year, one billion pounds of pumpkins are produced in the United States alone, including at least 100 million pounds in every state. Unlike many other aspects of your Halloween experience, pumpkins don’t come in difficult to recycle packaging, which should make proper disposal a no-brainer.

….Pumpkin seeds themselves are a strong source of nutrients, including zinc, iron and phosphorus. These are all great additions to a compost pile, assuming you don’t want to absorb these nutrients yourself in a pumpkin soup or pumpkin pie. So now that you know why to compost, let’s discuss how you do it.

Compost piles rely on a mix of nitrogen-rich greens (which will include pumpkin components) and browns (leaves, paper and other carbon-rich materials). So, Halloween is the perfect time to compost because you’ll have a bunch of leaves falling before winter that need to be raked anyway.

What you’ll be left with after the bacteria take over is a nutrient-rich fertilizer substitute for your garden. You’ll also get two stages of pumpkin compost, first when you gut it to create a jack-o-lantern and again when you smash up the shell in November.

The last benefit to composting pumpkins is that the product you’re creating is ideal for growing your own pumpkins. Lots of communities have pumpkin growing contests in October, so you might as well have an advantage based on what you’re growing with.”

If you’re somewhat intimidated by composting and have never tried it before, the 911 people have you covered, with the best resources on composting on the net. Click here and start composting today!

You really know something is wrong with the environment when things affect you first hand. Take the latest news about the rapid bee decline seen in the world today. Scary, yes. But even scarier when you try to buy honey from your local bee keepers, and they say that sorry, there just isn’t any.

Actually, it was my Mother who went to the local bee farm over the weekend to buy the delicious virgin honey that she has been buying for years. Well, last Sunday the bee keeper bleakly told her that there simply wasn’t any. The bees just didn’t make them. Were they leaving? or worse, were they dying? Are the culprits really pesticides?

So if the bees were indeed dying out, wouldn’t it mean that we wouldn’t have so many of the fresh produce we enjoy today? Like apples? And worse, if there weren’t bees pollinating our plants, how would nature survive?

Entomology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dr. John Burand recently had a lecture called “Colony Collapse Disorder in Honey Bees: The Tip of the Iceberg.” in which he explains the dire facts:

So what is Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)? A beekeeper in Pennsylvania first reported CCD in 2006. The symptoms include fewer or no adult bees, but the hive has plenty of larvae and honey. Surviving bees do not want to touch the food, though, nor do predators that would normally gorge on an empty hive. Historically there have been many large die-outs, but the extent of commercial migration of bees to pollinate different crops has spread the disease all around the country, with more than 30 states reporting heavy losses; some experts predict one-third of all honey bees have died since 2006. Some commercial operations have even lost all of their bees.

There’s no easy answer to what causes CCD, but Professor Burand suggested four main areas that are probably factors. First, stress on the bees from migration and other factors weakens the bees’ immune systems. Secondly, parasitic mites, which live off of, and eventually kill, the bees are a major factor, though these pests are nothing new. Next, pesticides on crops and in people’ yards harm the bees. Finally, these factors all lead to pathogens, like bacteria, fungi and viruses, killing off bees that would otherwise be able to fight off these diseases.

So is there any thing we can do to help these poor bees? Yes. Support organic farming. Buy organic. Its that simple.

For more information on the plight of bees today, check out these links:

Bee Crisis Hits Apple festival

French Blame Pesticide For Bee Decline

Mass Loss of Bees Threatens Our Ecosystem

Welcome to Yurto, the blog about eco-friendly living in the home. Inspired by the yurt, an ancient circular dwelling place built in tune with nature, we hope to explore the ways we can all make a change for the better in the world that we live in – beginning from our homes.

Why is it so important to go green? Al Gore, who woke up the world with his now-famous documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, puts it succinctly:

“…Some of the leading scientists are now saying we may have as little as 10 years before we cross a kind of point of no return, beyond which it’s much more difficult to save the habitability of the planet in the future…”

10 years??? Now that’s a scary thought.  If you have children like me, that’s enough reason to stop procrastinating and do something about NOW.

So from plastic to canvas, wasting to conserving,  lets find ways to care for the earth while we can and live healthier, happier lives.