Did I miss something?

Has summer passed me by? Was I asleep? No apparently not. Its June 11th and its cold. I am still in my winter gear and not impressed. I know I am not alone. I have spoken to many people this week who, having switched the heating off for the summer months have now switched it back on and I must admit I am there with them. I have even lit the fire once or twice in the past two weeks. So where am I going with this? Well you can be a little bit wise with the heating if you keep the following in mind....

Do we have the power?

I was at my mother in laws this weekend and we had the usual catch up on what has been going on since we last met. She knows that I have my blog and radio show and asks how I am doing. Somewhere along the way we got onto electricity and the cost of. She has one of the old house meters and has been noticing lately what electrical goods in her house are using the most electricity in seemingly large amounts each time she uses them. Here are the main 3 items that stood out.....

Oh dear what can the matter be...

...well it would appear that my lettuce have taken a turn for the worse as you can see below.

"Lettuce have a look"

These have been growing since mid April and to be honest you wouldn't think so. They have been fed, loved and .... over watered, OOPS! I only realised this when I decided to put them in bigger pots to try and give them a boost only to find that they were drenched and then I understood what was wrong. Disappointed? Yes. Giving up? No. Well I dont know if they'll pull through but I'll do my best to turn it around. I mean I never professed to be a pro at this but I have certainly learned from it. I feel like someone from the Neolithic (but in modern surroundings!) they didn't have libraries and gardening books to teach them-neither could they read but that is beside the point. They learnt how it all worked by trial and error and so will I. Mind you I have had much more luck else where if you want to see....

"I love it when a plan comes together"

I'm always encouraging people to recycle and be self sufficient whenever possible....as if you hadn't noticed already! I do however put my money where my mouth is .....theoretically speaking as cash is not exactly growing on my cherry tree. So the sun came out today, for a change, and I thought it was time I started on the back garden. I have the berry bushes, herbs and other plants ready to go but they need me to dig a trench and get going. So I thought it was about time I popped over to the parents and asked for my share of compost that we have been working on over the past 2-3 years together. I wasn't sure if it would be a success or not. Would it be too wet or even have broken down at all? I dont know why I was so pessimistic as I had followed the instructions, so to speak, all along. I knew that the top half of the compost wouldn't have broken down as we continually top it up and I didn't expect too much out of it either but I was really happy with our family efforts as I was able to shovel out a very nice amount of perfect compost. There were plenty of worms in there and squirmish or not, I knew that this was a really good sign as it's these little chaps that do all of the work 

P is for ....

Have been wondering for a while about recycling plastic's and have always been confused about those codes that are on plastic products all over the place. I searched the web to try and find a chart of some sort to help me with these codes and I must say that trying to find something that I thought would be useful was quite hard. So in the end I looked onto the Cork county website but no, nothing could I find. Perhaps I wasn't putting in the right words into the search engine but personally I think that information on finding anything that help's the environment appears to be non existent. Of course, it isn't, but I don't think that you should have to trudge through the Internet in vain considering it should be a top priority issue. Information should be easily accessible and easy to find. So I rang up the environment department of the Cork County offices and a spoke to Claire Kelly who I have to say listened carefully to what I was looking for and then went on a hunt to find a "Plastic Identification Chart" for me. Within 15 minutes it was sitting in my email Inbox. Result!

What are you waiting for?

What do you see, Planet earth or Home?

I finally sat down this evening to watch a few of the programmes I recorded whilst I was studying and taking exams recently and therefore couldnt watch until now. For most of today I was trying to figure out what I was going to talk about on my radio programme on the environment this Saturday but having watched a programme from RTE 2 on Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth," every other thought I had so far seems insignificant now. I've known for a while now that it is important to make changes in our daily lives in order to help our planet but I never realised how much more of an effort is needed to reverse the damage already done and how urgently this needs to be done....NOW!

Eco Friendly holidays

I've looked at some areas locally that people might like to visit but as always there are those of us who love to travel abroad and so if you want to travel but not forget the environment, there are ways of doing this too. We went to Berlin last year and I thought it was one of the best holidays ever and we booked the Circus Hotel because it had the environment in mind from the work GO!

Circus Hotel, Rosenthaler Platz, Berlin