First Post!

Ok so this is mostly going to be a blog about the different 'green' stuff that I have done, or am going to do. It will also have random stuff in it that I think is interesting in some way or another.
Before I go any further I would like to take this time to thank the person who inspired this blog; my Environmental Science teacher and environmentalist extrodanaire Mrs. Judy Mohan!!! (whoooooo!) :D


moving on:
My house isn't necessarily the most enviro-friendly structure out there, but we're slowly moving towards it.
When we moved in we planted a garden from which we get tomoatoes, pea, carrots, and sometimes, corn, various herbs, melons, and the occasional pumpkin. However the soil is about as fertile as desert sand and it is very difficult to grow much there. So in the past we've used all sorts of chemical fertilizers to help it, they worked...kinda. then we started just throwing scraps of stuff right into the garden: carrot peels, egg shells, the works. My hope this summer( before I go off to college) is to start a compost pile. That way we will have access to a cheap and eco-friendly source of fertilizer.
Shortly after we moved into the house I now live in we had a pool installed in lieu of A/C. A trade-off I cannot complain about. However, the pool tended to be on the chilly side, especially after a storm. To solve this we bought a heater, a big, expensive gas heater. It worked amazingly for about two months...then it didn't. After we fixed it, it worked off and on (mostly off) for the next 5 years. Finally we dumped the gas heater, it was expensive to run and expensive to fix. For about a year we relied solely on a solar cover, however, with our back yard being a wind tunnel, the heat mostly evaporated. Then I started to research other heaters. I came across the solar heater when mindlessly flipping through a catalog. It was cheaper to buy than any other heater, easy to install, and free to run! Best of all it meant that we were not going to have a gas bill during the summer!!! :D My dad ordered it and we installed the day after it arrived. It works amazingly. Our pool is always the right temperature now thanks to that heater.
Below are some pics of me and my family enjoying our pool _the photos are a little outdated, but you can see we use it a lot)






As soon as I get an SD card reader I'm gonna upload some more recent pics of the pool along with a picture of the heater
The next thing I want to do with the pool is find an alternative to using Chlorine to sanitize it. I have read something about a way to use salt and will be looking into it further

oh, here is a diagram of how the heater works (basically the same as what we use minus the conventional heater


This summer I also hope to install a rain-water collection tank for my house. That way we can use that water on our garden instead of it flowing into the street.

So that's all for now and before I end this post here are some really cool landscape shots that I took that remind me why protecting the environment is important







More pics to come later