Vitamin Green

Here’s a blog that features some of the most interesting videos about our environment (both the lighter and more serious side), from all over the internet. Makes for lots of very engaging viewing and proves definitively that a video says more than a thousand words…

Check out Eco Entertainment

Many green resolutions favour style over substance. Here are some really good ones, that put substance first.

15 Resolutions for the Environment That Actually Make a Difference
via The Daily Green
NOTE: Many (not all) of these are very relevant in the Indian context

Businesses and the government may not yet be true believers, but clearly many individuals in India are ‘getting it’.

Protecting the environment isn’t a cost, but a saving…

Check out these Super Savers
(via India Today)

A late update on a very interesting event we were at last month.

Daily Dump, evangelists of composting at home (and designers of these beautiful home composters), came to Goa in November 2009 for its first Annual Clone Meet…

Here’s a summary of what happened….
(via Daily Dump)

I read about cloches on the You Grow Girl website. A cloche can be thought of as a bell-shaped mini-greenhouse that gardners use to protect plants from frost, insect or rodent attacks, provide additional humidity or general protection for plants until they are able to look after themselves.

I’ve been having trouble with field rats that seem to enjoy feasting on the roots of my baby plants. I thought this was an innovative solution to keeping the rats out till the plants are able to look after themselves. Of-course, these are made from recycled soft drink bottles and have all the positives mentioned in our previous post.

These are really easy to make. Take a pointy-tipped  serrated knife and poke a hole in the bottle about an inch or so above the base. Slide the knife in and cut the bottle all around so that the bottom comes away. Using scissors you can neaten the cut edge to remove all traces of clumsiness. And that’s it! Your cloche’s ready to use. Use larger 5 or 10 litre bottles for bigger plants.

We’re always on the lookout for ways in which everyday things can be reused instead of being discarded after a single use.

While walking through the riverine island of Chorao, I came across a house where someone had very cleverly re-purposed used soft-drink bottles as plant containers in an elegant composition on a low wall. One was designed like a hanging basket and was used to grow mint! A third design (not in the photos) was a simple one where the top had been cut-off to make a 6″-8″ deep, tall container and it had the shorter variety of sanseviera (mother-in-law’s tongue) growing in it.

I like this idea because one can create a colourful array (some soft-drink bottles have attractive stickers that can be kept on) of containers at no extra cost, and more importantly, by not bringing new goods into your consumption basket. While I’m not a big fan of bottled soft-drinks, I could just as easily run to my local bhangarwala (recycler) and buy these from Re.1 to Rs. 10 a piece, depending on the size.

Put in a friend’s favourite plant and this makes a great little gift. These containers can also be used to germinate seeds before you put them out in the open.

Garden leaves are usually burnt in Goa. But that isn’t the healthiest option since the smoke disperses ash and adds CO2 and other toxic elements in our vicinity.

As this blog post says, its much better is to compost the garden leaves and use them to ‘fertilise’ your plants.

But, don’t just do it yourself – remember to educate your neighbour and maid too.

Via The Casual Gardener

Ganesh Chaturthi is a very popular and widely celebrated festival in Goa. But the environmental impact of this festival can be very high – the immersion of plaster-of-paris idols, lots of flowers and garlands and so on…

The Corporation of the City of Panjim, along with citizens from the city, came up with the idea of conducting an experiment (in progress now) to encourage people to place their garlands and floral offerings in our Leave-it-Pots instead of putting them into the river. Many little details and sensitivities were considered to encourage the use of these pots (which are composters designed by DailyDump) — and here’s how they finally turned out…

A below-average monsoon has made water an important topic once again in India.

But water shortages are inevitable if our national policy enables large-scale groundwater depletion for ZERO cost to industry.

CSE – the nation’s premier environment investigation agency – has an article that explains the issues in detail and shows how unregulated and un-monitored industrial water consumption is creating community-industry conflict and depleting our most valuable natural resource.

via CSE India

We’d like to build a house of our own someday, and we hope to have one that’s very low on resource consumption – both when its made and later.
Mud-brick homes seem like a very interesting option, especially since we have a friend whose home in Bangalore uses them. It was built by architect Chitra Vishwanath and we love the idea of using old technology (much evolved) today.

But earth architecture isn’t just making inroads in India. It’s a global phenomenon – and you can track it here…