Garden and outdoors

Have a beautiful garden and grow great vegetables by composting at home in a bin or container. Compost is the natural way to fertilise your garden and recycle your garden and kitchen waste. This composting guide will have you creating quality garden compost in no time at all.

An alternative method of recycling garden & kitchen organics If you have the space, trench composting is a cool method which involves less work but takes longer to mature, taking from six months to two years depending on the nature of materials used, climate, and aeration conditions. Compost made in this manner will still heat up at first, bu...

Feeding organic waste to worms gives people an effective and easy way to turn food scraps into a rich fertiliser. Adding worm casts or worm tea (liquid produced in the composting process) to the soil promotes soil fertility, moisture retention, and encourages plant growth. Worm composting is easy and fun and can be done indoors or outdoors.

Feed your food scraps to EM bugs. Effective Micro-organisms (EM) are a great way to recycle most kitchen organics (not bones or liquids), especially if you have limited space. Simply place your food scraps in an airtight container and add EM Bokashi to kick start the fermentation process. At the same time EM Bokashi neutralises odours and breaks...

Practical concepts and tips for designing your eco home and environment Site selection Eco building design Mud brick construction Solar power generation Water collection Sewer and waste disposal Permaculture, Bio-dynamic and Organic land use Fruit, nut and native selection/ production Information booklet provides T...

Friday, 23rd November 2007 Meridian Energy announced publicly yesterday that they are going to offer 1-1 net billing (equivalent to net-metering). This means you will get the retail rate for both imported and exported energy . This is something the grid-tie PV industry has requested for years now and it is good to see one of the energy majors st...

There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth - we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species - already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals e...

A number of web based sustainability guides, calculators and work books available to guide your business to becoming more sustainable.

The Clovelly House is a three bedroom, south facing semi-detached residence, with in-ground pool and off-street car parking, in Clovelly, an inner city suburb of Sydney, Australia. The house, designed by Kennedy Associates Architects and completed in 2004, was designed to meet the very specific spatial and accessibility needs of the client with ...

Together we can really help the environment — the more of us that step up, the bigger the difference we’ll all make. One positive change we can make is to reduce the amount of paper we consume. That’s why we’ve created an electronic version of this booklet that you can read onscreen. It also makes it easy for you to forward on to friends, fa...

Video discussing Transition Towns in New Zealand

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something green? Brides are becoming more and more eco-conscious and invitations are the perfect place to start.

With expanded and tougher criteria on toxic chemicals, electronic waste and new criteria on climate change only Sony and Sony Ericsson score more than 5/10 in our latest Guide to Greener Electronics. Nintendo and Microsoft remain rooted to the bottom of the Guide.

A panel of experts discuss how to make the war in Iraq more eco friendly ;-)

Scientist-turned-filmmaker Dr. Randy Olson, is a fan of Al Gore's global warming movie, but asks, "Where are the scientists?" He sets out to make his own documentary about global warming featuring scientists, but the only backers he can find are a fabulously flaky couple who top their list of people they want him to interview with Tom Cru...

Simply Good Food is a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programme designed to supply people in the Wellington & Wairarapa regions with a regular, year-round supply of quality fruit, vegetables, herbs and other seasonal foods. The Wairarapa Growing Company (WGC), a partnership of growers in the Wairarapa, is bringing New Zealand's first CSA ...

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Five laptops and five desktops were rated as the greenest of the year this week by MetaEfficient, a website dedicated to covering energy efficiency in all its forms.

As food prices spiral and we become more aware of the nasties in processed foods, vegetable gardens are making a comeback. And a Kiwi invention is ensuring that even those without the time or space for a big vegetable patch can enjoy the benefits of fresh veges. As long as you have a small patch of grass or a patio area you could be picking y...

Compost is a mixture of organic material and is used as fertiliser. Generally, the ingredients used to make compost come from our gardens and kitchens (food scraps) although organic material is anything that was once living. Compost results from the eventual decomposition or break down of the ingredients. It can take anywhere between two and 18 mon...

Compost can also be produced using worms. This is known as worm farming. It is also called ‘vermiculture’ or vermicomposting. Usually tiger worms are used for worm farming in NZ, though red worms can also be used. Worm farming uses the same principles as composting, but it does not generate heat, making it cold composting. Value is added to the ...

SMART GARDENING Smart gardening uses techniques that are beneficial to the environment and will also save you time and money. Making and using compost in your garden Planting native plants or ground cover Using mulches and drought tolerant plant species Replacing lawn with low ground cover or grass-cycling Reusing rainwater and landsca...

Transition Initiatives are bringing people together out of a desire to explore how we – and our communities – can respond to the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil. We know we don’t have all the answers but we believe we have the innovation to create those solutions. Each transition group networks with their local community on a coordin...

Low Impact Urban Design and Development (LIUDD) is a sustainable living concept. Urban sustainability and health are achieved through effective management of stormwater, waste, energy, transport and ecosystem services. The greening of cities by planting ecologically with local species is also a vital part of the overall well-being of ecosystems and...