At Last New Homemade Compost Bins

Aah, we love our garden compost here at Casa Dirty Boots.  But, the one thing we don’t – well didn’t love was our compost bins.  Oh they were fine and dandy when first created.  In fact we were rather smug that we’d used scraps of wood from the house that were good for little else to make them. Five years on though and what once was merely wood-wormed was starting to dissolve a little.  The whole bin arrangement needed reinforcements to keep it all dog proof (essential when you are composting humanure).    I shuffled some spare blocks that had […]

Frugal Sustainable Gift Wrapping

Today we have something a little out of the ordinary at the kind of Self Sufficient Life; a guest post from Kate Willson about helping achieve a frugal gift giving season this year.  So over to Kate: Christmas is fast approaching, and as some of you may know, sometimes buying the wrapping paper can cost as much as the actual gifts. To save money this season and continue with your mission to live green, below are some great and cheap ways to package your gifts this Christmas. Old Gift Bags/Wrapping paper—The easiest way to save and be green is to simply reuse old […]

Green Energy from Insects – The Carnivorous Clock

Okay so killing insects is somewhat of an odd “green” thing.  But the other night we just wanted to zonk out in front of the TV.  An episode of “Wallace & Gromit’s World of Invention” was on.  I have to admit I was pretty skeptical about stop motion animation trying to be educational. But I was wrong. We were shown an insect powered clock.  Now obviously clocks don’t use that much power.  But still seeing a very large fly paper feeding insects into something that is supposedly a battery was a little on the mind blowing side.  Not because we […]