Easy on the salt
Avoid rock salt or sodium chloride for deicing paths next to garden beds. The salts can seriously damage trees, shrubs, ground covers and dormant plants.
Use deicers containing potassium chloride or magnesium chloride.
Minimize salt use by laying it before a storm, when smaller quantities are effective. Heavily salted beds should be watered when temperatures rise.
How to go green
*A two-stroke, gasoline-powered lawnmower releases as many hydrocarbons into the atmosphere in 30 minutes as a car does in 90 minutes.
Switch to an electric mower, which costs 8 to 10 a year to operate.
*An LCD flat panel TV uses as little as a third of the electricity of conventional tube-based models, saving you on your power bill the equivalent of leaving a 50-watt bulb on all year.
*Buying organic produce grown within 100 miles of your home will help reduce the amount of diesel fuel needed to ship food.
*If you feel woozy after painting the bedroom with latex-based enamel, choose a product low in volatile organic compounds (VOCs) instead. New designer colors and improved quality make these safer paints equivalent to standard ones and they benefit your health as well as the planet's.
*Manufacturers of low-flow toilets use advanced computer modeling to deliver more flush power with less water, trimming around 90 from your annual water costs.
*Like to linger in a hot shower? Stand under your shower guilt-free with a solar hot water system. A solar water heater cuts around 12 percent off the average household's monthly electric bill.
*Replacing old light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones can trim 5 percent from your monthly electricity bill. But this doesn't mean you have to live beneath the ugly glow of low-end fluorescent bulbs. Go for the premium fluorescents that cast a pure white or buttery golden light across your interior.
*Local recycling practices vary, but there are some universal no-nos. Don't put plastic shopping bags, light bulbs, broken glass or food scraps in your bin.
*Skip the pesticides and use nature's method of bug-eradication: other animals.
Install birdhouses to shelter feathered friends who dine on pesky beetles and grubs.
This will download to your computer a computer braille ASCII file of the current story translated into grade 2 braille. This file may be sent to any standard braille embosser.
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