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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Poll: Your green epic fails
Let's do a poll: What green initiatives/products have failed you or you gave up on? I'll go first:
1. Using cinammon as ant control. EPIC FAIL. We have sugar ants everywhere. DH had a total meltdown about "living like college students when we're almost 30" and out came the Raid. Ouch.
2. Peanut butter. I tried several different brands to get away from hydrogenated fats in DH's beloved Jif, then palm oil in natural/organic PB. I even tried grinding it myself at Whole Foods. All a bust. DH put his foot down, and the best we're doing is Natural Jif, which has palm oil.
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Re: Poll: Your green epic fails
Mine has to do with ants, too. There were a bunch of ant hills in our paver patio last summer. I tried dozens of fixes including spending several hours one day going back and forth from the kitchen to the patio to pour boiling water on the ant hills. That fix lasted for maybe a week. We might just have to resort to chemicals this summer. We spent 4 months putting in the patio and there is no way I'm letting some stubborn ants ruin it.
ETA: How could I forget about the whole OCM thing? Epic, epic fail. I still have a little scarring from where I broke out like crazy.
Tired after a long morning of hiking and swimming.
I don't know about epic...but here goes
Organic chicken nuggets. I don't know what it is about chicken nuggets that little kids LOVE so much. So I tried organic. Yuck! and expensive. I've tried making my own. FAIL. I think they taste great. But the kids want the processed popcorn chicken nuggets in the bag. The best I can do is not buy Tyson and not feed it to them more than once a week (it's their Friday night "treat" dinner with baked fries).
American cheese......yeah. There is no green version of this. Another processed food that I can't seem to get rid of. I've tried slicing regular cheese (havarti, colby, cheddar etc.) real thin. FAIL.
I finally corrected this one, but I still consider it an epic fail that it took us a YEAR to put in a compost pile when we bought our house. It was even probably 9 months after my boss offered a free bin. I'll be making up for that one for awhile.
We're still using paper towels and Mr.P refuses to give them up wholesale. We don't use very many at all. He also can't find any non-Yoplait/Dannon yogurt that he likes.
Materials around the house - the greenest floor covering that met our needs (quick delivery & installation, not a million bucks) was recyclable carpet. Our garden beds are made out of virgin redwood, I don't even think it's FSC. We're hoping recycled concrete for the patio won't be an arm & a leg.
Minor one - last week we washed the same load of laundry four times.
And both of these, word for word.
Composting has been an epic fail. Unfortunately our stupid Raccoon aka Rocky has made it impossible right now. We are going to have to get a different type of bin, so I have to figure out how to plan that budget.
Meat... I had suggested to DH that we would go meat free once or twice a week... Yeah, that hasn't happened.
The cloths I got in the automotive section at Target to replace paper towel usage are NOT absorbent. They spread wet messes around instead of soaking them up. And they are RED. And they bleed with EVERY SINGLE WASH or rinse, even in the kitchen sink, after several washes.
But there are *fifteen* of them, dammit, and I will continue trying to use them for cleaning until I can think of a better use for them...
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I know my wash gets washed more than it needs sometimes because I'm not good at putting it away.
And my main fail is that I have a leaky faucet.
I only have a couple. Brands that didn't work: Baby Oh Baby Shampoo, it smells like someone's cousin Vinny wanted in on the organics market and dumped his old Dakar Noir in with some gylcerin soap. And a product called Nature's Miracle Stain & Odor remover, it doesn't remove anything, it's useless.
I'm actually thinking of going back to Spray & Wash Gel for stain removal. So I guess fail.
Unpaper towels and reusable shopping bags haven't exactly been a success either. I find I am too busy and not organized for reusable bags. I regularly use my unpaper towels in place of paper towels, but they haven't replaced paper towels. I would need about 50 or 60 of them for me to be able to eliminate almost all my paper towel use.
I've never used that product for anything besides pet messes, and it actually works quite well to remove pet urine smell.
Best sound ever: baby's heartbeat! (Heard @ 10w1d)
last summer about a million flies hatched in our compost bin while we were sitting in the backyard and the flies started shooting out of the bin like an automatic rifle. it was so disgusting and i wouldn't go near the compost bin for weeks afterward.
and ditto pp about drain cleaner. i had to go back to using Drano.
But i'm sorry other girls haven't had luck with their reel lawn mower. We love ours, but our yard is seriously tiny.
I have been doing reviews of "green" cleaning products for my blog and have a bunch of fails with them. One dishwasher liquid wouldn't clean anything at all. Such a waste of resources.
We used eco ant traps last summer (no chemicals involved). I wish I had the package so I could get the name for you. If I see them again I will let you know.
Have you tried the newer ones? They come in different shades and I have heard that the early ones were pretty bad. I don't mind them at all or even notice a difference, but maybe I'm not as discerning about my lighting.
We use our drier for every load, even in summer.
Our CC&Rs don't allow for clothes lines, even temp ones on decks, balconies, or carports. And since we don't have a yard at all, well that kind of excludes the ability to use a line. We pay for the wind power option on our electricity bill, so I like to tell myself it's at least a wash. Hey, it's how I sleep at night....
The biggest one is definitely draino. I live in an apartment, so I can't go taking apart the drain but I have tried a snake with very little luck. There's just something about these drains.
The other thing is less of an epic fail and more of an ongoing argument. I really want to compost and we just haven't done it yet. It bothers me that we don't but we have a small apartment and no closet to put a bin. I've been in my friend's kitchen who has a compost bin and omg it stinks. I just can't bring myself to live with that smell. So we haven't done it yet. But I hate myself for not doing it.
Oh and one more, we try to save energy by lowering the heat in the winter time and we don't use ac at all, just open the windows. But this winter (and last *sigh*) it got soo cold I couldn't take it and I just cranked that heat til i was comfortable. I still feel bad about it.
I try to not set myself up for fail.
However, I'm currently running my dishwasher for the second time today. It finished and I immediately restarted it. We tried TJ's detergent because other people seem to like it a lot, and a local nestie recommended it. I figured our water would be similar so it should work well for us too. No, not so much. It just sticks together in a big clump in our dishwasher.
When I opened up the dishwasher just now, the inside was coated with food particles, even though the dishes looked clean. I'm asking Jeff to pick something up on his way home, because a week of this TJ's stuff is not working for me.
Composting. I'm going to try and move it out of the bin I have it in and into the backyard once the weather gets a little nicer to see if that helps.
We dry all of our clothes year round in the dryer. I hope to change that once we're at our next place, but I couldn't stand the smell if I left them outside right now and it'd take forever for them to dry in our cold dark basement.
The diva cup. I've pretty much given it up for now. I hope to try it again one day, but as of now, I don't think we'll be friends.
Miles (6 year old Maine C00n mix), Boots (5 year old Lab mix), Darla (4 year old GSD/Collie mix), Frankie (1.5 year old DSH mix), Peanut (15 months old - 09/11), and Bean (arriving Feb 2013).
Me too. Unless it's a different product with the same name, I think pet stains is all it's made for. And it is darn near miraculous compared to other products.
recycled toilet paper...DH vetoed it after 2 days = (
Also trying to keep the thermostat at 60, with the vents in the ceilings - at 10' ceilings, it just got too cold in the bedroom at night, even with lots of blankets and stuff
have you tried adams peanut butter? http://adamspeanutbutter.com/default.aspx
we just store it upside down so you don't have to stir it to use it.
My neighbor has an electric lawn mower that they love.
Have you tried CLR power plumber? Its not as green as vinegar and baking soda, but it works great, and its better than Draino. Its non-toxic, CFC free, made in the USA, and contains no acids. It comes in a box. Its a can that shoots air into your drains. You get about 14 uses out of a can. I've found that the drains stay clear much longer than Draino.
DH, who is very understanding of my green products and ideas, has had it with natural/organic PB. Thanks though. He has endless patience, I must have made him try honestly a dozen different brands, each time with "please just try one more!" Several of them I didn't like as well. He was sweet enough to compromise with me on Natural Jif, I'm glad I even got that.
DH is happy with our push reeler mower, no batteries, and no cord. We have a small TH backyard though.
ETA: I also use Draino and dry all my clothes in the dryer
Our HOA doesn't allow clothes lines of any kind though, so I would try it if I could.
Trying to make "green" improvements/repairs to our 40 yr old home. Most "green" materials are way out of our budget so we are getting Corian countertops put in on Monday- at least they aren't granite right?
In college I tried to get my sorority to stop using so many d@mn foam cups- I was the house manager and I bought plastic cups for all of the residents and put their names on them, hoping that people would take responsibility for their own cup, etc. Epic fail, the cups would end up getting left all around the house half full and no one would bother to take them to the kitchen (meanwhile they would just toss the foam cups) it was a foul, foul failure.
Organic lawn care. We tried - oh did we try - but we were unable to combat the horrible thistles, crab grass, gout weed, plantains and black medic that make up a good chunk of the lawn by hand-weeding and CGM.
So last fall we put down conventional weed killer and then overseeded the lawn 4 weeks later. We may have to do the same thing this spring. The hope is that, once we get the weeds under control we can go back to hand-weeding and CGM.
We're also looking at reducing the amount of lawn we have by creating/expanding flower beds.
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This...except we haven't even tried organic care. Our HOA is so fierce about weeds. I swear, let them see one and they're writing you a letter and threatening to fine you. We have a little over two acres so it's too much to hand weed (although much of that area is natural with tree cover and we don't weed treat those areas). I feel super guilty about our lawn chemicals.
Diet Coke. I've completely modified my diet and the bulk of it is organic and I'm locally sourcing as much as possible. We started composting and are growing a garden this year. But...I can not bring myself to give up diet coke. I know it's horrible for me, I know it's full of chemicals and it requires an enormous amount of energy to produce....but I can't give it up...yet.
Ant killer. The ants were so bad in our yard they turned the entire yard into an ant farm and they would attack any living creature who came into their space! The dog was afraid! We finally got the stuff you hook up to the hose and spray out onto the yard..I felt like a god as I burned them with chemicals..then I felt bad. Then we had to keep the dog off the yard for 24 hours so she didn't get sick...oh well..
We lived in Scottsdale and I grew a small garden..a lot of things grew but getting things to produce was another story. So imagine a jungle of a garden...huge tomato plants, and watermelons, big carrot tops..and then..tiny carrots under the ground..and no watermelons or tomatoes. My winter garden kicked arse though...amazing broccoli and peas. I will say that I used a mixture of compost and conventional gardening techniques..I had tomatoes that turned a fancy shade of yellow--and nothing "organic" was working. I looked up what was wrong with them and found it was a magnesium deficiency...a little miracle grow fixed it within hours.