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Turning your organic waste into useful mulch is more of possibility then you may think. This quick start guide will have you up and composting before you know it. What to compost: fruit and vegetable scrapes, egg shells, lawn clippings, shredded paper or newspaper, straw or hay, tea leaves and coffee grounds. What not to compost: meat scraps, fatty trash, vegetable or other cooking oils, sawdust or large amounts of wood ashes.

When Eric King moved from his apartment in Pittsburgh to a single-family home with a lawn, he bought a manual lawn mower instead of the usual gas-powered kind. He figures he's putting money in his pocket and saving trips to the filling station. He's got plenty of company. Sales of manual — or push reel — mowers with the cartwheeling blades are on the rise this year.

Organic fertilizers are all the rage these days, and with good reason. They can provide plants with a long, slow feed, and their manufacture reuses waste products while putting less demand on natural resources.

Have more plastic shopping bags than you could ever reuse to line your household trash cans? With just a few other supplies, you can turn a spare bag into a kite.

Father’s Day is quickly approaching. Found a product you know he just has to have? Do a little internet shopping and see if that same product is available in bamboo, corn plastic, or made from recycled materials.

For many people, getting married is one of the biggest events of their lives. There’s lots of planning involved, and lots of resources used in the process.

Just in time for summer, the EPA has launched an effort designed to help program your thermostat, saving hundreds on cooling bills as well as reducing energy use. The new site provides simple tips and resources for staying cool while remaining green this summer.

More families are looking right under their feet to ease the problem of high food prices. As consumers balk at the rising cost of groceries, homeowners increasingly are cutting out sections of lawn and retiring flower beds to grow their own food. They're building raised vegetable beds, turning their spare time over to gardening, and doing battle with insect pests.

Do you know how much water your lawn needs? Most people don't. If you turn on your sprinklers two or more times a week, you might be overwatering. Watering too much isn't just wasteful. Deep and infrequent watering is better for the health of your grass.

Energy independence is not some far-off dream: High quality solar technology exists here and now. The initial investment cost is still high, but as more and more folks purchase solar collection equipment it will become less expensive.

Saving water in the kitchen isn't the right thing to do just during a drought. It's the right thing to do all of the time. Getting into these habits not only saves water – it can also make your cooking more healthful and even tastier.

Don't feed your plants without considering how rich their food is. Urea, for example, is the fertilizer equivalent of a chocolate bar, a very rich food, rich enough so that one cup could kill a rose bush. Near the other extreme might be bone meal, the unbuttered popcorn of fertilizers, providing nourishment but nothing to get fat on.

In case you haven’t heard, the TV world is changing on February 17, 2009. Television stations will begin broadcasting only in digital format, and analog TV users will have some adjustments to make.

With Earth Day fast approaching, books on "living green" are covering bookstore shelves like kudzu – everything from the encyclopedic Green Living for Dummies to tips on doing the right environmental thing from actor Ed Begley Jr.

As manufacturers are required by the government to cut down on additional solvents by either reformulating or discontinuing their paint, more low- and no-VOC paint is popping up on hardware store shelves, putting it on the average consumer's radar. Here's how to find the right paint for your home.

The government says that if every American home replaced one light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb, we could save enough energy to prevent greenhouse gases equal to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.

To honor Earth Day in kids' crafting, one really needs to think trash. That is, "What can I rescue from the garbage bin and reuse?" This is no time for going heavy on the non-recyclable doodads, such as pipe cleaners and pom-poms, in our art projects. For Earth Day, which is April 22, consider these crafts that make the most of objects you probably already have.

For the most part, creating an eco-friendly garden involves returning to the Earth as much as or more than what you've been taking out of it. Water, for instance. Soil nutrients. And it can be done on the cheap. Here's how to get started improving your own little piece of the universe.

Springtime is here again, and with it the annual tradition of cleaning house. But that doesn't have to mean bag after bag of garbage. Given fears of a recession and worries about overflowing landfills, there's new incentive to find second lives for many household items.

When Bronna Bodenstein's "only child" Moe D. Beagle has a particularly hard day, she knows just how to pamper him: a few rounds of fetch, a belly rub and an evening unwinding to the relaxing scent of "Rose Petal Pooch," an aromatherapy candle made just for dogs, infused with essential oils and Peruvian balsam bark.

Ideally, the act of recycling would be enough for you to rest easy. But here are eight ways to make your recycling efforts as eco-friendly as possible.

When we asked our 22-year-old nephew Chris about living conditions in Chile, he complained about the shower. The daily ceremony in the house where he's staying involves lighting the pilot on the water heater, waiting for the tank contents to heat up and then completing a shower quickly enough so as not to be drenched with ice cold water from the tiny tank. It might be uncomfortable, but Chris is getting an education in conservation.

It's easier than you think to paint your house "green." Simple changes can save resources and energy — and perhaps slow global warming. A growing demand for energy efficiency topped findings from the American Institute of Architects' home-design trend survey for the second quarter of 2007.

There's nothing like a flood of holiday catalogs — followed by an even bigger flood of post-holiday sales catalogs — to make families think about trying to get their names off mailing lists.