Accidentally Green

Making Healthy Decisions That Honor God and Happen to Help the Environment

Choose Safe Toys with These 6 Resources

Are you in the middle of shopping for toys for children? Here are six posts to help you make wise gift choices: 1. How to choose safe toys this holiday season 2. Governing toy safety 3. Choke on this: Certain toys can be dangerous for children 4. Phthalates, yet again 5. How to choose safe toys 6. What to get children this Christmas ... Read more

4 Ways to Green Your Christmas

Are you busy with your holiday preparations? Do you like to work at it a little bit at a time all throughout December? Here are four posts that can help as you start entertaining and giving gifts: 1. Does a green Christmas have to look boring? 2. Is it possible to reduce paper use during the holidays? 3. Hosting greener holiday parties 4. Avoiding holiday hazards Today, I'm linking up with: ... Read more

Totlogic Offers a Safe, Clean Option for Children

When my first child was a baby, I was just starting on my Accidentally Green journey. I had just discovered how harmful certain soaps and shampoos were, and I had such a difficult time finding safe products that were reasonably priced. My list of requirements seemed to be long and difficult to find. I wanted to bathe my baby in products that were free of all phthalates, parabens, sulfates, and formaldehyde. If they could be free of artificial fragrances and colors too, it would be a huge ... Read more

Using Zuvo’s Ultraviolet Filtration to Treat Drinking Water

Whether you have well water or city water, most likely you use a lot of tap water. From washing dishes to bathing, laundering, and food preparation, the purity of water is important from a health standpoint – especially if you’re using it as drinking water. Because there are such lax standards for the drinking water that fills store shelves – not to mention the annual waste of more than 1.5 million tons of plastic water bottles – often you’re better off to treat your own tap water. But ... Read more

Lessons in Rural Living: How Do You Know If Your Well Water Is Safe?

Since moving to the country, my family has been adjusting to life with septic and well water. It hasn’t been easy. One issue that homeowners face with well water is the need to treat it. Unlike city water, which is supposed to be tested regularly, professionals don’t test the safety of well water – unless the homeowner schedules and pays for the testing. According to the EPA, well water should be professionally tested once a year to monitor pH levels, coliform bacteria, nitrates, and total ... Read more

Lessons in Rural Living: A Beginner’s Guide to Well Water

My husband and I closed on our home in the country this past February, and after two solid months of renovations, we moved in on April 1. Since that time, we’ve been trying to adjust to life with a septic system – and well water. Just to clarify, we both grew up in the country and were used to our parents having well water. But since we moved away from our parents’ homes almost two decades ago, we’ve used city water ever since. I have to tell you, there’s something really nice about turning ... Read more

Lessons in Rural Living: Well Water 101

As newbies to rural home ownership, my husband and I have been learning a lot about well water. Before we went into contract on our home, we only knew that we could access water by turning on the faucet. But well rooms? And well pumps? This was a foreign language to us. If you’re anything like we were (clueless!) here’s a list of very basic well terms. Hopefully it will help in your decoding process: Well A well is an underground structure that has been dug, drilled, or bored to access ... Read more

13 Ways to Winterize your Home

Sometimes, when it comes to winterizing your home, you need to spend a little money to save a lot of money. (Free or cheap remedies can help only so much.) You don’t have to completely break the bank, though, in your winterization efforts. Here are 13 fairly affordable ways to make a difference in conserving energy (and money) this winter: 1. Plastic window insulation As I shared from my own experience, applying plastic window insulation to the inside of your window frames can ... Read more

8 Ways to Save Money and Energy This Winter

Winter will be here before you know it. And that means higher energy bills are coming. Fortunately, there are eight simple ways to save money and energy this winter by reducing your need for heat: 1. Lower your thermostat. When you know that no one will be home, turn down your heat. It can be turned down while everyone’s sleeping at night, too. (A programmable thermostat makes this very easy.) If you won’t be home, there’s no sense in keeping your empty house warm. And if ... Read more

How I’ve Winterized My Home

There’s one really rotten thing about living in cold weather climates when you’re on a budget: increased utility bills. Because living a frugal kind of a lifestyle is something I’ve simply had to do for all of my life, any increased expense really bugs me. I hate the soaring prices of food and gasoline. To save money on my electric bill, I don’t run the air conditioning in the summer unless it is a miserably hot day (we’re talking temperatures in the 90s). So when I was single and living ... Read more

How Does Your Fall Garden Grow?

Last year I heard about fall gardens for the first time in my life. I never knew that you could plant seeds at the beginning of September and reap a cold weather harvest well into November. Once Prince Charming and I finally had our own home and space for gardening, we were able to try a fall garden. And while it was still hot over Labor Day weekend, my husband took the spent remains out of our garden - cucumbers, peas, eggplant, cabbage and broccoli - cultivated the soil a little, and ... Read more

Am I the Only Mom Dealing with Neverending Colds?

  Some people adore fall. I don’t. I know that every fall brings plenty of gray days and cold weather. (I’m a hot, sunny day kind of girl.) I know that after every fall, a freezing, snowy winter is coming. And most of all I know that every fall, my two children and I will suffer from cold after cold starting sometime in September all the way to April or May. It doesn’t matter where we live, how healthy or not healthy we eat, how frequently we wash our hands, how much we stay ... Read more

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