Green Purse Alerts
In This Issue
Sign Up
Quick Links
garden trowel
Love to garden but tired of the back-breaking effort required to dig around in the dirt?

Ergonomic gardening tools are specially designed to give your hands and back a break.

What makes them so special?

· Extra padding in the handles takes the stress off joints and fingers.

· Curved handles and ingenious long-handled designs allow you to put more body weight behind the use of the tool so you use more muscle in a less tiring way to get your gardening chores done.

· Various ergonomic hand-powered tools are so well-designed, they allow you to skip the power-tool version that guzzles energy and spews air pollution.

Two companies merit a look.

Oxo Good Grips Garden Tools have soft, non-slip, flexible handles for a comfortable grip. Oversize holes in the handles let you easily hang them in your garden shed or garage. Tools sporting the blue-tinted Gel-e feature provide extra cushioning, a nice feature if you have to dig in hard compact soil.

Life with Ease.com sells tools made by Fiskars. They include a wide variety of pruners, trowels, hoes and pruning saws. Life with Ease also offers a tool sharpening kit so you can file your tools back into life and oil squeaky parts in the event they get a little rusty (which mine always do!).

Both Oxo and Life with Ease tools are competitively priced, especially given how long they last compared to tools with wooden handles that have a tendency to splinter and fall apart.

Oxo is available in many hardware stores as well as online. Life with Ease is strictly sold online.

Want more gardening ideas? BigGreenPurse.com can help you get started. Check out these "how to" tips.
honey
In response to the Purse Alerts! "Feeling Antsy?" column, Faye from South Florida wrote:

"Great topic, Diane!

I live in South Florida and ants are just everywhere.

I'd like to offer a home remedy that worked for us - one that is pet and child safe.

Mix equal parts dry active yeast and white granulated sugar. Blend with honey (no water) until a paste forms. Spread this paste on small squares of paper in ant-prone areas. Allow the ants to eat and carry this paste back to the rest of the colony (and most notedly the queen).

Once this mixture comes into contact with the water in the bellies of the ants, the yeast will activate and start producing carbon dioxide. Ants can't expand, so eventually there is too much gas inside them and they POP!

We've found that this mixture works best with medium- and large-sized black ants. This mixture does not seem to have much effect on smaller ants.

Another great thing for sealing cracks against ants is wasabi paste. Leave it to this Asian girl to figure that out!"

Thanks, Faye! We'd love to hear from the rest of you Green Purse Alerts! readers, too. Let us know what works for you. Or suggest a topic you want us to cover in the next Green Purse Alerts!

Write to us at: info@biggreen purse.com

You can find more environmentally-friendly lifestyle tips on the Live Green pages of www.biggreenp urse.com

By the way, if you want to pass this information along to a friend, just click on the Forward button right below my signature.

Talk to you again soon,

 Diane's Photo
Diane MacEachern
Big Green Purse

Email Marketing by