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Backyard Composting Tips

by Tricia

There are many benefits to composting your household wastes like kitchen scraps, leaves, grass clippings and so on. One of the main benefits is that you can use the compost that you’ve created on your own garden or perhaps your lawn if you don’t have a garden.

Our plants and trees can gain much needed nutrients when we amend the soil around them with compost.

Here in Toronto we have what is called “Green Garbage”. Those who don’t compost can add their kitchen scraps and a few other materials to their green bins for collection each week. The city then combines this green waste with shredded, and I presume composted yard waste (leaves and plant trimmings and such), and gives it back to the residents of Toronto each Spring on certain days. Residents can pick up compost for their garden at special depots set up in various communities on specific days.

We usually try to pick up a large garbage can worth of the cities compost each spring, but we don’t rely on it as we have our own composter in our backyard.

If you’d like to learn how to set up your own composter why don’t you have a look at these videos.

Backyard Composting

Learn the basics of garden composting. Create some great nutrient rich compost for your garden from scraps and yard waste. Improve your soil the organic way.

Garden Girl TV: Simple Easy Compost Bin

Patti, the Garden Girl, shows you a simple and easy way to make a compost bin for your organic lawn or garden.

So if you haven’t already done so, go ahead and start your own backyard compost bin. Your plants will show you how much they enjoy having their soil amended with compost and your kitchen garbage won’t be as smelly!






Filed Under: Garden Maintenance, Garden Tips, Living Green, Organic, Video Tagged With: amend, backyard, bin, city, clippings, collection, compost, composter, composting, easy, garden, grass, green, greenbins, Improve, kitchenwaste, lawn, leaves, nutrient, Organic, plants, scraps, Simple, soil, spring, tips, Toronto, trees, waste, worms, yardwaste

Free blog community at Thoughts.com

by Tricia

thoughts.jpg

I was asked to do a write up of Thoughts.com blogs – a 100% free online blog community.

Thoughts.com was given an appropriate name since it was created as a place for people to share their thoughts. It has since developed into a community of bloggers from all over the world.

As free blog communities go there are a few features that you’ll find on Thoughts.com that you won’t find elsewhere.

Unlike other blogging communities members of Thoughts.com can share videos, photos, music files and podcasts. Registered members can even rate other members videos, podcasts, blog posts and photos. In fact, if a member wanted to be able to make posts in the community blog sections of the site they would need to have been rated by other members and have attained a rating of 4 in order to post. So participation and interaction with other members is obviously encouraged.

I realize that many of the people that read my gardening blog have websites or blogs of their own, but not all of you do. Perhaps Thoughts.com might be a site to explore since you can upload your own photos and videos for others to see. If you were to sign up for a free membership you could use your blog as a journal and make entries about your plants or gardening methods.

The best feature of the site is of course that you can upload so many different types of multimedia all in one site. Other blog related communities or for that matter even personal blogs often need to host their photos, videos and podcasts on a variety of sites and then embed code into their blogs or posts in order to show others what they’ve created. Since you can store all your multimedia files right on thoughts.com I’m sure it’s easier to use photos and videos in your posts or point others to these files without having to leave the site.

Another great feature of Thoughts.com is the fact that they reward their top members with a free trip each year. This year they’ll be taking five of their most active members to Las Vegas. It’s an all expenses paid retreat. You can read all about it on the site but the winners will stay in a 4 star Las Vegas resort, have three free dinners and two free shows awarded to them, as well as having round trip airfare from anywhere in the continental United States.

Now that sounds like a pretty sweet deal. I can’t think of any other blog community that does anything like that. The best part is that all you have to do to win is be one of the most active on the site which is easy enough to do if you are uploading photos and videos, having them rating by members and rating other members items as well.

Check out Thoughts.com if you’d like to start your own free blog and socialize with others. Don’t forget to visit the community forums while you are there.

Filed Under: Contest, Hobbies and Crafts, Items to Try, Photography, Recreation, Services, Video, Web and Technology, Web Site Promotion Tagged With: active members, blog, blogger, blogging, community, forums, free, most active, music, photo, photos, post, posts, product, resort, share, socialize, thoughts.com, upload photos, upload podcasts, upload videos, vacation, Video, win a free trip

Get a warranty from SquareTrade

by Tricia

Have you ever purchased something online from eBay or even a retail store and then later wished that you’d purchased a warranty for the item? Or perhaps you are like my husband and I and you purchased an item but the extra warranty offered by the store was just so expensive that you balked at paying such a high price for coverage that you might not ever use?

That’s right. Chris and I purchased an HD video camera and a Digital SLR camera from Best Buy this past Sunday. The two items and accessories cost us well over $3000. We were offered extended warranties for both items, but do you know how much those extended warranties would have cost us if we’d purchased them? Close to $800! That’s almost a quarter of the price that we paid in total for the two electronic items! Geez! We could get a new washer, dryer or even a desktop computer for that price!

This is where Square Trade comes in. SquareTrade offers warranties on electronics and appliances at 30 to 50% below retail. It doesn’t matter if you purchased your electronic item or appliance online or in a retail store you can get a warranty for the item.

Now if Best Buy had offered their extended warranty at half the price that I just told you about we might have purchased it. It’s there loss I suppose. Now that I know about SquareTrade I’ve looked into the warranties that they offer for the two items that we purchased and the warranty prices really are about half the price of what we were offered at the retail store on Sunday.

The website states that warranty claims are served within five days and that they do not charge for deductibles. You can also cancel or trade your warranty at any time.

The site looks pretty easy to use. Go to the main page of the site and click on the “Get a Care Plan” button, or the “Get a warranty” button at the top of the page.

There are two columns on the page that you are brought. One if for an item purchased from a retail store and the other is for an item purchased from eBay. Pick the correct button and begin filling out information as to what product you purchased as well as the purchase price and date if you bought from a retail store, or simply fill in the eBay product number if you bought from eBay.

Once you fill out your information you’ll be offered a warranty for the item. Once you’ve read the information on what you are being offered you can purchase the warranty.

If you do purchase warranties through SquareTrade you’ll be able to manage your warranties and any claims you make towards those warranties online via the SquareTrade system.

SquareTrade covers items purchased from online and offline stores such as Amazon, Dell, Sears, BestBuy, Circuit City and many more. Plus, you can buy warranties for any times that you purchased in 2007. It doesn’t have to be a recent purchase as far as I can tell.

Warranties are only available to buyers in the USA at this time. Being in Canada I won’t get to try out the SquareTrade service, but if you are a US resident you might want to take a look at what they have to offer and decide if purchasing a warranty via SquareTrade is right for you.

Filed Under: Great Sites, Home and Lifestyle, Photography, Recreation, Services, Shopping, Video Tagged With: 30 to 50 off warranty, appliances, bought, care plan, consumer electronics, discounted warranty, Ebay, information, items, price, product, purchase, purchased, purchased online, purchased retail, Shopping, Warranty

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