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Cut your energy bill this holiday season by switching to LED Holiday lights

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We had our first snow last week. That’s a little early for Toronto, especially to have snow that actually stayed on the ground for a few days.

I was taken by surprise by the early snow and it made me realize that we’d better get the Christmas lights out and start decorating the house before it snows again and makes it difficult to get the lights up.

Have you started decorating your home for the holidays yet?

We’ve pretty much switched over to LED Christmas lights. With the cost of energy these days it’s nice to know that LED lights are 90% more efficient than standard incandescent lights.

Did you know that this past Spring Toronto’s CN Tower, one of the tallest free standing structures in the world, got new lights? Yes, they equipped the tower with thousands of LED lights. Now at night the CN Tower is lite up with a variety of colors or pasterns. I think they change the colors and patterns daily. By patterns I mean that on Canada Day the tower might be light up with a flag totally made of LED lights or on the 4th of July there could be an American Flag showing. It’s beautiful. Plus, it doesn’t cost the city very much to light the tower. Only $1000 per month! That’s pretty good for a gigantic public building and tourist attraction.

So … if even cities are starting to use LED lights maybe you should too if you haven’t already made the switch.

A few other things that I like about using LED Holiday lights is the fact that the bulb is encased in a very hard plastic which makes them extremely durable. I’m sure you know how easy it is to break glass incandescent bulbs – especially the ones you use outdoors! LED lights are also long lasting. They’ll operate for 50,000 hours or more! That means years and years of use before you need to replace a string of lights.

As you know we try to be as green as possible with our gardening and the products we use around our home. I consider LED lights a green product because they are energy efficient and also because they last so long.

How many of you already use LED Holiday lights?






My new garden pest

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Well, I missed Green Thumb Sunday yesterday. This is my main reason:

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Yes, we got a puppy. She’s investigating some of the plants in the garden in this shot. As you can see we’ve had our first snow too.

Midnight is a Labrador Retriever pup and as you might already know Labs love to chew, chew, chew. I can only imagine what kind of challenges are ahead of me next spring and onward as far as keeping my garden intact!

That of course will be my goal. Keep the dog happy, but keep the garden looking nice too.

Luckily we have a number of nice parks in the area, as well as hiking trails and we aren’t too far from the beach. So … hopefully I’ll be able to keep the dog busy and happy in the various neighborhood parks and limit the damage that she might do to the garden.

Wish me luck!

BTW if you want to read more about Midnight and what happened after we brought her home early Saturday morning you can read about it at my other blog Tricia’s Musings.

Still recovering from my trip and starting to winterize the garden

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I’ve had a heck of week or three between being sick before I went to Vegas and getting even sicker while I was there. I’m still not up to par but I’m doing a lot better today than I have in more than a week. I think …

We got home early Monday morning and my husband had been wise enough to have both Monday and Tuesday off work. He tried going out in the garden on Monday afternoon to disassemble the patio furniture and start putting it away but it was cold, gloomy and rained quite a bit that day so he didn’t get very far.

Tuesday was a different story. It was very nice outside and while I was lying on the couch still feeling ill he decided to go outside and finish what he’d started the day before. He also managed to mound some soil around the base of ALL of our many roses in order to give the roots, graft and the first foot or so of above ground growth a bit of winter protection.

Hopefully over the weekend we’ll both get out into the garden.

I’d like to trim some of the roses that have very long branches that I know will die over winter. If I trim them a bit I can more easily protect what’s left with a large pile of leaves and some burlap wrapped around the roses. Then when spring comes all I’ve got to do is take the burlap off and digg out the leaves and if it’s anything like previous years there will be very little winter damage to the rose branches and if I’m really lucky the stems might even still be green.

Most of our roses are fairly hardy, but I have a feeling this is going to be a brutal winter so I want to be sure to protect the plants. We lost a few roses last year because we didn’t do any winter protection. It was a mild winter but we had very little snow so the cold, ice and frost damage might have been even worse than if we had had a good snow cover.

Have you begun to winterize your garden yet? Or do you even think about protecting your plants at all?

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