Guides To Green Living: Book Reviews For Environmentally Friendly Readers

It might still be hot and steamy outside, but back-to-school and fall time are fast approaching. If you’re looking for ways to “green up” your autumn activities, check out some of these helpful online resources for everything from environmentally friendly school supplies to composting equipment and home-canning tips:

Composters.com: Looking to build up the health of your garden soil before the next spring planting season? This online retailer, operated by Green Culture Inc., specializes in composting bins and all sorts of composting-related items. You’ll find everything from outdoor and indoor composting bins, kitchen scrap carriers, composting guides and compost screeners to worm bins, electric and manual push mowers, cold frames, rain barrels and portable, eco-friendly toilets.

Smencils: Back-to-school shopping means buying plenty of pencils for the kids, but standard pencils come straight from trees. The Smencil Company, though, sells what it calls “the world’s only gourmet scented pencils” … and they’re made from recycled newspapers. Made by wrapping newspaper around a  graphite core, Smencils comes in 10 scents: bubble-gum, cherry, popcorn, grape, chocolate, cotton candy, watermelon, orange, very-berry and root beer. The company also offers kits for making your own Smencils at home and customized Smencils with your choice of labels and messages.

Green Earth Office Supply: This online business offers a large selection of school and office supplies, from paper-making kits, rubber stamps, notebooks and printer paper to biodegradable plastic mugs, hemp travel organizers and refillable wood pens made from sustained-yield scrap wood. You’ll find non-office stuff here, too, including recycled rubber purses and evening bags, biodegradable pet waste bags, engine-valve candlesticks, and cafe tables made from bicycle wheel rims and cogs. Its Website also provides links to environmentally-oriented events, shops and other resources.

With late summer and early fall comes harvest time, and if you’re an avid gardener, you might soon be finding yourself with more tomatoes, zucchinis, peas and beans than you can eat in a month. So, if you haven’t tried home canning before, now might be the time to start learning about how to “put up” your fresh vegetables and fruits for those cold, harvestless winter months ahead. There are plenty of resources for home canners, new and experienced, online. Among them: Home Canning.com, Recipezaar’s “Home Canning: Easy as 1-2-3!” and PickYourOwn.org’s “How to Can Anything” guide. Recipezaar’s also a great site for finding thousands of recipes for all those canned goodies, and PickYourOwn.org lets you locate places for fall time apple-picking and pumpkin patch fun.