Category Archives: Guest Post

How To Design A Butterfly Garden

To those who have never done it, designing a live butterfly garden might appear a bit intimidating. But in reality, so long as you are careful to do a little planning and aren’t afraid of some elbow grease at the outset, the joy of a butterfly garden is well within your reach.

First you need a sunny spot. The sun is important because plants grown better when they get plenty of exposure to it. But it is also critical for butterflies, who are cold-blooded insects. Without sun, they can’t fly.

People wonder how large a butterfly garden should be. There is no single right answer. It really depends on how hard you want to work to create it, and what kind of result you are hoping to achieve. Really, you could put a few plants in pots and so long as they’re the right plants, you’ll have butterfly visitors. But if you want a number of species, then you need something a bit larger.

Aim for ten by ten square feet. Till the soil and then add some nutrients to give your plants a real jump start. Lime is good, as is compost – both of which are available at garden supply stores.

Once you’ve got your garden set up, it’s time to add some plants. What should you add? Well, different species like different plants. You can do a little research and try to maximize your plants for ideal butterflies.

But a simple list of relatively easy to care for plants probably includes: rose bushes (go for a few shades of red), asters, marigolds, violets, butterfly bushes, clover and zinnias. You can add milkweed if you are interested in attracting Monarch Butterflies.

Be sure that you keep your plants grouped together by color. We love butterflies because of their colorful wings, and they love plants because of the colorful blooms! If you scatter the flowers, the butterflies will have a harder time focusing on where they want to alight. Keep your yellows with your yellow and your pinks with your pinks!

After you’ve got the plants up, it’s time to kick back and watch the butterfly show begin!

Prepare for Disaster by Packing an Emergency Backpack

You never know when disaster is going to hit close to home.  It’s a simple thing to overlook as we go about our daily lives, but the evidence that things can go terribly wrong on a horribly grand scale is rampant among our world.  Earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, and wartime struggles are just a few catalysts to force us out of our homes in a moment’s notice and on to the street facing primal survival.  The illustration may sound like hyperbole, but unfortunately, emergency evacuation is something millions of people have to face each year.

Fortunately, you can always prepare for the worst.  If disaster preparedness is themed around immediate evacuation, there are a few things to consider.  First, pack light.  A lot of folks think emergency preparation means going out and buying a pallet of freeze dried food.  That’s great if you’re faced with a disaster that grants you the fortune of staying in your home, but one ton of beef jerky won’t do you much good if you’re forced 100 miles from your neighborhood.  Only pack the things that you need.

Sticking with the packing light theme, pack smart.  Emergency backpacks can surely be loaded with practical tools you may get use out of for years, but what we’re primarily focused on, particularly in reference to perishables (like food and water), are items that will get us through 72 hours – a week at the latest.  Sure, you may very well find yourself in a seriously awful predicament for a much longer period of time, but 72 hours generally allows you get yourself somewhat established and where you need to be to continue.

You’ll also need to pack ahead of time.  This sounds like a no-brainer…it is.  Unfortunately, we as humans tend to put things off until it’s too late.  Going out and purchasing all of the supplies necessary for a good evacuation kit is only half the battle.  If disaster strikes, you don’t want to be running around like a maniac piecing everything together while your house falls apart; you might forget something, or worse, die.  Do yourself a favor, and put your gear together in an easily accessible, memorable location.

As far as the gear itself, we’re keeping it basic.  You need a versatile backpack to stow your supplies, long-lasting, high calorie food, water, first aid, simple tools, a radio, and lightweight shelter.  This guy put together a wonderfully detailed list of all the supplies you need for preparing an emergency backpack.

Remember, pack simple, be smart, and don’t put it off until it’s too late.  Good luck out there!

For Those Not into Weight Lifting: Hamstring Exercises without Weights

The reason why a lot of people are discouraged from exercising is the use of weights and machines, especially with what they see on advertisements. But of course you can perform exercises even without weights or machines; you just have to be resourceful and creative. You may even find that there are exercises specifically developed so you won’t need anything else but just your body movements to execute them.

You can perform the following hamstring exercises without weights:

1.    Dead lifts use only your body weight for resistance. Stand with your feet apart and pointing forward. Bend your knees a little, your arms hanging loosely in front of you. Keeping your spine straight, bend at the waist to lean forward and reach the floor. If your hamstrings aren’t too tight, you may be able to touch the floor. Push through your heels, buttocks, and hamstrings to return to standing position. Do 2 sets of 20 reps each. Progression: do it one leg at a time.

2.    Ball hamstring curls are done by lying on your back with your legs straight and your feet on top of a stability or Swiss ball. Squeeze your buttocks and lift your hips. While pushing into the ball and bending your knees, roll the Swiss ball under your hips. Extend your legs straight once more while your hips are still in the air. Do 10 reps initially, followed by 3 sets of 15 reps each.

3.    Lying hamstring curls are done by folding your arms and relaxing your head on your arms. With your legs straight, bend your left leg and let your heel touch your buttocks. Return to starting position and do it with your right leg. Do 10-20 reps with each leg.

Remember to warm up before and cool down after whatever exercise you do. Work on these exercises regularly and you’ll have improved hamstrings—and glutes—in no time.

Solar Pathway Lights Info

Many choices are available to consumers when shopping for exterior home lighting. Indeed, whether it is choices in finish, material, size, or shape of the exterior home lighting, choices are plentiful. One type of application of exterior home lighting is pathway lighting. Similar to choices in the broader category of exterior home lighting, pathway lighting is available in different designs, whether considering the design from an aesthetic perspective, or whether considering the design of the lighting from the power source design perspective. While some homeowners initially focus on the aesthetics of the pathway lighting, they may also want to consider the power source the lighting uses to illuminate. This article briefly discusses solar pathway lights.

Solar pathway lights operate by utilizing the sun’s energy to provide illumination. The solar component of these lights is designed to harness the sun’s energy during the day and emit it at night. Thus, no electricity is used in this design. However, in order for these lights to function as designed, the solar panel component of the lighting fixture must be placed in the sunlight, so that they harness the sun’s energy. If solar pathway lights, specifically the solar panel component of the lighting, are installed in locations that are not sunny, or blocked from the sun by objects, this type of lighting will not work well with current solar pathway technology. These lights are designed to be installed in sunny locations.

Therefore, if consumers are considering installing pathway lighting on the walkways of their property, and the lights will be installed in sunny locations, solar pathway lighting may be a good option for them. Benefits of solar pathway lighting include that they tend to be easy to install, are ecologically friendly, given they use no electricity in their design, and because they use no electricity in their design, they do not add to the electricity bill.

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Pondering a Future with Natural and Cheap Electricity

Given the current state of the economy and our increasing needs for energy, one may wonder how we are going to be able to meet our energy needs in the future. It would seem that we will need to find a source of abundant, cheap electricity if we are going to continue to grow as a technological society. So, where is this electricity going to come from?

It is almost certainly not going to come from fossil fuels like oil and coal. While these remain among the lowest cost sources of electricity today, and coal in particular may be the cheapest electricity supplier at present, the problem is that all fossil fuels must be extracted from the earth. As the easy to reach reserves are used up, it will become more and more expensive to extract what is left. This is without even mentioning the expense of cleaning up oil spills and other disasters that may be caused by the extraction of fossil fuels. In any case, fossil fuels will only become more expensive, and there is little chance that they will provide the cheap electricity that we will need to power a prosperous society in the future.

As a result, it makes sense to look to natural sources of electricity as a potential source of inexpensive power in the future. The atmosphere and ocean contain huge amounts of energy in the form of wind, waves, and tides, and wind is already a relatively cheap source of electricity in regions where strong, steady wind blow. Much research is currently being done on extracting energy from waves and tides, and we can look forward to much progress on these sources of energy in the coming decades. The sun provides an even more vast source of energy, as all of the motion in the atmosphere and ocean owes its existence to heating from the sun. While the photovoltaic technologies that are currently in existence to produce electricity from solar power are quite expensive, much research is also being done to make solar electricity cheaper.

Because of the existence of so much energy in the natural world, and this energy is constantly being replenished by the input of solar energy, it makes sense to look to this natural energy as a source of cheap electricity to allow our technological society to grow in the future. We need to continue to fund the research into renewable energy generation that will make this future a reality.