Got milk? You don’t have to just drink it. 

Love it or hate it, milk has a place not only in your diet but also in your tool box and cleaning closet as well as among your toiletries. Raw goat milk, in its unadulterated and probiotic-heavy state, is the best to use. But seeing that unpasteurized milk is outlawed for sale almost everywhere in the U.S., pasteurized goat milk is second best. While not all milks are created equally, you can use any animal milk to successfully benefit from these tips. From curing a hangover to tending to those stained linens, milk has got your back.

Appetite Suppressant

To prevent overeating at mealtime, drink a glass of milk 15 minutes beforehand. Milk fills you up and gives you enough protein – 1 cup of non-fat milk contains 8.26 grams of protein – to keep you feeling fuller and less inclined to go overboard when food is served.

Hair Conditioner and Mask

With its vitamin and mineral content, milk works great on smoothing and shining your hair. Rinse your hair with fresh milk and let it sit wet for a few minutes before rinsing with water. You could also mix powdered milk with water to form a paste and then comb through hair, letting it to sit for at least 5 minutes before washing out.

Hangover Cure

Milk helps to settle the stomach, rehydrate the system, and raise blood sugar levels. These make it a great morning-after hangover cure. Additionally, milk contains the amino acid cysteine, which is known to neutralize a lethal dose of acetaldehyde, which is an alcohol metabolite.

Fish Freshener

Place frozen fish in a milk bath and let sit until the fish thaws. The milk makes the fish taste fresher.

Make-Up Remover

Mix powdered milk with water until a paste forms. Apply the paste to skin to remove make up. Rinse thoroughly.

Crack Eliminator

Before you toss Grandma’s beloved china, enlist milk to the rescue! The protein in milk reacts with the mineral kaolin in china to close cracks. All you have to do is place china in a pan, cover it with milk, and bring the mixture to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat to a simmer for up to an hour.

Silverware Polisher

For glistening silverware, take advantage of milk gone sour. Simply soak silverware in sour milk, cover it completely, and let it soak over night. The next day, wash the silverware as you normally would. If the milk isn’t sour already and you want to make your own, for every cup of milk, mix in one tablespoon of lemon juice and one tablespoon of vinegar and let it sit for five minutes before use.

Bug Bite Soother

Mix milk powder with enough water until it resembles a paste. Apply the paste to the area affected by the insect bite to relieve pain. The enzymes in the milk will neutralize the venom.

Facial Cleanser and Mask

Milk is a natural cleanser. It contains vitamin A, riboflavin, niacin, and vitamins B6 and B12. The alpha-hydroxy acids in milk exfoliate the skin, reducing the appearance of wrinkles and discoloration. Use a cotton ball to dab milk all across your face. Let it sit for a few minutes and then wash with water before moisturizing. For a mask, take 1/4 cup powdered milk and add enough water until it becomes a paste. Mix thoroughly and apply to the face. Allow to sit for 5 minutes before rinsing.

Ink Remover

To remove ink from clothing, take the affected garment and soak it in a milk bath overnight. The next day, wash the garment as usual. The stain should be gone. To boost the milk’s effectiveness, mix two parts milk with one part vinegar as the soaking solution.

Body Skin Moisturizer

The butterfat in milk moisturizes the skin. And because the pH of milk is close to the skin’s natural pH, the skin is more receptive to the moisturizing effects of the milk. Pour a few cups of fresh milk or 1/2 cup powdered milk into your bathtub, Cleopatra style.

Dry Hands Softener

To relieve dry and chafed hands, rinse them in milk a few times a day. Over the course of a week or two, your hands will begin to feel softer and less Winter rough.

Leather Cleaner

Dab worn or dirty leather with milk and buff until clean. The milk removes debris and leaves the leather shiny and looking brand new.

Corn on the Cob Flavor Booster

Boil corn with some milk in the water – about 1/2 cup – and the corn’s sweetness will heighten and its flavors will become more developed.

Shaving Cream Replacement

Run out of shaving cream? Nothing powdered milk and water can’t fix. Mix enough water with powdered sugar to produce a paste. Apply the paste to your face, underarms, and legs and shave. This simple concoction is smooth enough to resemble the real thing.

Poison Ivy Soother

To reduce the itch from an unintended stroll through a poison ivy bush, dab fresh milk or a powdered milk and water paste on the affected area. The milk will reduce the itchiness, redness, and irritation.

Sunburn Soother

Delicately pat sunburned skin with fresh milk. The milk cools the burn and the enzymes in the milk help to offset the pain.

Fertilizer

A tip from farmers and seasoned gardeners themselves – use milk as a fertilizer. Milk has been used as an organic fungicide and fertilizer without harming the plant.

Furniture Polisher

Sour milk makes for a great furniture polisher. Apply sour milk to furniture surfaces through a disposable spray bottle and wipe clean. You can also make your own sour milk, outlined above.

Milk Carton Bird Feeder

No, we didn’t forget about offering you a way to re-use the milk carton! Here is a tutorial on how to turn the carton into a bird feeder.

Images: Muffet, Striatic, Sshreeves, Jenny Downing, Gagstreet, Markusram, Robert Benner, The Living Room

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When I first began gardening, I thought Miracle Gro, a fertilizer product offered at most plant nurseries, was what I needed to keep my garden flourishing. It was only several years later that I realized Miracle Gro is a chemical fertilizer that no self-respecting green advocate would ever be caught using.

With organic gardening, I knew that any chemical fertilizer shouldn’t be necessary if you create a healthy organic soil that is in itself rich in nutrients. I also figured that it would be a bad idea to use a product like Miracle Gro not only in my own garden, but because the process needed to create such a product is harmful to the environment, which later makes it way to waterways and creates unnatural and unbalanced algae blooms, for one. I knew I did not want to support such a product.

Being relatively new to the organic scene, I wasn’t sure what I should do to fertilize my plants or if I even needed to. After doing some research, I learned that organic growing is about three things: balance of nutrients, soil structure and biology, with the ultimate goal being nutrient cycling. If you start with a nutrient-rich soil as your foundation, this should be enough to keep your plants healthy.

Even so, you may need to periodically feed your plants. Alternatives exist in the form of organic pellet fertilizer or fish emulsion and liquid kelp. You can make it yourself, find alternatives at your local plant nursery or buy it online.

The post Not Such a Miracle After All: Organic Alternatives to Miracle Gro appeared first on EcoSalon.

Let’s say you have a terrific natural liquid fertilizer, courtesy of healthy llamas and alpacas. It’s free of additives, preservatives and pesticides, and it’s available in virtually inexhaustible quantities. Green? You bet – in the gardening sense, and also in the way you’re selling it in reprocessed plastic bottles. Your product has Win written all over it.

Now all you need is a catchy name to hook the greenest green thumbs. How about…Llama Brew?

At first I wondered: is it just me that feels a shudder of horror? After all, I’m British, and “brew” is a word that we Brits have bonded with at the molecular level, as evidenced by our universally applicable panacea, “Fancy a brew?” We’re hardwired to associate it with drinking. So, just a personal bias? I did a little digging. Check out this eccentrically-phrased “review” of Llama Brew, and have a look at the Google Ads on the left. As I write this, they’re all selling coffee beans. So Google agrees with me. And if it’s not hot beverages, it’s the cold variety – as this DIY beer recipe demonstrates.

It’s agreed: something with “brew” on the side is probably meant to be drunk. (Just look at this headline. Case closed.) When you add the fact that Llama Brew is sold in plastic bottles and therefore looks like a darker variety of iced tea…well, you can imagine how wrong it can all go on a hot summer’s day. And yet it’s so easily remedied by adding, for example, the word “poop” in there somewhere. Poop is a word that it’s impossible to miss with even the most cursory glance. Llama Poop Brew. You’re safe.

This is a great product for gardeners – but of all the things that shouldn’t look like other things, surely fertilizer’s at the top of the list? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a nice hot brew.

Image: law keven

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At first, it seems extremely eco-friendly, the biannual Compost Giveaway Events every fall and spring in San Francisco hosted by the city’s Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC).

Residents are offered free compost to produce soil for community and school gardens and local backyards. It’s the green and organic thing to do.

The problem is the mulch isn’t made of food scraps and manure but a combination of toxic sewage sludge from waste water treatment, green waste, yard waste and wood chips.

What’s in sewage sludge? Stuff that’s foul and harmful to people and other living things.

The True Food Network, which is leading a petition drive against the latest giveaway argues sewage sludge is shown by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to contain heavy metals, pathogens, pharmaceuticals, PCB’s, flame retardants and endocrine disruptors. In addition, organic pollutants are present in sludge samples, such as polybrominated diphenal ethers (PMDEs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, DDT degradation products, chlordadanes, synthetic musk products, triclosan and tributytin.

“Residents may be led to believe that the city’s sludge compost is organic,” says the network. “The USDA’s National Organic Program’s (NOP) regulations, however, strictly forbid the use of sewage sludge as a fertilizer or soil amendment, no matter if it is composted or otherwise treated. This compost is by no means organic.”

The Center for Food Safety and the Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems filed a petition with Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s Mayor and Ed Harrington, General Manager of SFPUC, asking them to immediately and permanently suspend the sewage sludge compost giveaways for the fall. Residents are asked to join the letter writing campaign to protect the health of its gardeners.

Image: SfLatchkey

The post Ag-Caustic! Battling Toxic Compost Giveaways in San Francisco appeared first on EcoSalon.

In late December an important story broke here in California that calls into question the integrity of foods labeled “certified organic”. It’s tragic that the greed of a few operators can jeopardize the integrity of the entire system. Unfortunately, as we have seen with the melamine scandals, when there are piles of money to be made, greed can trump ethics. For some, the temptation to cheat is just too strong.

Back in 2004, a former employee of California Liquid Fertilizer revealed that instead of making a certified organic liquid fertilizer from chicken feathers and fish, the company was spiking their fertilizer with much cheaper ammonium sulfate, a chemical not allowed in organic production. Before you get scared, this is not a food safety problem. It’s simply cheating. Organic farming principals disallow the use of chemicals.

The Sacramento Bee broke the story in late December after the paper obtained documents from the California Department of Food and Agriculture through a Public Records Act request. It’s troubling that the California Department of Food and Agriculture officials were notified of the problem in June 2004 by the whistle blower, but didn’t take any action to remove the product from the market until January 2007.

The farms that unknowingly used the fertilizer have not been charged. They are some of the largest organic producers in California, supplying large, mainstream, grocery retailers nationwide. One of these farms, Earthbound, is doing the responsible thing by testing its produce for chemical residue.

The lax enforcement of the California Department of Food and Agriculture notwithstanding, this issue points to another problem in the organics industry: price pressure. As organics started to go mainstream and become big business, big players wanted to win the game. Large food retailers like Walmart and Target and large grocery chains like Albertson’s compete mainly on price and work with razor thin margins. Larger farms with economies of scale are better able than smaller, more diverse farms to supply the large grocers. Prices go down, making organics affordable for more people, which is a good thing. The farms are under pressure to produce more, which requires more inputs to make the plants grow faster. Yet the farm managers need to keep costs under control if they want to sell to the big guys. I think it’s an all-too-human reaction on the part of the pressured farm managers not to ask too many questions about the really cheap fertilizer they are buying.

California Liquid Fertilizer held as much as a third of the state market in 2006 before state regulators quietly pulled the company’s leading product. And the problem isn’t over. It’s widening. In November 2007, another company’s liquid fertilizer was pulled. And last week, Federal agents raided Port Organic Products Ltd. of Bakersfield. Though no charges have been filed in that case, county records from 2005 show Port Organic has stocked thousands of gallons of aqua ammonia, a common source of synthetic nitrogen.

Organic food has long been criticized as being elitist. The increased availability of affordable organic foods in mainstream grocery stores has gone a long way toward dispelling this myth. Now I worry that instead of a two-tiered food system where some people can afford organic food and some can’t, we’ll have a two-tiered organic system. People who cannot afford to shop at their local farmers’ market and take the time to research the farms and ask questions about the farmer’s practices will end up with fake organic food – that they are paying more money for than they would conventional.

And that’s really sad for everyone – consumers, and the farmers and organic producers who have worked hard all their lives build an industry based on trust and transparency and who now find their integrity called into question. Shame on companies like California Liquid Fertilizers and Port Organics, whose short-sighted profit motives may well damage the long term livelihood of all.

Sources: 1, 2

Image: Kevin Dooley

The post Tainting Trust: Fake Organic Fertilizer Scandal Widens appeared first on EcoSalon.