Aside from adding natural beauty to your landscaping, trees offer a great number of benefits! For starters, they purify the air and clean the water, what a positive effect that would happen if everyone planted trees, even if it is for the sole purpose of blocking cold winter wind and hot summer sun. Trees also provide food and shelter to wildlife, help prevent soil erosion and combat global warming.

North and Northwest Tree Recommendations

To reap the full protective effect that trees can offer, it is important to plant the right types of trees in specific location. Evergreens should be placed in the North and Northwest locations of your landscaping. These will remain dense in the winter to block those cold brutal winds that wreak havoc on your heating bill. This also reduces fossil fuel usage and carbon dioxide emissions.

If you have an overly large yard, the trees should be planted no further than the distance of one or two tree heights from the house. This is also going to help reduce drifts of snow from accumulating at your door and driveway that you have to shovel.

East and West Tree Recommendations

The only trees that you want to plant on both the East and West sides of your landscaping are the deciduous variety. These are trees like maple, oak, cherry, birch, dogwood, elm and crabtree that get nice and full come spring. Not only do these types of trees add beauty to your landscaping when they’re in bloom in the spring, they provide a splash of color in the autumn before the leaves fall.

Of course, the most important thing is that these trees will shade your home to help keep it cooler. You will find that you will not have to run your air conditioning nearly as often to keep your home cool. If everyone did this, utility companies wouldn’t have to struggle to provide energy to residents and businesses.

Depending on where you live, you may be familiar with the rolling brownouts that many companies enforce during peak demand times which is extremely inconvenient. Other areas simply reduce energy levels, causing electronics to suffer and air conditioning units to work even harder to try to accommodate the temperature setting. Planting trees is a contagious action! If you do it, so will your neighbors and this act will snowball. Such a small act can invoke a huge positive change.

It should also be noted that it’s always recommended to plant a shrub or even a small tree a bit closer to your home to shade your central air conditioning unit. Believe it or not, the sun affects these units too and they work as much as 10 percent harder when they are left exposed.

Keep in mind that planting trees to shade your patio or deck will make your outdoor living space more comfortable and you’re less likely to have a yard that looks like a blanket of hay come mid-summer.

This is a guest post from My Garden Hammock A site dedicated to the humble hammock with some great tips on choosing a hammock bed for the garden or even to replace your bed

• Make your wedding in an outdoor. Outdoor wedding with full greens, flowers and excellent climates is very romantic than anything. Definitely in outdoor wedding you can avoid place rentals.
• Serve organic foods in you wedding. Ask your food contractor to avoid chemicals in food. Ask him to use medicinal plants and vegetables that are obtained naturally. Definitely the guests will encourage the organic and natural food.
• Try to grow flowers for your bouquet on your own. Start the preparation three or four months before. Make your bouquet arrangement by yourself.
• Give your guests live plants as souvenirs. So that they can take care of the plants for years and also they will remember this wedding souvenirs throughout their life.
• Use recycles gold flakes to make your wedding bands. It would be a grand touch to a green wedding to use rings made from recycled gold.

First thing is to build your eco-friendly house in such a place that will not jeopardize the environment in anyway. There is no need to a super structured building. All the usual modern facilities can be accommodated in an eco-friendly house.

The arrangement of the rooms is crucial to build an eco friendly house. There is no need to have enough sunrays in your bedrooms or living rooms, whereas your kitchen and bathroom need all the available sunlight. So, plan it accordingly. The garage and the store rooms are to be placed in the furthest corner from the sun.

Place skylight over the rooftop. It will save much energy and bring life to your daily living as well. A slanting skylight facing the south west side is the best option.

Consider planting adequate greenery around your house, if you have space for that. Otherwise, you may use some earthen flower tubs. There are lots of indoor plants available in the market.

Your house should have enough windows and ventilators for free air flow. South facing houses are the ideal in this regard.

This is a little knowledge about how to build an eco-friendly house.

Suggested Reading:

+Best Eco Friendly Homes Design

+Guide to buy Eco-friendly Homes

+ Solar Panels for Homes

The concept of eco friendly house depends upon rational and judicious use of energy and the equipments that we use in our daily life.

First on Eco friendly house plans, we may build our house using the fire bricks. These are special type of bricks that are made from the fire-ash emerged from the thermal power factories. We can prevent soil erosion using this kind of bricks.

Rain water harvesting is another good option for Eco friendly house plan. We can store the rain water to use in future purposes. To do this, we need to make the rooftop in a slanting architecture. The collected rainwater should be channelized to an underground well. A pump fitted to the well will lift the collected rainwater to the overhead tank. Basically it is a process of recycling the ground water. Doing this will prevent soil erosion.

Wind turbine for home is also a useful option. Barring the initial cost, you will get enough electricity to run all your home appliances.

Please find more about eco friendly house in forthcoming editions.

Suggested Reading:

+ Best Eco Friendly Homes Design

Conventional paints do more harm than they are useful. Not only they produce different diseases to human, but they are one of the major culprits of environmental destruction. So it is better to use eco friendly paint for your homes.

Paint contains three basic ingredients – the pigment (that gives the color), binder (that binds the pigment to the painting surface) and the solvent (to maintain the pigment in liquid form until they are applied). Now, making these three ingredients and the ultimate finished product produces a lot of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC). These VOCs are carbon-based compounds which are extremely injurious to the environment. They escape from the paints months after application and cause health hazards.

Some green paint company use citrus oils as binding agent. They are less pollutant to environment but can cause severe headache to human. Others use synthetic non-toxic compound that are much safer.

Restrictions have been put to minimize the VOC level in paints. These are marked as ‘Low VOC’ paints and are much safer.

Eco friendly paints are sometimes marketed as ‘organic paints’. This term is very much misleading as there is no household paint that is made solely from organic materials.

Still it is always better to use eco friendly paints for your homes for a healthier environment.

Suggested Reading:

+Eco Friendly Home Improvements

+Eco Friendly Homes Video Series

+Guide to Buying Eco-Friendly Homes