Andy's Idea Factory

For those of you who follow this blog , our socials (links below), or our YouTube , I've been slacking on posting some of our big ideas for the year because, well honestly, there's kind of a lot going on, to say the least! In a perfect world, with an excess of free time, great sleep, and the modern conveniences, we'd keep you updated here... but it's not a perfect world, and none of those things have been in excess for us right now!  So creating a new blog post or YouTube for all the fun things we've learned, tested, built, tried, failed, and rebooted this year... just hasn't been possible. Instead... I'm going to summarize, like the video above, and if you want me to elaborate on one of the projects, message me or comment below and I'll start there! It'll help me with the motivation if you do! Because I'd LOVE to be documenting this journey better, it's just for lack of time that I don't!  For background... what we're building is the...

In October we posted when we first got our Tower Garden . Now it's time to share a little about what we've learned! A quick summary and recap: What's a Tower Garden ?  First, it's compact: It's literally a 4 foot tall by 1 foot wide white tower with 20 net pots that sits atop a 1 foot by 3 foot 20 gallon reservoir. Next, it's water and energy efficient: A pump inside the reservoir distributes water with nutrients to the plants' roots that hang from the net pots. In recycling the water every 15 minutes, the Tower Garden uses 10% of the water that traditional gardening does. It's also on a 125 watt timer (included), so it waters the roots every 30 minutes for 15 minutes, meaning no work for you, and costing about $4 per month to run. So on to what we've learned - Chapter 1 Seeds and Lights ... For anyone who says they can't garden - either born without a green thumb, devoid of space (apartment owners), or simply without the time, Tower...

Ever since the first time I saw one of these systems, I thought, "yes, one day you will have one of those."  The day has arrived. That first time was three years ago, when the Juice Plus Company first released The Tower Garden ® as their newest product of their short list of healthy living items, and a friend came in to the Yampa Valley Sustainability Council 's monthly meeting to show it off.  It wasn't just me. Everyone in the room went, "oooooh," "ahhhhh." Granted, this was a warm audience - a room packed with gardeners, local-foodies, and health nuts - but we oooh'd none the less. For lack of space in our previous quaint home, we held off even though the Tower Garden takes up a total of maybe six square feet.  But as soon as we moved into our new home in December I knew, come fall, we'd be putting together our first Tower Garden®.  And we just did. Let me backtrack a little; we love  to garden.  As soon as the snow melted thi...

Today was a magical morning; I got to finally visit the local farm where I get my milk, Moon Hill Dairy , which is located about ten minutes north of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. There are four new calves that I went up to photograph, but as always with a working farm, there was more in store for me when I arrived.  "You want to feed one of the new calves?" Were the first words out of Lisa's mouth when I walked up. DO I??   Apparently her mother - new to the process - isn't taking to her calf, as she wasn't "mothered" herself. The poor white calf loves attention like a puppy, and I got to sit with her, scratch her, help her stand up, massage her weak legs, and yes, give her the biggest baby bottle I've ever seen.  What an amazing process, this thing called life! But before tending to Baby White, as I started calling her, there was more business to be done on the farm.  We rounded up the "ladies" to bring them in for milking, leading th...

Upon taking position as Zero Waste Coordinator for the Yampa Valley Sustainability Council , as of today I have made a commitment to not only help Steamboat become the first Zero Waste resort town in Colorado, but to also begin tracking my own waste, my family's waste, and the waste, consumption, and impact of my fellow humans around me, wherever I may go, whenever possible. I currently travel frequently for work because I am coordinating a huge training project for Amtrak trains, educating 8000 employees on better handling customers with disabilities . My work with this travel market over the last five years has led me into much research and study of travel and impact of and on travelers and our planet, great experience which I hope to bring into the world of sustainability and our impact on our precious planet. Yesterday while traveling back from Miami to Steamboat, I thought to begin my mission of tracking in this new capacity. To start, I always travel with my own drin...

I watched a movie last year called "Who Killed the Electric Car," and have carried around a pit in my stomach about it since then. Perhaps electric isn't the way to go, but why would someone eliminate possibilities?  Two weeks ago I watched "Fuel," which was far more educational and enlightening than "Who Killed...", but it still offered up some conspiracies about Henry Ford and his Ethanol cars during the prohibition era that shocked me. My head flooded with other theories about all those who have suffered death or torture in contradicting the oil industry over the last 100 years. And as a green enthusiast since the early 90s when I turned of voting age, I have spent the last two decades wondering, when, if ever, will things change? Then I saw Nissan's latest commercial. A polar bear is lounging on a last chunk of ice in the glacier melt.  He jumps off and swims south, then walks further south, past what is obviously the Alaskan-Canadian-Pacific...

In parts 1 and 2 of this series I discussed the insides and outsides of your body as an aspect of Healthy Living. Read the label of your bath and body products to avoid harmful toxins and improve physical and mental health. Same goes for your food labels and choices and healthy eating, in the post prior to this one on Healthy Eating . But for me a big part of how I live healthy is the health of my environment and my personal sustainability. The overall health of your environment reflects on your overall health. First, I have spent years perfecting our home's energy- in Chinese Medicine the flow of the home is central to the personal health of those dwelling in it. Read up on Feng Shui if you haven't heard of it, but the finer points are easy: remove the clutter, create movement, balance the dark space with light, bring in greenery, and pay attention to electronics (turn them off regularly!) and other potentially energetically harmful items, locations, etc. Such as, d...