This year, why not try a few unconventional valentine ideas that will expand your lover’s heart, rather than her waist or rear end! Chocolates are fattening and the flower industry is often horribly destructive to the environment, so your special eco-friend is unlikely to be impressed with these last minute valentine gifts. (Unless of course [...]
You can grow a living medicine chest in your garden with little effort. The old song says, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Let’s add echinacea, garlic and basil. Most are culinary herbs with poetic histories. All are green medicines that you can harvest at will. The herbs don’t take up much space, if not much [...]
It’s nearly 2013 and I am grateful. After three years of traveling with a backpack through 14 countries in Africa and the Middle East, I am finally back home with my family in the United States. The time I spent abroad stretched my mind and broadened my heart, transformed long held stereotypes into a long [...]
Turn to the ancients for a green building technique that lets you play like a child. Mesopotamian mud bricks still do the job, for free. Mesopotamia was the ancient collective of settlements tracing the Tigris–Euphrates river basin. It spanned modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and smaller parts of Iran. Modern school kids learn this [...]
The authentic flavor of Tej beer made according to a centuries-old process. An Ethiopian friend supervised my making Tej at home. It’s a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. It requires Gesho, a dried leaf used instead of hops (Rhamnus prinoides, a relative of buckthorn). But it’s as authentic a recipe as ever you’ll find, for my [...]
A few months ago together with three enthusiastic family kids I started a gardening experiment: growing fruits out of the seeds we collected from fruits we ate, just planting it in the backyard. We used tomato, watermelon and melon seeds, the kids even made signs for each. Though all seeds sprouted, the watermelon seedling was first [...]
Crunchy, tasty popcorn, made on your stove top, with nothing but goodness in it. My friend was amused that I have no microwave oven. How can I deal with food all day long and not own one? And how were we going to pop the popcorn she’d brought over? The health risks associated with microwave [...]
Now that the kids are back at school, time to go green and continue the celebrations with this back-to-school tutorial. Parents will need to help with this one. This time of year with kids returning to school, many go on shopping spree spending lots of money on branded notebooks, agendas, and bags. But why not [...]
Once Muzer Al-Kasas was able to collect all of the necessary materials, it only took him three days to build a small electric vehicle. Unlike Better Place EVs (which are now for sale in Israel) or any other fancy equivalents, the taxi driver’s inexpensive innovation is a slightly more viable means of transportation for a [...]
Making your raw, home-grown eggs safe for mayonnaise is easy. If you raise your own chickens and have plenty of healthy eggs, like chickens our editor Karin raises, there’s little to fear from salmonella. But for those of us bringing eggs home from the supermarket, that fear may creep into the fun of cooking. True, chances [...]
When Shimrit Elisar travels to other cities, she wonders where to find pizza after hours, where all the “cool kids” hang out, and how to score a reasonably-priced yoga class. In other words, she wants an insider’s look, which is why she was inspired to create DIY Tel Aviv. This alternative city guide is packed [...]
Avatar Architettura decks out a working space for fashion designers with chic recycled wooden pallets. Avatar Architettura has decked out a working space for fashion designers in Beirut with recycled wooden pallets otherwise destined for one of the city’s notorious landfills. Known for strategies that “privilege ecology, flexible systems, biodiversity, and recycled materials in an [...]
MIT researchers say that soon all we’ll need to harvest our vast solar resource is grass and stabilizing powder. While Masdar and Suntech and other solar energy projects are laboring under expensive, high-tech materials in order to improve their energy-absorbing capability, MIT researchers in the United States are taking a different approach. They realized that [...]
Get one up on Rumpelstiltskin by turning plastic shopping sacks into uber-artsy bookmarks. I really hate giving cash gifts. Gift cards aren’t much higher on the “Hey, I burned lots of calories thinking of you” scale. Even when the card’s end use fits the user, it’s still not very satisfying for me (wow, so it is always about [...]
Instead of standard apples and honey, put some creative green thought into your Rosh Hashanah gifts this year. The Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah 2011 is quickly approaching next week on September 28, and for many Jewish people this is a time of gift-giving in the new Jewish calendar year 5772. Gift giving is [...]
For Muslims who cannot grow celebrated beards, this is for you! A brilliant tongue-in-cheek DIY post for making your own knitted, crocheted and sustainable beard.
From a long line of egg farmers, Karin’s dad finally builds her a chicken coop Where bylaws allow, or can be bypassed, I highly recommend building your own chicken coop. Imagine getting fresh, free-range organic eggs every day? When my parents came to visit me in Jaffa a few months ago, Dad found himself bored. [...]
Is your sunscreen protecting you or do you need protection from your sunscreen? Image via Joe Shlabotnik So summer is here and the timing is right for dancing in the street, but not without first considering the impact of the blistering sun. The automatic instinct is to grab the sunscreen and slather it on, especially [...]
Pet owners in the Middle East pay lots for imported pet food. Miriam offers recipes for Fido’s food with locally sourced ingredients to keep him healthy, save money, and reduce carbon emissions. A dog somewhere on the street howled pitifully, all day and all night. Neighbors told us that her owner had gone abroad, leaving money [...]
Every Friday night religious Jews light candles for Shabbat, the Sabbath or Shabbos. Guest poster Debra A. Waldoks sends us this tip in “light” of Earth Day today. Jewish or not, consider the ramifications of earth-friendly candles. My husband called me out on it: He claims that I am “green” when it affects my personal [...]
Purim, one of the most colorful and popular holidays in Judaism (probably because it is a mitzva to get, ahem, inebriated), is coming up this Saturday evening. Colorful because it involves getting dressed up in costume, and popular because it’s fun to see everyone else’s creative costume ideas, eat delicious pastries, hear the story from [...]
Photo of the Dead Sea by David Shankbone, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. We can’t live without salt. That’s a known fact. To satisfy the craving for this essential nutrient, people have fought wars to own it, built roads to transport it, suffered extreme labor to extract it from the earth, and paid high taxes for [...]
Mod your petrol-run car – and make it electric! A lot of car buyers today are interested in cutting their carbon footprint – that’s why they want to purchase both hybrid and electric cars. Hybrids (Karen writes about the pleasures of owning a Prius), are a combination of both a gasoline and electric power source. [...]
Making arks and art out of trash kids collect. This “Noah’s Ark” sculpture above is part of an environmental community project run by Haggit Rich of SafsaPesel in Israel. In her workshops, groups make usable sculptures for kindergartens, schools and parks. Once Rich and the children decide on a project, they collect materials such old [...]
Think Again is a series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. Plus, [...]
Think Again is a series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. Plus, [...]
Think Again is a series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. Plus, [...]
Think Again is a series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. Plus, [...]
Think Again is a series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. Plus, [...]
Think Again is a series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. Plus, [...]
Think Again is a series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. Plus, [...]
Think Again is a new series that provides fun ideas for how to reuse items in your home that you would normally throw out or recycle. Reusing is higher on the “green” food chain than recycling, because getting another use out of an object is always more effective than spending the energy to recycle it. [...]
Awareness of the environment has become a way of life for members of the Eco-Art Village established by the Vertigo Dance Company in the Ella Valley. Now they are ready to share with others their message of environmentally aware, sustainable living. “There aren’t places where you can learn how to do these things,” says Adi [...]
Green Prophet readers know that saving money and composting veggie waste are both very green things to do. UPDATE: the video link is no longer active so we took it down. How about saving money and composting together? Our reader Cecilia Dahari sends us this tip to a Rachel Ray video which shows us how [...]
If you are looking to sharpen your composting skills, banish flies, kill odors, and speed along the making of rich fertilizer for your garden, while running a greener kitchen, City Tree has the answer. This Thursday at 8 at Bialik 23 in Tel Aviv is the First Israeli Composters’ Forum. Bring a notebook and maybe [...]
The winter months are fast approaching, and more of us are feeling the need to look for things to keep us warm – whether it be soup, sweaters, slippers, or socks. And for those of us who are trying to be green, the more we can avoid using electricity and non-renewable energy for our heating [...]