Spring-Clean Your LifeHere's everything you need -- and need to know -- to get your house
sparkling, without the usual chemicals.

Plus: Get a Green Home

Dusting
Using a soft, slightly dampened cotton cloth, work from ceiling to floor in each room. Pay special attention to the areas you can't see, such as the tops of door and window frames, high shelves, and ceiling-fan blades, which are often neglected.


Vacuuming
Clean window blinds and baseboards with the vacuum dust-brush attachment. For curtains and furniture, use the upholstery attachment. To avoid damaging delicate curtain fabrics, turn the vacuum's suction to low.

Laundering
Wash throw pillow covers, unlined curtains, and bedding (including pillows, duvets, and mattress pads) following the instructions on care labels. Send lined curtains to the dry cleaner (check the Yellow Pages for a "green" dry cleaner in your area). Freshen items that can't be laundered by hanging them on a line in the sunshine for a couple of hours.

Plus: The Best

Photo: Gabriel AntoineBy Molly Fischer

Catherine Edouard Charlot's Brooklyn studio contains a lot of the things you'd expect to see in a designer's workspace: bright spools of thread, stacked copies of Women's Wear Daily, a collage of magazine photos tacked to a bulletin board. Then there are the 691 umbrellas. Stuffed in bins and strewn in piles on every surface, they range from black nylon throwaways to delicate floral parasols. Many are half-dissected, their fabric snipped from its wire skeleton, awaiting transformation into one-of-a-kind raincoats, totes, and Audrey Hepburn-inspired sheath dresses for Charlot's unconventional fashion line.

RELATED: 11 Things Fashion Insiders Are Crazy for This Spring

Charlot, 46, calls her designs "upcycled" (a term popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their seminal 2002 book, Cradle to Cradle), which means they're not just recycled but made more valuable in the process. In addition to discarded umbrellas (Wall Street is a rich hunting ground),

By Vincent Pedre M.D.

With 50 million Americans suffering from allergies, it is no wonder that there are so many over the counter (OTC) antihistamines.[1]

A nationwide survey found that 54.6 percent of all US citizens test positive for one or more allergens.[2] Unfortunately, OTC medications are often either ineffective, or cause untoward side effects.

If you are an allergy sufferer, you know that spring rings in a season of itchy, watery eyes, sneezing, nasal congestion and postnasal drip.

In the worst of cases, spring allergies can turn into a sinus infection. These natural remedies can help to ward off the discomforts of allergy season.

Eight Natural Remedies for Seasonal Allergies

1. Medicine at the tip of your fork: It is as much what you eat, as what you don't eat. This is so dramatically helpful that I have to put it at the top of the list. Eliminate wheat, dairy and sugar and you may be surprised at how your sinuses clear up within a

by Green Diva Meg

Join the growing (pun intended) number of people who are discovering CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). A CSA, also known as "subscription farming," is a way for people to buy super fresh, in-season produce like fruits and vegetables and even meat directly from local farmers. It helps the farmers when they need funds in the beginning of the growing season, while offering members great fresh-from-the-dirt produce. Generally, you buy a 'share', and then you get a regular delivery of fresh goodies (usually weekly) throughout the growing season.

There are so many reasons to join a local CSA. Here are 5 good ones:

1. Supporting local businesses: Being a member of a CSA directly supports a local farmer. Our friend Woody Tasch, the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered, is part of a growing (again pun intended) community of investors that believe in the benefits

by Green Diva Meg

Sometimes saving the planet really does start from home. We can make a difference in our home energy conservation without putting solar panels on our rooftops or installing windmills in the back yard. Here are some good reasons to consider paying more attention to how much electricity we not only use, but probably waste and some simple tips to help save energy, the environment and a few bucks on our electricity bills!

The Environmental Impact

• According to The Environmental Defense Fund, 65% of pollution attributed to global warming (or climate change) comes from the generation of energy and its use.
• Coal is the most common fuel for generating electricity in the United States.
• In 2010, 45% of the Country's nearly 4 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity used coal as its source of energy. [From EIA, the US Energy Information

It's fun being green!Kids love to bash, beat, and thrash their toys. Wooden toys not only last a long time through the abuse, they're also friendly to the environment. And you can't deny that they're way more attraxctive than brighly colored plastic items. Here are 5 of my favorites.







Wood Teethers1. Wood Teethers
These are the perfect solution for babies who need to help their little teeth out. With eco-friendly teethers, you can trust what your baby has in his mouth.
Get this toy







Organic Wooden Block Set 2. Organic Wooden Block Set
The simplest toys are some of the best for fostering imagination. This 20-piece wooden block set will keep your child entertained for hours.
Get this toy







Related: The 25 best eco-friendly toys hitting shelves this year


Personalized Toy Camera 3. Personalized Toy Camera
Your child will love pretending to be a real photographer - perhaps just like mom or dad - with this wooden camera personalized with his or her name.
Get this toy











Automoblox Minis 4. Automoblox Minis
Wooden toys don't have to look cutesy. Little boys and big boys both will appreciate

Do you know what's in your chicken?Is pink slime just the tip of the corrupted food iceberg? In an April 4, 2012 article in the New York Times, journalist Nicholas Kristof spotlights two recent studies that have found many unappetizing (to say the least) chemicals lurking in poultry.

Related: Some processors label beef containing pink slime

"We were kind of floored," Keeve E. Nachman, a co-author of both studies and a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future told the Times. "It's unbelievable what we found."

Nachman's team examined ground chicken feathers from six states and China (feathers, like human hair and nails, contain traces of the chemicals an animal has been exposed to). One of the most troubling substances they identified was a broad-spectrum class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones that the FDA banned for poultry production in 2005. Antibiotics are given to industrially raised meat and poultry to make them grow more quickly. This particular class of drugs breeds

Go natural!I've long wanted to try dyeing Easter eggs naturally, but shied away because it seemed so complicated. This year, I decided to dive in and crack the code. And you know what? It's really not complicated at all. In fact, naturally dyed Easter eggs are super fun to make. The process lends itself easily to experimentation and improvisation, and the results are gorgeous. The eggs are suffused with vibrant, deep, natural color, and are sure to lend warmth and beauty to your Easter celebration. Look ma - no chemicals!

There are two ways to approach naturally dyed Easter eggs. The first is to create your natural dyes and cold dip hard boiled eggs until you've achieved the desired color, anywhere from several minutes, to overnight in the fridge. For the beet-derived pinks, I found that boiling raw eggs in the dye was the best way to get an even color. See below for instructions on how to make each color.

The more of each ingredient you use, the richer and more potent your dye will be. For the