Green wedding rings

It's official - I am addicted to Etsy. Thanks in large part to certain bloggers who keep posting about awesome locally made upcycled clothes and furniture they've found (I'm looking at you Heartfelt!).

Today I found some beautiful wedding rings made from recycled gold and silver from the AnneHolman etsy shop. I mean come on! Are these gorgeous or what?

This made me think that I should finally write the post that I've been meaning to write forever about options for green wedding rings.

When hubby and I got married, the only place I could find making rings from recycled metal was Green Karat. But it turned out to be a good thing as we were extremely happy with the service (we got custom rings designed) and with the rings themselves. The only thing I would have changed would be to get silver rings instead of gold (we chose white gold without the coating and while less yellow than pure gold, its still yellowy and doesn't match any of my other jewelry).

Getting rings from recycled metal helps to dramatically reduce their environmental footprint. It's no secret that the majority of the mining industry is bad news from an environmental and sadly also a human rights point of view. Green Karat writes a bit about this on their site. But that is only one company's view - if you google "mining, gold, environmental", you'll get more information on mining than you ever want to read.

For a ring with an even smaller environmental footprint, how about avoiding metal altogether? If I had known about this company when I got married, I would have absolutely asked them to make our wedding rings. The company is called Touch Wood and they are based in BC. They make the most beautiful rings you have ever seen. Their rings are made from blown down or bug damaged trees on their property and also from wood from a neighbouring orchard and other scrap woods. They also use vegan glue and their website, home and shop is powered by solar power. I just love this company and their rings.
Hubby do you want to get married again so we can get these rings?

Or maybe I need this for my birthday:

Planting

I spent a good part of the weekend filling* my new raised beds with sand and soil and then planting one of them with:
3 types of tomatoes
4 types of lettuce
3 types of bush beans
peas
carrots
beets and
radishes

This is my first year using the square foot method so I also spent some time googling this and learning how much of each type of veg can go in each square.

Fortuitously, one of the search results was The Man Who Planted Trees on you tube. It's lovely.







*with a huge amount of help from hubby, L & C.