January 2009
Greening the White House
by Susan Harris
Have you heard about the "Eat the View" campaign that's petitioning the Obama administration to grow a Victory Garden at the White House? Led by Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International and widely promoted by food and garden writer Michael Pollan, Eat the View uses big names plus great videos and graphics to garner gobs of publicity for this excellent cause - over 450 newspaper items so far.
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July 2008
Did you know?
More herbicides per acre are dumped on lawns than on the fields of agribusiness.
In the U.S. an estimated 7 million birds are killed yearly by lawn-care pesticides.
Phosphorus run-off from lawn fertilizer causes algae blooms that suck oxygen out of lakes, asphyxiating fish.
A single golf course in Tampa, Florida uses 178,800 gallons of water every day, enough to meet the daily water needs of over 2,200 people.
On average, 7,600 Americans are injured every year using lawn mowers, about the same number as firearms.
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June 2008
One look at the product shelves of local nurseries or even at Home Depot will tell you that green is in. We’re in the midst of a media blitz in service of “green” garden chemicals - and that’s a good thing. I think. At least they’ve noticed that we care, but is “green” always good? Caveat emptor, indeed, and the more we know about these products, the better. So, last month, I covered the weed-and-feed advice in Jeff Gillman’s much-talked-about new book, The Truth about Organic Gardening, because it’s environmental information that’s science-based, not slave to any marketing labels. This month, let’s tackle the products with the potential to do the most harm—pesticides.
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May 2008
Jeff Gillman knows all about the hot controversies within the gardening world in this age of eco-consciousness and has this complaint: “Everyone seems to want to pass judgment.” As a professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota, he’s concerned that most gardening information is written by people who follow a particular school of thought and are “unable to see beyond their biases.” So he wrote The Truth about Organic Gardening (Timber Press) to help gardeners “see beyond dogma” about organic versus synthetic gardening products, one of the primary areas of disagreement and confusion. I say amen to that.
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April 2008
LEED ratings for eco-friendliness in new buildings are all the rage in the construction world. The acronym stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and developers are suddenly scrambling to get them because they add so much to the selling price of both commercial and residential buildings. Some government contracts are even requiring them.
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March 2008
Here’s what most homeowners do. They wait until it’s already warm and colorful outdoors before noticing that their yards look like crap and wondering what they can do to change that sad fact. And what’s even sadder is that by then, usually late April or May, they’ve already missed the best time to get their gardens ready for the season, so here’s what you should be doing in March, okay? Early April at the absolute latest! (Late February would have been even better, so remember that next year.)
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February 2008
Rain barrels are a hot topic lately on green blogs and email groups, finally gaining momentum here after decades of widespread acceptance in much of Europe. Their greatest benefit is in reducing stormwater runoff into our local watershed and finally the Chesapeake Bay, which means less pollution and sedimentation there. With climate change bringing longer droughts and more downpours, the runoff problem is only getting worse. What’s more, rain barrels reduce our dependence on municipal water supplies and thus lower household water bills, but is it enough to make much difference?
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January 2008
You may be assuming that you can do whatever you like with your yard, but consider these cases from 2007:
A 70-year-old woman in Orem, Utah was arrested for failing to water her lawn in the heat of the summer. Utah has such a dry climate that only lawns on regular irrigation schedules can possibly comply with such a (really, really bad) law. Residents of even drier Tempe, Arizona were fined for the very same reason.
Police in Toronto destroyed a 10-year-old wildlife habitat garden containing over 150 species, including dozens of shrubs. The law there requires "yards" to be no taller than 8 inches, unless an exemption has been granted, which this habitat gardener had not done.
A Corinth, Texas homeowner was fined for growing tall, drought-tolerant, native and well-adapted grasses instead of turfgrass.
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