Green Options

It’s a great time of year for trees and kids–all of a sudden, these big, stable background pieces of summer are starting to CHANGE! They’re turning colors, and delicious things are ready to be picked from them, and leaves are falling off of them–awesome! It’s a great time not only to make some autumn crafts with kids but also to read with them about trees and leaves, reinforcing the concept of seasonality, educating them about botany and agriculture, and celebrating and honoring the natural wonders in their own backyards.

Here’s what we’re reading this month:

I think it’s the stubborn in me, but at this time of year, instead of getting a jump on the Christmas season and having, oh, I don’t know, a RELAXED holiday for a change, I feel the urge to really dig down into the autumn leaves and embrace the glories of this season. I live in the north, and so the trees are a treasure to behold, the temperature is blissfully breezy and crisp, and I look dang cute in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. So celebrate with me the apple harvest and my casual cuteness with these thematically-appropriate projects taken from some of my favorite Web sites:

Dear Readers,

In the spirit of the season, EcoWorldly is running a special Thanksgiving theme this week. As families in the United States make preparations to come together this month for the traditional feast of potatoes, cranberry sauce, and turkey (or the vegetarian Tofurky equivalent), we’ll take a look at food and farming in other cultures and countries around the world.

We’ll share our favorite environmentally friendly recipes for local specialties and ethnic cuisines around the world and we’ll also explore some of the environmental issues involved with bringing food from the farm to your dinner plate.

Subscribe to our RSS feed by email to get all of these, plus our regular stories about the environment from writers living on six continents.

The leaves are falling from the silver maple trees today, and it’s my favorite time of the year. Autumn is a terrific season for experiencing with children, especially. Unlike the slowing down of winter and even the dawning of spring, sometimes, the seasonal change to autumn is an abrupt and vivid one–it’s so easy to remember summer, still, but so easy to see the turning and falling of the leaves and feel the nip in the air.

Because autumn itself is so tactile and sensorial, I take extra pleasure in exploring and celebrating it with my girls with some hands-on activities and projects. In accordance with our green crafting manifesto, we try to work primarily with natural and recycled materials, and to support a sense of ourselves as members of a global community; here are some things that we’ve done, that we like to do, and that we’re going to try this autumn:

When autumn, lovely autumn, swings round these here parts once again, so many things start to fall: leaves, acorns, pine cones, temperatures, humidity levels… Although spring and summer get the most credit as seasons for bountiful harvests, autumn has its bounty, too.

Amongst nature’s many freely offered wild edibles, we finicky humans have overlooked a vast number of scrumptious delicacies as we have evolved (or devolved) from wilderness gatherers to grocery-store, fast-food drive-thru, vending-machine gatherers. To our own detriment.

Now, summertime may be regaled as the season for sweet foraging, for then the many berries are bursting with sugary savory sweetness in bite-size bits. But autumn has its sweetness, too, in particular thanks to one oft-ignored tidbit: the persimmon.

Let me clarify: The wild persimmon of which I speak is the American persimmon, Disopyros virginiana. This is not the baseball-size, bright yellow, imported Japanese/Chinese kaki persimmon (Diospyros kaki you can find in grocery stores. No, D. virginiana is native to the American Southeast, though it has found its way out to the Midwest and even up towards the Northeast of these United States as well. Its fruit is much more humble in size, like a little ping pong ball, and much subtler in color, a sort of pale orange blending into rosy pink and purple depending on its ripeness. It is more sensitive as well, hence its absence from grocery store produce sections.

So to experience the wild persimmon, you must head out into the autumn woods and keep your eye up in the canopy or, alternatively, down on the ground for fallen edible offerings. Then you may discover the lovely American persimmon in all its autumn fecundity.

Autumn brings with it many things to look forward to. An end to the dog days of summer. The return of migratory birds like the white-throated sparrow and junco, the specific species varying by location. Earlier sunsets and later sunrises. And of course the changing of the leaves.

Ah, yes, the changing of the leaves. Being a Blue Ridge boy, autumn has a special place in my heart for this reason alone. When the mountains change their deep emerald shawl for the colors of this cooler season, a person finds it impossible not to stop, stare, and swoon at the spectacle.

If you give in to the natural urge (or instinct) to head into the woods as the leaves change in a deciduous forest near you, without doubt you will have another little gift of autumn waiting for you: acorns.

Oak trees are one of the commonest, most indicative and even symbolic types of trees in temperate climes. And when autumn comes ‘round again, they get busy giving birth to acorns beyond measure. Tons and tons and tons of them. So many that even the industrious and devilish squirrels, try as they might, cannot eat them all.

This preponderance, this abundance, this cornucopia of acorns is great if you are a hungry, nutty little squirrel trying to fatten up for the chills of wintertime. But be warned: acorns can be hazardous to your health.

Think about it. With oak trees numbering in the mega-millions, and each one producing mega-millions of acorns in any one autumn brood, we woodland wanderers have potential hazards aplenty awaiting us. Once those acorns are fully aged and ready to “fly,” they come raining down like miniature bombs. And as autumn progresses, they seem to mature from timid toddlers to ornery adolescents and come raining down like teenagers racing their hotrods.

Now that we are just past the autumnal equinox, it is time to shake up your beauty routine to adjust for the cooler months coming. The fall is a time of change. Making small and subtle changes now will help you look and feel your best this season. Here are some Fall beauty tips that are easy to incorporate into your routine.

Nothing says romance like wine. In California and Illinois September is officially wine month. Wine celebrations, tours and events are going on everywhere. It is fitting. To me Autumn and wine go together, especially with a twist of romance thrown in. Maybe that’s why I got married in September. Love and romance is always swirling in the crisp Autumn air.

This weekend my husband and I will be celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. How are we going to celebrate? With some awesome Italian food and a little bit of wine. Ideally, I would love to take a wine tour of some of the vineyards and wineries around Michigan but I don’t know if we’ll have the time, or the babysitter.