Green Options

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Fall is getting close. The official first day is September 22nd, but right now is the perfect time to get your fall food garden going! This is a wonderful time for gardening, with pleasant weather and fewer bugs around than the summertime. There are all sorts of great, hearty veggies that thrive in cooler weather!

Fall Veggies
Good vegetables for a Fall garden are ones that can withstand cooler weather. Cruciferous vegetables do well. So do root veggies and certain greens. There are even edible flowers you can plant this time of year! Here is a quick list of veggies that love the Fall as much as I do.

In a victory for would-be self-sufficient urban farmers and organic gardeners alike, the city council in Fort Collins, Colorado, this week voted to let residents across town keep chickens in their backyards.

Lovers of fresh eggs and healthy compost will have some limitations on their chicken-keeping capabilities, though. Each residence is limited to no more than six chickens (sorry, roosters, you’re out: it’s your loud crowing that sealed the deal). Birds also must be kept in secure enclosures that are at least 15 feet from the property line. (That’s probably also a benefit for the chickens, though, just in case the next-door neighbor has a poultry-hating dog or cat.)

Guerrilla Gardening is popular in London, where gardeners illegally, under the cover of night, cultivate plants in public spaces.  Food, flowers, and trees are planted where weeds once grew, providing the public with beauty and free food.  Technically, guerilla gardeners are participating in “criminal damage” under the law.

Via: Web Ecoist

It’s that time of year again, when everyone’s organic gardens are booming with summer squash. From zucchini to patty pans, I’m always looking for ways to use up a lot of summer squash in a delicious dish my kids will enjoy.  Ever since I tried Kelli’s balsamic asparagus, I pretty much follow her instructions for any vegetable that is in season. Here’s my secret to success:  I don’t measure anything.

Super Simple Balsamic Roasted Organic Summer Squash

Preheat oven to 420 degrees.

Cut up summer squash into large pieces (I cut a zucchinis into eighths).  Pour olive oil into the bottom of a glass pan.  Add the summer squash, then drizzle with more olive oil and balsamic vinegar (look for low or lead-free vinegar).  Salt and pepper to taste.

My family has just returned from an awe inspiring vacation on Catalina Island. One of the (seemingly endless) ways that the camp lessens it’s carbon footprint is by composting. Can I take a moment and make an announcement please?

I am not a farmer.

I am a housewife from Los Angeles who happens to have access to a computer and an insatiable need to leave the world a teeny bit nicer than I found it. That need does not include turning lemon rinds into bougainvillea. Travis Langen, I blame you, because today I am researching what we need to begin composting. Why? Because you presented composting to my children in such a manner that they are very excited about the process.

Sometimes, you come across a Website that’s just so full of great, inspiring and exciting information, you can’t get enough of it. That’s what happened when I came upon the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index, a database of entries into the annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge to solve “humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.”

The challenge, launched last year, honored its first winner this past June: a plan for a “Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia,” submitted by John Todd, a research professor at the University of Vermont and founder and president of Oceans Arks International. And just last month, the institute unveiled its Idea Index, which provides details on entries in every area from community and energy to transportation and water. It’s too much to take in all at once, so today, let’s look at some of the innovative ideas in one area alone: food.

“Simple living” continues to garner much pop culture hype, sparking books, magazines and a slew of self-help opportunities to assist you to declutter, scale back and slow down. Environmentally conscious and sustainable living fall under the simple living radar, but where does ecopreneuring or running a green business fit in?

My wife and I incorporated numerous “simple living” strategies into our business and life over the years. While our lifestyle may exude quintessential simple living elements — from canning applesauce to crafting holiday gifts — there remains an inherently complex element to our ecopreneuring workstyle. Our calendar looks like a treasure hunt map of lines of travel, Bed & Breakfast guests arriving and departing, writing deadlines, family gatherings, and our son’s home-school group projects. We always juggle multiple, sometimes unrelated, projects.

A better word than “simple” to describe our ecopreneuring approach is “focus.” By consciously choosing to do certain things, we inherently simplify by prioritizing. We open more time to focus on what we really want to do by eliminating (or at least seriously reducing) time drains, including the following:

(1) Daily commute.
With the average daily commute in the US now nearly a half-hour, by working from home, we save over seven days per year driving to someplace, not to mention the fossil fuel emissions of daily driving.

For as often as we do eat, it seems as if most of us don’t think too much about what we’re putting into our bodies. With food production so far removed from our every day lives, it’s easy to ignore where our food comes from and what it’s impact may be. But what we put on our plates has a larger footprint than what we drive. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,

“Livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”

The things we choose to eat can obviously have an enormous impact on the planet and everything on it, including ourselves. Naturally then, our diet choices can say a lot about our ethics and beliefs. They can even be a political statement and a form of activism. I think that every choice we make has the potential to change the world, and certainly what I choose to eat has an impact.

Welcome to the first Carnival of Green Crafts!

For more information about the Carnival, please see the Carnival of Green Crafts home page here at Crafting A Green World.

We’re pleased as punch to announce that the next Carnival will be August 9th at BlogHer, courtesy of Hobbies, Crafts & DIY Contributing Editor Debra Roby. Send in your posts via the carnival submission form today!

Thanks so much to all the crafters who shared their posts with us for this Carnival.  Let’s dig in!

When you go out to work in the garden or the flowerbed, do you go out and dig in the dirt? When you fill up your flowerpots, are you filling them with dirt? When you head to the hardware store, do you pick up bags of dirt? When you think or talk about where the green things grow and the dead things go, is the word you use dirt?

If you answered yes, then I am afraid you have been using a very, very DIRTY word. Yes, you have been using perhaps the worst four-letter word in the English agricultural vocabulary. You have been dissing, dismissing, and dirtying the good, clean, productive resource otherwise known as SOIL.

Or at least some folks would say you have.

This may seem like a trivial question of semantics: Is not “dirt” and “soil” the same thing? You know, the stuff you get under your fingernails and on your pants, the stuff you have to wash off your veggies and your kids. Who cares…dirt, soil, it all amounts to the same brown stuff, right?

Well, perhaps. But a great many mindful agriculturalists, gardeners, and other landlubbers (i.e., land lovers) will take the greatest offense if someone uses the word “dirt” to refer to soil, that complex earthy material in which living things grow and thrive and feed.

Discovery Education’s fun and interesting website The Dirt on Soil offers this very useful distinction:

Dirt is what you find under your fingernails. Soil is what you find under your feet. Think of soil as a thin living skin that covers the land. It goes down into the ground just a short way. Even the most fertile topsoil is only a foot or so deep. Soil is more than rock particles. It includes all the living things and the materials they make or change.1