By Lucille Chi •
October 29, 2009
3 Rivers Eco Lodge is an enchanted sustainable hotel encampment consisting of hillside terraced cottages. Rainforest preservation, indigenous tree planting programs and organic gardens are at the heart of this green resort.
Retreat features include:
- solar water heaters
- self composting toilets
- biodegradable, locally made soaps and furnishings
- environmental education through conservation
- a yoga studio
- indigenous tree planting projects
- green globe info
- organic gardens
- rainforest preservation
By Lucille Chi •
October 28, 2009
Coco Eco is an award winning bed and breakfast named both after the area it is located (Coconut Well, Australia) and the ecological principles that it embraces such as:
- solar powered facilities
- black & grey water recycled and purified in Wastewatergarden®.
- plantation & recycled timbers
- solar passive design principles
- building footprints designed to minimize impact on local flora and fauna
- reduced use of chemicals & PVC products
- recycling programs
- organic vegetable garden & free range eggs
By Lucille Chi •
August 17, 2009
City Dirt is a brilliant urban gardening blog. The founder will be publishing the book A Little Piece of Earth this coming winter. Don’t wait to start planting some seeds now and have fun experimenting with growing food in small spaces. It is truly possible!
When Michelle Obama announced plans for a White House kitchen garden, local foodies, gardeners, and health advocates rejoiced: what better way to promote the value of home-grown food than get the first family involved. It turns out that the Obamas aren’t the only executive family growing vegetables on the grounds of the official residence: a number of governors and their spouses have taken up the cause of not just planting vegetables, but also implementing more sustainable landscaping practices at governors’ mansions and even state capitols.
By Lucille Chi •
July 25, 2009
There is a brilliant sustainability series on urban gardening (Alive Structures and roof garden tutorials will be featured) in New York City this summer put on by a non-profit called New York Restoration Project. There will be four talks, every other Thursday from 7 pm to 8 pm, in NYPC’s Toyota Children’s Learning Garden. All of them are open to the public.
Where? Toyota Sustainable Summer Series Toyota Children’s Learning Garden 603 East 11th Street, New York, NY
When? July 30, 2009 from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
What? Sarah Seigal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. She will give a short garden tour and speak about the garden design, specifically the shade tolerant planting palette she created for this garden.
What else? Refreshments at the end of each event.
NYRP works exclusively in New York City managing community gardens to help ensure their liveliness in each community. Keep reading for more details on the series in August and beyond…
By Vanessa Brown •
July 7, 2009
We recently moved into a new home where landscaping needs to be done–and soon to meet HOA guidelines. However, I am completely lost and confused with all the options and don’t know the best decision. Whatever we do choose it needs to meet these guidelines:
1. Be safe for my children and pets
2. Be environmental friendly
3. Work with the dry climate of Utah
4. Be affordable
5. Not have much upkeep since I am the one in charge of the lawn care in my home
After much research this is what I have learned and hopefully it will help me make a decision!
By Susan Kraemer •
June 4, 2009
Steel is just about the most recyclable building material on earth. You could be well reading this in an office building built with steel originally smelted from iron in Julius Caesars day. So it makes good green sense to build eco prefab houses with steel.
By Lucille Chi •
May 3, 2009
Inhabitat shares a great set of stories on Alive Structures: a Brooklyn based green roofing collective. Together, with the most creative native gardeners in the city, Alive Structures will be giving tours of their rooftop gardens at NYC wildflower week. All those in the greater New York area make sure to stop by to explore this exciting dimension of the greening of cities.
City roof gardens create a nice natural habitat for pollinators and migrating species, and additionally “they provide open green spaces for property owners and the public to enjoy.” Green roofs are known to improve air and water quality, lessen storm-water runoff, lower building energy consumption, and reduce urban heat island affect.
Green roofs are constructed as a series of layers including:
- a waterproof membrane
- a root barrier
- drainage mat
- an erosion control fabric
- lightweight engineered soil, and vegetation.
By Lucille Chi •
April 26, 2009
The GreenRoofs.org “Green Roofs for Healthy Cities” Conference is on the horizon in Atlanta this coming June 2009! It is just ideal for:
- those interested in creating Green Roofs.
- studying the future of Vertical Gardens/Green Walls.
- raising awareness for green roofs and living walls (vertical gardens).
- engineers, architects, landscape architects, landscape designers, property managers, developers, roofing contractors, and students.
- anyone interested who wants a 2-day crash course in green roofs and all the beautiful benefits they bring to cities.
- creative city gardeners of all sorts.
“Green roofs are an important component of green infrastructure. They provide valuable public benefits related to stormwater management, reduction of the urban heat island, improvement of air quality (including removal of particulate matter), and general improvement of the quality of life in communities.” ~GreenRoofs.org
Earth Day provides us with an opportunity to both reflect and act on our desire to use the planet’s resources in a sustainable manner. As we’ve noted in numerous posts, water may be the one resource we should focus on more, individually and collectively. No doubt, many of you have water-saving activities planned; a few of you may already be at work installing low-flow shower heads, faucet aerators, or even rain barrels.
Rainwater harvesting makes a lot of sense: the initial investment can be quite low (especially if you do it yourself), and your plants love rain water. Unfortunately, as Rachelle Carson Begley once noted, an awful lot of commercially-available rain barrels are, well, ugly.
