Home & Garden

bee-flickr-panna

Pollinators play a critical role

Grist reports:
Anyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 cropsthey pollinate — from almonds to apples to blueberries — [...]

Read more »

Recent Posts

Can air fresheners make you sick? | Grist

air-fresheners2

Let’s get the New Year off to a fresh start by tackling this sickening situation. In public spaces across the country, including offices, stores, restaurants, airports, and schools, air "freshener" is being forced upon us. Daily we are subjected to known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and other toxic substances. Sounds like a horror film, but it [...]

Read more »

Building The Midnight’s New Edible Wall Garden | Gainesville Compost

midnight-garden-lights

By Chris Cano
Check out the Midnight garden, a canvas of “living art” powered by compost produced from the food waste of the Gainesville local restaurant community, including The Midnight’s fruit and vegetable scraps which we collect each week via bicycle.
via Building The Midnight’s New Edible Wall Garden [Photo Story] | Gainesville Compost.

Read more »

Barnett aims for a ‘water ethic’

Bruce Ritchie
Floridaenvironments.com
Author Cynthia Barnett of Gainesville says she traces the start of her focus on water issues to a St. Petersburg Timespage 1A story written in 2003 that she says made her “insane.”
Barnett is author of “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.” It’s an important new book that challenges Americans to transform their views of [...]

Read more »

Michael Pollan’s food classes

Joe Fassler  writes in The Atlantic about Edible Education 101.  Joe Fassler, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. In 2011, his work for TheAtlantic.com was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. He hosts The Lit Show on KRUI radio and litshow.com.
This fall [...]

Read more »

Organ damage linked to GMOs

HuffPo reports:
In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.
According to the study, which was summarized by Rady Ananda at Food Freedom, “Three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn [...]

Read more »

Town aims for food self-sufficiency

Vincent Graff -of the Daily Mail reports, dailymail.co.uk, on the town that is growing its own:
Admittedly, it sounds like the most foolhardy of criminal capers, and one of the cheekiest, too.
Outside the police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, there are three large raised flower beds.
If you’d visited a few [...]

Read more »

Climate change affects turf

Carol Brzozowski reports in Turf Magazine:
Plants are blooming and experiencing leaf budding earlier in public gardens throughout the United States and some plant species, including weeds, are growing in areas they never grew before. Ominously, plant pests are also being seen in new areas.
You won’t find details of these phenomena in the National Oceanic and [...]

Read more »

Rodale looks to 2012

Rodale Institute’s Holiday message:
Game Plan
A note from our Executive Director
 
Over the last three years more than one in three cultivated honey bee colonies has died nationwide, posing a serious risk to our national food supply. We believe the answer to saving the bees is the backyard beekeeper. More specifically, non-toxic and sustainable backyard beekeeping.

We are creating a [...]

Read more »

Permaculture embraces sustainable practices

Additional information about permaculture posted online:

Permaculture is a design system based on ethics and design principles which can be used to establish, design, manage and improve all efforts made by individuals, households and communities towards a sustainable future. The permaculture flower uses the evolutionary spiral path to link together the key domains required for this [...]

Read more »

Local food makes news in SLO

Chew on this
Locals are finding ways to move away from food created by corporations
BY KATHY JOHNSTON
A quiet revolution is stirring in local kitchens. All over San Luis Obispo County, people are claiming their right to decide what goes in their mouths and their power to choose where it comes from.

CRUNCHY CHOICE

Dan Melton picks out [...]

Read more »

Under Industry Pressure, USDA Works to Speed Approval of Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered Crops | Truthout

farm

For years, biotech agriculture opponents have accused regulators of working too closely with big biotech firms when deregulating genetically engineered (GE) crops. Now, their worst fears could be coming true: under a new two-year pilot program at the USDA, regulators are training the world’s biggest biotech firms, including Monsanto, BASF and Syngenta, to conduct environmental [...]

Read more »

Green Home Rehab

green houses

A new 1,600-square-foot split-level on Voluntown Road, it is the Builders Association of Eastern Connecticut’s answer to a market in which new construction faces stiff competition from the surplus of houses for resale. The prototype is meant to showcase assets rarely found in older homes: ultra-greenness and affordability.
The problem, said Paul Stone of Lombardi Realty [...]

Read more »

City Farmer: DIY Sourdough Starter and Chestnuts A’Plenty

Illustration of the American Chestnut by Krissy Abdullah.

Nov. 2011 City Farmer: How to make your own sourdough starter! PLUS: All about the American Chestnut. A bimonthly Fine Print column by Krissy Abdullah. Includes beautiful illustrations.

Read more »

Alachua Transition Initiative – Meet Up at Gaia Grove

Gaia Grove

Tour of a productive no-till (weedless) garden ; short documentary about positive adjustments in a post peak oil wolrd; discussion group(s). Light lunch provided.

Saturday, October 15 · 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Gaia Grove
21255 NW CR 237
Brooker, FL

DIRECTIONS/MAP: http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&pc=FACEBK&mid=8100&rtp=adr.%7Epos.29.8873596_-82.3848724_Gaia+Grove+Eco-Camp+%26+Learning+Center_21255+SW+CR+237%252

ABOUT ALACHUA TRANSITION INITIATIVE: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alachua-Transition-Iniative/122998017805941?sk=info (Remember to “LIKE” the page!)

ABOUT TRANSITION INITIATIVE http://www.transitionnetwork.org/support/what-transition-initiative

via

Read more »

Organic outperforms industrial ag

Roddale organic

The results are in from a 30-year side-by-side trial of conventional and organic farming methods at Pennsylvania’s Rodale Institute. Contrary to conventional wisdom, organic farming outperformed conventional farming in every measure.
Rodale announced its findings and posted the full report:
The hallmark of a truly sustainable system is its ability to regenerate itself. [...]

Read more »

Save a seed company!

Landreth seed

Anybody want to order a gorgeous seed catalog for $5?
Or, better, invest in a seed company?
This story behind this offer — this extremely urgent offer — begins in 2003.
After 21 years working in venture capital, Barbara Melera was more than ready to move on. But when she had lunch with a friend who [...]

Read more »

Living with less air conditioning

air conditioning

NPR reports that according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this summer has been the second-hottest ever recorded in the United States, helping to push power demand in homes to record levels. As some worry that the growing use of fossil fuels to produce electricity for cooling is unsustainable, one [...]

Read more »

Fun City: Green Drinks Sept. 7!

GreenFlag

Green Drinks Gainesville is pleased to coordinate with Linda and Ken McGurn of the Sun Center and Innovation Gainesville to host the September meeting of Green Drinks. Join us September 7, [...]

Read more »

Roundup persists all around us

monsanto-skull

(Reuters) – Significant levels of the world’s most-used herbicide have been detected in air and water samples from two U.S. farm states, government scientists said on Wednesday, in groundbreaking research on the active ingredient in Monsanto Co’s Roundup.
“It is out there in significant levels. It is out there consistently,” said [...]

Read more »