Learn to create backyard wildlife habitat - Oct. 13th & 15th

I love having wildlife in my garden! The birds, butterflies and other little garden visitors turn our yard into a private little wonderland for me and my husband to enjoy.

If you would like to learn how to create a wildlife habitat in your yard, why not plan on attending one of the FREE educational workshops put on by The District of Columbia Department of the Environment and Audubon Maryland-DC’s Audubon At Home. The next two workshops will be held on October 13th and 15th from 5pm - 8pm at Hearst Park, 3600 Tilden Street NW.

These hands-on workshops will help you learn about plant selection, conservation landscaping and will discuss the basic needs of wildlife.

Participants will receive a FREE habitat kit at the conclusion of the workshop. The kit will contain a native plant guide, an invasive plant booklet, a book on wildlife gardening, a birdhouse kit and live plants.

For more information or to register, visit the District Department of the Environment website.

Swap Seeds at the Green Festival in Washington, D.C.- Oct 23-24th

Start saving your seeds!!

There will be a seed swap sponsored by the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange at the Mother Earth News Fair Pavillion as part of the Green Festival on October 23rd and 24th.

Share your seeds, your knowledge and your enthusiasm for different plant varieties with other gardeners and farmers! Connect with folks who might be your neighbors, or from anywhere in your bioregion and bring any seeds you have to share. Bring all seeds, whether you’ve saved them yourself or even have varieties leftover from this year’s garden! This is an informal, relaxed event and beginners are welcome.

For more information, visit the Mother Earth news website.

10 Eco-Friendly Garden Apps for the iPhone

I’m probably one of the few people left on the planet who only uses my cellphone for actually making phone calls. I don’t even know how to text on it, or to READ a text if someone sends me one, much less use any of the more complicated functions it has. So I’m amazed when I casually ask a question in a group of people and suddenly thumbs are flying across tiny keyboards searching for an answer. Apparently, there is an “App” for everything.

There seem to be almost an endless number of Apps for gardeners, but it took me a bit of digging (pun intended) to uncover the Apps that were geared for eco-friendly gardening. Here are ten that I thought looked interesting.*

1) Garden Insects, by Natural Gardens LLC - The North Woods Garden Insect Guide features 18 of the most common garden pests that thrive on the hard work you put into your vegetables each year. Wouldn't you like to be able to identify them and learn environmentally friendly ways to discourage and eradicate them from your plantings? This app was designed to do all of that.

2) Compost - "Compost" is a calculator utility designed to help household composters achieve an optimal mix. A well functioning compost decomposes at a good rate and does not smell bad. To achieve the proper environment, experts recommend a Carbon:Nitrogen ratio somewhere around 25 to 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. Users input the pounds of food waste and/or grass clippings they have available and then select from dry tree leaves or newspaper as their high-carbon source. "Compost" suggests an appropriate amount of leaves or newspaper to use. This is another one that users say isn’t worth the price.

3) Organic Garden– A comprehensive guide with the most common vegetables, with their botanical names, descriptions, needs of light, water, soil, climate, sowing time, bloom time, cares, diseases, nutritional info, association, enemies, etc.

4) Organic Gardening for Beginners – Beginner’s Guide to Growing Your Own Organic Vegetables – In this easy-to-read guide, you will learn how to garden using no chemicals or outside man made products.

5) GardenID – Once you set your location, you can select from a master list of fruits & vegetables, or you can see what grows best around you. You can even see what’s best to grow now, so you waste waste time or money on plants that are out of season.

6) SoilPH - Many struggling gardeners don't bother learning about their soil. It certainly isn't as much fun as choosing plants. However, if you choose the wrong plants for your soil you might just be throwing money away. Soil pH is one of the easiest factors to measure and account for. Unfortunately, it is often neglected because it sounds difficult and reminds people of their old school chemistry lessons. This app was designed to help you test your soil PH, correct your soil PH and find the correct PH for your plants.

7) Rain Harvest - Have you ever wondered how much rain falls on your roof during a typical rain storm? Use this simple rain harvesting calculator to find out. You will be amazed at how much water can be collected from your roof (or any other surface) during even the shortest of rain storms. Why not collect and store this wonderful natural resource and put it to good use later to water your organic garden?

8) Gardening Toolkit - Not sure what to plant and when to plant it? The Toolkit can you give the advice you need. This feature-packed app also tracks what's in your garden, keeps notes in a handy to-do list and even lets you search a photo-filled encyclopedia of hundreds of plants

9) Vital Almanac – Vital now offers you the complete gardening enthusiast’s almanac for growing your organic fruits and vegetables by using the power of the moon.

10) Florafolio – Native Plants of the North East – The ultimate native plant resource for gardeners and nature enthusiasts. Florafolio 2 is an easy to use, interactive field guide to native plants of North Eastern North America. Florafolio is the perfect guide for anyone who wants to identify species in the wild or garden with native plants. *Keep in mind that I don't have an iPhone, so I'm not personally recommending any of these apps or the AppShopper site. However, I did find that the search function on the AppShopper site was one of the more user friendly ones.

For others without an iPhone, here is an on-line app that I find very cool. It is called the National Tree Benefit Calculator and it was developed by Casey Trees and Davey Tree Expert Co. This tool allows you to input your zipcode and select a tree to find out the various environmental benefits including: stormwater benefits, property value, energy, air quality and CO2.

Fall White House Gardens & Grounds Tours

If you have never taken a tour of the White House Gardens, you have a chance to do so on October 16 or 17th during the Fall White House Gardens and Grounds Tour.

Visitors to the gardens will be able to view the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, Rose Garden, Children's Garden and the South Lawn of the White House.

The tours are open to the public; however, a ticket is required for all attendees, including small children. The National Park Service will distribute free, timed tickets at the Ellipse Visitor Pavilion located at 15th and E Streets on each tour day beginning at 8:00 a.m. Tickets will be distributed -- one ticket per person -- on a first-come, first-served basis.

In case of inclement weather, the Garden Tours will be cancelled. Please call the 24-hour information line at (202) 456-7041 to check on the status of the event. For more information, visit the White House Gardens and Grounds Tour site.

Landscape for Life Brown Bag Lecture - Friday, Oct. 8

The U.S. Botanic Garden will hold a Landscape for Life Brown Bag Lecture on Friday, October 8th from noon - 1pm. The topic of the lecture is Health & Well-being/Water, Soil & Materials

The Sustainable Sites Initiative recognizes the importance of Human Health and Well-Being as a critical factor in sustainable landscapes. Considerations include creating outdoor spaces for social interaction, providing views and quiet outdoor spaces for mental restoration, and reducing light pollution, as well as protecting and maintaining unique cultural and historical places. At this lecture, learn why human health is integral to a sustainable landscape and how the appropriate use of water, soil, and materials is crucial to your success.

The U.S. Botanic Garden is a partner in the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) together with the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. In conjunction with a diverse group of stakeholder organizations, SITES is establishing and encouraging sustainable practices in landscape design, construction, operations, and maintenance. A web version of SITES has been created for use by home gardeners. This series of programs serves to highlight how home gardeners can incorporate sustainability into their personal landscapes.

Date: Friday, October 8
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. Location: Conservatory Classroom
FREE: Pre-registration required: visit www.usbg.gov or call (202) 225-1116

Information is from the USBG website

Live in Maryland? Save $25.00 when you plant a tree

"Planting a tree is a lifetime investment..in our state and in our future." Governor Martin O'Malley

Did you know that if you live in Maryland, you can get $25.00 towards the price of buying and planting a tree? That's a sweet deal for every property owner and a great way to have a positive impact on the local environment.

Trees protect water quality, clean the air and provide wildlife habitat. One large tree can eliminate 5,000 gallons of stormwater runoff each year, and well placed trees can help reduce energy costs by 15 to 35 percent. Because of their tremendous environmental benefits, the state of Maryland has partnered with local businesses to provide discounts for trees. Their goal is to help plant 1 million trees by 2011!

They have an excellent website called Marylanders Plant Trees which provides information about different tree species, participating nurseries and a downloadable coupon for the $25.00 discount.

One really interesting tool that they have on the site will help you calculate the environmental benefits of different species of trees before you make your selection. Here is one page of the results that I got when I input a Live Oak (one of my favorite trees for wildlife).

Don't have room to plant a tree? Consider giving the gift of trees for holidays or to honor the memory of a loved one. The gift of a tree is actually three gifts - one to someone you care for, one for future generations and one for the environment. For more information, visit The Gift of Trees page on the Plant Trees website.

Green "Tricks" to Enhance your Gardening - Recycle Everything

Here's an online article that I can really relate to, although I think the title might deter some readers that aren't specifically into vegetable gardening. The article, Improve Your Vegetable Garden! Green Living Tricks to Enhance Your Green Thumb Success, is really about tricks for re-using various household items in your garden.

I am really into recycling and re-using almost anything that comes through our household, but writer Alex Bhaswara had a few suggestions that I haven't tried yet.

Here is just one idea from the article, referring to what you can do with the lids from metal cans.

Now, don’t throw away those lids! The lids can be placed at the base of light loving plants, such as tomatoes! The lids will reflect sunlight, thus providing extra light. In addition, the reflected light has been shown to repel plant eating insects and aphids. To deter birds from your fruits trees, punch holes in the lids and hang them from tree branches. Apparently the reflected light and movement scares these rascals away.

Other suggestions offer new uses for used jello and pudding containers, styrofoam produce trays, gallon milk jugs, popsickle sticks and other items. If you like to re-cycle everything, like I do, check out the article for more details!

What's the water footprint of the foods we grow?

I recently came across a book called The Green Blue Book: The Simple Water-Savings Guide to Everything in your Life, by Thomas M. Kostigen. The premise of the book is that "everything in your life" has a 'water footprint', which is made up of it's 'virtual water' content, or the total amount of water that it takes to make or grow something. Kostigan wrote the book to make readers aware of just how much water goes into the products that we use everyday so that we can make choices that will help us save water.

Although I think saving water is a really important fact of life, I'm not sure that knowing that the water footprint of a pound of beef (1500 gallons, according to The Green Blue Book is going to help encourage people to eat more soybeans (224 gallons per pound).

Determining the 'virtual water' content is pretty complicated for some things. The pound of beef listed above, for instance, takes into account the water required to grow the feed that the cow eats, the water the cow drinks, and the water required to process the beef. Kostigen doesn't go into the full details of how he came up with most of the numbers, such as the 39,000 gallon footprint for the average car.

I thought the book might list which fruits and vegetables required less water to grow, so that I could decide which ones I could plant that might survive drought conditions. After reading the book, I'm still not entirely sure that the figures he lists for fruits and vegetables JUST take into account the water required to grow them of whether something else is factored into his 'virtual water' number. Plus, although he does list that an apple, for example, has a virtual water footprint of 18.5 gallons per apple, you would have to try to figure out how many apples were on the average tree to come up with a number to represent how much water an apple tree would take. The same would hold true for the other fruits and vegetables he lists.

So, if you are trying to find a listing of waterwise fruits and vegetables to grow, The Green Blue Book probably isn't going to help much. But if you are curious about the water footprint of his book (42.8 gallons for the average book) or the computer you are reading this on (10,556 - 42,267 depending on the type of computer), you might want to give the book a read. Checking the book out of the library, like I did, will save the planet 42.8 more gallons of water.

Think pink for breast cancer awareness month

Since 1985, October has been designated as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM).

In honor of my incredible friends who are breast cancer survivors, I decided that I was going to walk through my yard and make a $1.00 donation to cancer research for every pink flower I found blooming. Well, my yard is FULL of pink blooms right now, so I couldn't be quite as generous as I had intended. But I will write my check, and I hope that I can encourage some of you to do the same.

Here are some programs that I found online that gardeners and snackers might find interesting:

Breast Cancer Awareness with Flowers- ProFlowers.com donates a portion of the sale of these special bouquets to Komen for the Cure.

Yoplait Save Lids to Save Lives- Yoplait conducts the highly successful Save Lids to Save Lives® program, which takes place during September and October each year. For each pink lid mailed in by customers, Yoplait will donate 10 cents to Komen with a minimum guaranteed donation of $500,000 up to $1.6 million.

Plant for Hope Program- From September 1, 2010 through November 30, 2010, EuroBlooms will sell a variety of packaged bulbs and perennials to benefit Komen for the Cure. EuroBlooms will donate 30 cents for each package of bulbs and perennials sold with a minimum guaranteed donation of $100,000.

Komen Cottage Birdhouse - From April 1, 2010 through March 31, 2011, Louisville Stoneware will donate $7 from each Cottage Birdhouse sold to Komen for the Cure.

Pears Care Program- From July, 2010 through November, 2010, specially marked packages of California Pears will be sold in retail stores nationwide to benefit Komen for the Cure. On behalf of the growers of California Pears, The California Pear Advisory Board will donate $25,000 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure in connection with this program.

Dove Chocolate - Promises of Hope- DOVE® Chocolate Promises of Hope™ feature messages of hope and inspirations written by breast cancer survivors. These messages capture the strength, compassion and voice of women who have overcome the battle of their lives. In 2010 DOVE® Chocolate will donate $75,000 to Komen for the Cure.

Simon Pink Ribbon Gift Cards - From September 1, 2008 through December 31, 2010 Simon Malls will sell their Simon Pink Ribbon Gift Cards in their retail centers nationwide and online at www.simongiftcard.com. Click here to find a Simon mallnear you. Simon Malls will pay $1 to Komen for the Cure for each gift card sold, with a guaranteed minimum donation of $250,000 per year.

For a list of other Corporate Sponsors of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, visit their site.

What's the best way to go green? 1616 answers and counting

Most of us know about social networking. We use Twitter to share interesting news we find or to pass along short bits of info. We use Facebook in a similar way, with room for more details and more personal comments with friends and fans. But when it comes to serious discussions, I have to say that I really prefer LinkedIn. I cross-post some of my messages from this blog onto LinkedIn and I end up with very detailed, educated responses to my questions.

But the LinkedIn discussion that really has me interested lately is one in which Dave "The Wire Man" Maskin, owner of WireNames.com asked, "What is the one thing every single human being on the planet can do that's considered GREEN?" Dave posted that question five months ago to the "Green" discussion group on LinkedIn and as of this morning, there were 1616 replies!!! The Green Group, by the way, was started by John Horsley, who calls himself an Internet Evangelist, and is the founder of GreenProfs.com

I haven't been following the discussion from the beginning, and I certainly don't have room to list them all here, but if you are a member of LinkedIn, I encourage you to join the Green group and follow the discussion. Here are some of the answers I found this morning:

1) Recycle
2) Adopt
3) Give up your car
4) Give up meat
5) Buy locally produced products
6) Plant a tree
7) Install a dual-flush retro kit
8) Print less
9) Use organic coffee
10) Remember - there are no small actions!