Green Gardening

Even though we’ve gotten a heavy dose of rain this past week, California is still on drought alert. But if you’re like me you still want to keep your garden blooming. I started a binder to collect interesting tips on how to maintain your garden on a tight water budget, and I’ll be adding other useful tips for keeping ‘green.’

Click on the link below to view websites with some helpful ideas for keeping your garden green and environmentally friendly. Once you open the LiveBinder, click on the tabs at the top of the page to go through the different articles and websites.

Green gardening tips

Purify your air with Plants

This binder is about the green way you can clean the air in your home. Some plants are excellent at cleaning pollution from indoor air. Dr. Bill Wolverton published his research at NASA to find plants that clean the air. These plants absorb toxic chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene which are commonly used in the production of clothing, furniture, mattresses, carpets, plastics and printing. One healthy plant can clean a 100 sq.ft. room of 87% of these contaminants in 24 hours. (try the Rubbert plant or Peace Lily).

Check out his inexpensive, well-illustrated, and extremely practical book – “How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants that Purify Your Hofme of Office.”

To open the binder, click on the link below. Once the binder is launched, click through the tabs and subtabs in the binder below to view all the different websites that talk about plants and their purification value. Some sites will list plants that you can buy for your home.

Plants that purify the air

Learning to compost

Living in San Francisco, we have the advantage of Sunset Scavenger, the company that removes our trash and recycling, taking care of the composting in our neighborhoods.  They provide the cans and pick up of the compost and all we have to do is put it out on the curb to get taken away.

However, if we wanted to keep the compost for our own use, we’d be out of luck.  This binder below has found several different websites that can give you guidelines on how to start your own compost.

Just click on the link below to view the different websites.  Enjoy!

Composting

Global warming

This binder is a collection of some recent articles regarding the effects of global warming.  Some of the events seem pretty startling.  It also lists some websites for groups that do not believe in global warming.   There arguments are interesting.  We’ve also listed other websites that reveal studies that explain how global warming is happening. 

We will keep posting new articles to the binder as they come up, so keep checking back by clicking on the binder to see more.

To view the binder click on the link below and then review articles and websites by clicking on the tabs.

Global Warming – research

Great Gardening Websites

The City of Belmont had their Spring Garden Faire today. It was a nice event, and I especially enjoyed the tour of the award-winning Belmont gardens. The weather was warm and it was a picture perfect day.

Handed out at the event was a list of gardening and going green websites. Too bad they didn’t know about LiveBinders. It would have been a lot easier (and saved paper) to just handout two urls, instead of two pages of urls.

I have put these lists of sites into binders so that they can be more easily shared (and shared in a more environmentally friendly way) via email. Click on the binders below to see these great gardening and going green websites:

Great Gardening Websites

Go Green

Surprising events in the news

There are days when you can’t believe what goes on in the world. Some events remind you of the ancient past and you think we haven’t come very far as a species. Other events make you wonder what the future is going to look like.

 

Click on the link or icon below to view a few article I found pretty hard to believe.

 

Surprising news 1

We’re green…

that is to say we’re naive about this whole environmental awareness, save the world, go ‘green’ thing. My daughter’s 4th grade class has been spending the last month becoming aware of the global effects of pollution on the environment as they get ready for ‘Focus the Nation’ day – today. Our family has been in the process of changing the way we get to school, how we pack lunches and what we set the table with.Of course we’ve used the web as a resource to find out things – lots of things that we didn’t know about. For example, the students have been told to replace plastic snack bags by using plastic containers – but that sure makes for a very large lunch box. We thought about wax paper bags – except we didn’t know if they were biodegradable and neither did the teachers.That is how our research began. We then looked into replacing plastic water bottles with those colorful water bottles that you can re-use. From what we could find out, they could be potentially toxic, too. Looks like we might have to go back to those old thermos bottles we used to use – the ones with the glass inside that always shattered and made funny noises in your lunch- remember those?Its pretty interesting stuff wondering what is better for the environment and balancing that with what is healthy or convenient for you. You can’t just assume that the popular method is the way to go.If you’d like to find out if wax paper bags are an alternative or what types of plastic are safe for your kids – click on the livebinder below:

Green efforts