Five Easy Gardening Tips and Five of My Favorite Quotes about Gardening

 I love having a garden. It can be a lot of work, but it has great rewards too. I have a vegetable garden and a perennial flower garden.

Here I share 5 tips and 5 quotes that express why I love gardens.

"One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides."                  W. E. Johns

1. Coffee grounds to the rescue! I love to start my day by drinking coffee and inspecting  my flower and vegetable gardens. It makes for a very efficient gardening morning because coffee is great for your garden! Coffee grounds add nitrogen to the soil and they increase the soil's acidity. But, even better than that, they deter some garden pests. Slugs, cats and even some deer really hate coffee grounds.

Warning: Make sure you never put un-brewed coffee grounds in your garden.  Before brewing coffee grounds have way too much nitrogen for you garden soil.

"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace."                              May Sarton

 2. Ugh...slugs!!!   Yes, they are part of nature, but if you are like me, you think they are pretty gross. Worse than that, they will eat just about anything you are growing. But, luckily, they are pretty easy to trap. Save the rinds from oranges, melons, etc. Place them in your garden at night. Make sure to leave them with the fruit side up. The slugs will be attracted to this tasty treat. First thing in the morning, check on your rinds and you will find some fat and sluggish (yes...I know...) slugs in the rinds. Now you can throw them in the trash, or better yet, put them on top of your outdoor compost pile and let them decompose.

Note: If you think your slugs are the partying type - leave them a little saucer of beer. It will work the same way as the fruit rinds, but your slugs will have a great time.

"I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation. "                                                                                                                           Phyllis Theroux                

3. Easy dried herbs! You know how annoyingly hot your car gets in the summer. Well, now you can use that heat to your advantage. If you want a speedy way to dry the herbs you have grown in your garden, try this little trick. Put a sheet of dry newspaper on the seat of your car. Close the doors and windows. The herbs will dry quickly and the car will smell yummy!

"The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature."                 Jeff Cox

4. Recycle veggie water!  When you have picked veggies straight from your garden or bought them at a farmer's market, don't you hate to throw away the water you used to steam or boil them? After all, it has a lot of the vegetable's nutrients in it. You can save the water and add it soup or use it as a base for a smoothie, but you can also use it to water your house plants.

 "Plants give us oxygen for the lungs and for the soul."                                                        Terri Guillemets

5. Oh no, frost!  What if the weather does something weird - I still remember a snow and ice storm in May of 1977 - and you have to contend with frost during the summer? Those little clay pots that you have hanging around make great little houses for protecting your tender young plants. Place the pot over the seedlings. They should survive frost and freezing temperatures for a night or two.

Bonus quote:                                                                                                                                       "For every garden one plants on the outside, 700 gardens grow within."            Unknown

Bonus tip: Use large pinwheels and wind chimes to deter pests.

Jan Krause Greene is the author of I Call Myself Earth Girl, a novel which explores how a woman gradually opens herself to mystic wisdom when she discovers she is pregnant and is convinced that she conceived the baby in a dream. She is currently working on the sequel, as well as two other books. She also helps individuals embrace their authentic voices through Finding YOUR Voice Writing Workshops.

More easy ways to use less plastic

Loving, protecting and living on the earth!

Plastic - part 3

In a recent post, I asked people to send me suggestions on easy way to use less plastic in the kitchen.

Here are the suggestions I received:

1. Buy only fresh produce that is not packaged at all.

2. Use wax paper.

3.If you have to use plastic, use the smallest size bag or segment that you can.

4. Never buy bottled water.

The one about bottled water was submitted multiple times.

So, how about you? How have you cut down on the use of plastic in your kitchen?

The Plastic Bank.....social plastic, an idea whose time has come!

Loving, protecting and living on the earth 

Another post about plastic, but this one is good news! This will be very short.

Please, check out the Plastic Bank - Harvesting Plastic Waste to Reduce Poverty.            

The website is plasticbank.org

What a brilliant idea they have! I don't know these people, but I am pretty sure I love them:

David Katz is the founder and President of The Plastic Bank. According to the website, David's dream was to bring hope to and liberate the minds of the world’s most disadvantaged and to rid the world of ocean plastic.  His inspiration came from his travels, seeing beaches with more plastic than sand and people living in extreme poverty withouthope.  David realized that, not only do the people of the world need hope, but also that the world itself is also struggling.  I realize this too.

plastic in ocean

Shaun Frankson is a social entrepreneur.  He wants to change the world. So do I.

Andrew Almack believes in the power of social entrepreneurship to change human behavior.  I believe in the power of ideas to change human behavior.

Sarah Ross is dedicated to making the world a better place for her children and her children's children. So am I.

Please go to their website and read about this revolutionary idea. If it makes sense to you, the way it does to me, please sign their petition asking companies to use social plastic in order to improve lives while reducing plastic waste.

If you know of any other innovative businesses that are trying to solve environmental problems and improve lives, please leave a comment.

I want to introduce my readers to all of them, because I know that if we all work together we can protect the environment and improve the lives of those living in dire circumstances.

With open minds and optimistic hearts we can make a difference.                                      That is why WE are here NOW.

Loving, protecting and living on the earth!

I write many blogs about the environment and how we must all do our part to slow climate change and to protect our natural resources. This page will be a page for sharing ideas, inventions and discoveries. I hope it engenders a real conversation about what individuals can do in big and little ways.

Here’s a question to start us off. Plastic is so much a part of our lives. It seems to be a part of almost everything we buy – on the packaging, if not in the product itself. So much of what we use in our homes is plastic, and to make matters worse, so much of it is one use plastic- cellophane wraps, plastic bags, plastic sandwich and freezer bags.

Question: What are the ways you reduce the use of plastic in your life? Let’s see how many ideas we can get.

Here is one thing I do. It doesn't sound like much, but after years of using plastic without even thinking about it, it was a big change for me. Now I hardly ever wrap anything in any kind of plastic for storage. Instead, I use glass containers for leftovers.

A simple easy change at the grocery store - I don't put my produce in plastic bags when I buy it. Why put apples, lettuce, tomatoes, etc in a plastic bag in your grocery cart just to put it in another bag to carry it home? My produce always arrives home just fine even though it is packed loose in my reusable grocery bags. (I have quite a variety of bags that I use for toting groceries. I think I got them all free and I just keep accumulating them. )I realize that for much of the world using reusable bags is the most common practice imaginable, but for many of us here in the U.S., it is something we actually had to "learn" to do.  The same goes for not wrapping things in plastic...a learning curve for us here in the U.S.

Please add some suggestions for reducing or eliminating your use of plastic in your home. The more ideas we share, no matter how simple, the more we help people like ourselves make simple changes, and if enough us make simple changes it adds up to a big change. Even it you think it is something everyone already does, put it in a comment anyway. You never know what an impact your one idea may have.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

What Happens Next?

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to live through a transition of enormous significance? Would you be aware every day that radical transformation is taking place?

Logic tells me that we would notice changes all around us. Yet, my experience is telling me this is not true. Right now, the earth we inhabit is undergoing rapid climate change and, although, we hear the term everyday, most of us do not notice much of a difference.  But a few people are taking notice and trying to get the rest of us to pay attention.

Roy Scranton is one of these people. Those who scoff at climate change as something that only hippy-dippy tree-huggers care about might be surprised to learn that Scranton is a veteran who served a tour in Iraq during the early years of the Invasion. In his recent opinion piece for The Stone, he tries to wake us up to what is happening right before our eyes.

He does not quote spokespersons for environmental organizations. Instead, he repeats the dire warnings of  military and civilian leaders who are concerned about how national security is compromised by climate change and the resulting extreme weather events.

"This chorus of Jeremiahs predicts a radically transformed global climate forcing widespread upheaval — not possibly, not potentially, but inevitably. We have passed the point of no return. From the point of view of policy experts, climate scientists and national security officials, the question is no longer whether global warming exists or how we might stop it, but how we are going to deal with it."

In other words, it is happening now. We are already living through a transition of enormous significance whether we choose to pay attention or not. So significant, in fact, that geologists are considering the addition of an new epoch to the Geological Time Scale. It would be called the Anthropocene and it is NOW. As the name suggests, this epoch is characterized by the effect the human species has on the earth's geology.

So what does all this mean for us right now? Scranton suggests that we have to learn how to die "as a civilization." In other words, during this epoch, the big philosophical questions about the meaning of individual lives and individual deaths will be overshadowed by the death of our civilization as we know it.

Sounds extreme, doesn't it? Sounds like something that would pretty hard to ignore, right?

Apparently not, because most of us are pretty good at ignoring what is happening to our only real home, the earth. It is as if we have all agreed upon an unspoken pact of ignorance; believing somehow that if we don't pay attention to it, it won't really happen. Sure the climate is getting warmer, droughts are more severe and longer lasting, storms of all types are more extreme, but if we pretend it doesn't matter, it won't matter.

Why have so many of us decided to just ignore what is happening?

Maybe it is because noticing it and thinking about it means we have to do something. If we don't want the world - not just the earth itself, but also civilization- to be radically different within 100 years, then we have to find solutions. Those solutions require extensive shifts in the way we live, the way we grow and produce food, the way we raise animals and crops, the way we travel, the homes we live in, even the clothes we wear.

How can we make those radical shifts if we don't first have a massive shift of consciousness? A shift that starts with recognizing that we are all now, at this very minute, living through a transition of enormous significance.  Yes, you and I and the little kid down the street and the old lady next door, all of us are living at a time of great consequence. We have been chosen by God, or the universe, the spirit world or random chance to guide ourselves and this planet on which we live through a period of vast change. How we live through that change and what kind of future we pass on to the generations that follow after us depends on how we respond now.

What happens next is up to all of us!                   

Roy Scranton article

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/?emc=eta1&_r=0

Some books to read on the topic

Tropic of Chaos  by Christian Parenti - a description of the chaos caused by climate change, serious and bleak, but not without hope that humans can change the path we are now on.

Cows Save the Planet  by Judith D. Schwartz - this book is a call to action with actual things we can do to heal the earth. This book gives me hope. I urge everyone to read it.

I Call Myself Earth Girl by Jan Krause Greene - visionary fiction with an   environmental and spiritual message about the times we live in and the future that we create. (Yes, it is my novel.)