Over at the DG, I write about returning to the garden.

Here's an excerpt:

"My landlord and I have decided to give gardening another go.

Last year we were first-time gardeners, and I’d probably give us a C-plus ... if I was grading on a curve. We did OK until about August, and then things sort of fell apart. We were both away a lot, and it was extremely dry. By September, our community garden plot was a wild, jungly tangle of weeds, tomato plants and zucchini. I kind of enjoyed finding new ways to use the zucchini, like making zucchini bread, but my landlord was less enthused. 'I’ve had enough zucchini,' she said."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about moose in her column Greenpoint.

Here's an excerpt:

"The phone rang on a Monday evening. The 12-year-old boy down the road was calling to tell our 12-year-old boy that there was a moose in his yard.

Half an hour later, our daughter called from New York City to tell us we had a moose in our neighborhood. Apparently her buddy, who lives next door to the 12-year-old down the road, had texted her when the moose strolled over to his yard.

News travels fast. So do moose.

The next day, several people in the next town over had reports and photos of the moose — it was seen walking down the sidewalk toward the high school, swimming in Lake Luzerne, strolling by the music camp on the other side of the lake. If it was the same moose as the one in our neighborhood, it probably had taken another swim, across the northern tip of the Great Sacandaga Lake, on its way to town. Or maybe it took the South Shore route and crossed nearer to where the Sacandaga meets the Hudson."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about how some schools are taking steps to cut down on food waste.

Here's an excerpt:

Shortly after my son gets on the bus in the morning, we find his empty breakfast dishes on the table.

For a while, we thought the boy was doing an excellent job of eating every last morsel. Then we thought the big dog was casually stretching her neck up to table level to lick off the plate as she walked by. Then we found the true culprit: the little dog, who first climbs on the chair to wash the plate for us, then climbs right onto the table to drink whatever milk the boy neglected.

My son says it’s fine, because he likes to share.

We try to share all our food waste. What we don’t eat, and the dogs don’t finish, goes to the chickens. They might get old rice, the leftover seafood chowder, bread crusts, sour milk. The chickens get the pre-meal waste too — the carrot scrapings and lettuce ends, the seedy middle of the peppers, the apple cores.

What no one can eat — orange peels, coffee grounds and egg shells, for example — goes into the compost. The kids have been trained to bring their lunch scraps home for the chickens or the compost, rather than dropping them in the trash can at school where they would invariably end up in a landfill.

It’s easy to eliminate food waste on a micro-level. The problem is the bigger places — those school cafeterias, for instance.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about Earth Day.

Here's an excerpt:

Coming into April, my inbox was inundated with messages about Earth Day events and ideas. Some were hikes and planting days, seed-sharing ideas and energy-savings tips.

Far more were what I would classify as lightly greenwashed advertising campaigns. For Earth Day, I was told, I should use wheat-based natural kitty litter, wear appliquéed recycled T-shirts and eco-friendly bracelets, purchase sustainable wooden toys and become gorgeous with Earth Day-inspired beauty products.

Or I could just drink. “In celebration of Earth Day, raise a glass to the environment and enjoy these eco-friendly cocktails,” one email said, offering some recipes. I think it was from the same company that pushes cocktails for other big drinking holidays, like Father’s Day and Arbor Day.

I’m all for using Earth Day as a reminder about how to take care of the only home we have, just as fire departments use daylight saving time to remind us to check our smoke detectors. But just as we need smoke detectors every day, we need to care for our world every day.

Click here to read the whole thing.

It's spring, whether it snows or not, according to my colleague Margaret Hartley, who writes about the transition to a new season in her column Greenpoint.

Here's an excerpt:

"The last day of winter had us shoveling around 10 inches of new snow. The first day of spring saw the shovels out again, cleaning up another 2 inches or so that had fallen overnight.

So what? Spring is here anyway.

I have proof. Not only is the sun a little higher every day, but the chickens have started laying again. Spring means eggs.

Chickens are light-sensitive. With no artificial light source they will stop laying in the winter and start up again in spring. In nature, this makes perfect sense, allowing chicks to be born in spring and summer when their chances of survival are far better.

For people who raise chickens, the winter shutdown is not particularly welcome. I made fun of some people I know, fairly new to chicken raising, who gave away their whole flock last month. They were fed up with the lack of eggs.

'We need a different breed,' they said, and I thought, 'They need a better light.'

Maybe they’re just like us and keep forgetting to turn the light on. Or maybe, like us, they have a henhouse light that’s just not strong enough.

And maybe, being new to chicken raising, they don’t realize that even chickens who stop laying in the winter will start again in the spring.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about how it's not quite spring in her weekly column Greenpoint.

Here's an excerpt:

"Up in the still-white north where I live, we are watching seedlings spring up, impossibly green, on the window sill. We are sorting our seed packets, admiring the bright drawings and photographs of vegetables that come in colors we have forgotten over the long winter. In black and gray we draw out our own garden plans, as if we can’t really believe in kale green or tomato red. It’s hard enough to remember what a warming ray of sunshine feels like.

At dinner time, it’s down to the ice box to dig around for something green from last year’s garden — string beans, broccoli, a bag of curried cabbage. The best is finding a mix of early season vegetables, with baby summer squashes, wild and cultivated greens, tender herbs and tiny peas. It tastes like spring, and I think we’ve eaten the last one.

So we are waiting. My husband is designing improved hot frames in his sketch book, talking about using the stored window frames and getting early broccoli. My son interrupts, complaining that the whole world looks gray, then laces on his new red sneakers for a run. He comes home complaining some more, this time about wet feet and icy roads.

'When will it be spring?' he whines. Some early broccoli might help that boy."

Click here to read the whole thing.

There's an interesting article over at Slate about how alligators are slowly moving north, due to climate change.

I really liked seeing alligators on my swamp tour of the bayou outside New Orleans, and on my trip to the Everglades, but I'd prefer they remain an exotic creature. In other words: I don't want them anywhere near me. The rattlesnakes on Tongue Mountain in Lake George terrify me - the last thing I need is a bunch of alligators roaming around the woods, too. Though I'm far enough north that I probably don't have too much to worry about. Unlike the people in Virginia, and D.C.

I love my cats.

However, this piece over at Slate makes a good case for not owning cats.

Of course, my cats are spayed and neutered, and they stay indoors all of the time. So I don't think they're hurting anybody, or very likely to kill any endangered birds any time soon.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about the need to reduce the consumption of bottled water in her weekly column Greenpoint.

Here's an excerpt: 

"In Concord, Mass., the new year brought with it a new law: a ban on single-serve bottled water.

The town, the first in the nation to issue any ban on bottled water sales, voted in the new law last April with the aim of reducing waste and the amount of fossil fuels used to make the plastic bottles and ship the water.

In Burlington, Vt., a similar ban went into effect this month at the University of Vermont, where the sale of bottled water is now officially banned on campus.

UVM announced its plan year ago, with the university’s Office of Sustainability saying the push came from students who worried about the waste, the environmental costs of producing and transporting bottles and the privatization of a natural resource like water by multinational corporations.

Over the past year, UVM has retrofitted its drinking fountains to make it easier to fill reusable water bottles that students can carry with them.

Adding and promoting “hydration stations” has become popular on college campuses. When my daughter and I were touring campuses last year, we were often shown water filling stations and told how the schools encourage their students to carry their own refillable water bottles with them to reduce waste and to take advantage of the fresh, clean water the U.S. has in such abundance. Even campuses that don’t ban water sales have removed bottled water from their vending machines.

Whether an outright ban or simply offering alternatives is the best way to go, reducing the use of bottled water — especially single-serve bottles — certainly makes sense."

Click here to read more.

In her column Greenpoint over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes the miracles that are all around us, every day.

Here's an excerpt:

"I’m thinking of Walt Whitman’s 'Miracles,' the poem where he talks about walking and watching and taking notice of everything around him: a cityscape or a stranger, the shore or the forests.

“Or watch honey-bees busy around the hives of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles. . .”

It’s easy to overlook these miracles. We are busy, modern humans, living complicated lives that take a lot of energy — physical and fossil-fuel driven — to run. Sometimes we are just too busy to step outside, even for a minute, to take a deep breath and open our eyes.

To me, there are lots of reasons that taking notice is so important. It is reinvigorating and renewing. And it is real."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about the pleasures of living in a place where it's dark enough to see the stars in her weekly column Greenpoint.

Here's an excerpt:

"When our daughter came home for Thanksgiving, she noticed perhaps the only thing she had missed since moving to the big city: stars.

Well, maybe she missed her dog and her little brother, a little. But mostly it was stars.

We sent her outside one evening to turn off the chickens’ light and to throw a chip of hay to the ox, and she was gone so long we sent the boy out to look for her. She was stargazing, and she got her brother to look up, too.

We are lucky to live in a dark place. On a clear night, we can see the Milky Way, check for constellations, look for shooting stars.

'In the city, if I see one star, I get so happy,' my daughter said. She and a friend tried to go stargazing one night, at an organized viewing party on Manhattan’s High Line park along the Hudson, but it was raining. She was distressed to find her high school friends, also home for Thanksgiving, had not given any thought to the sky.

'Do you have stars in Burlington?' she asked one friend, and he said he hadn’t noticed.

'Can you believe it?' she asked us. 'How can you not notice?'"

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about how to celebrate the holiday season in simpler ways - ways that don't involve waste and over-consumption - in her weekly column Greenpoint.

Here's an excerpt:

"Thanksgiving, the homiest of holidays, has passed and the craziest time of year has begun.

My family loves Thanksgiving, so much that we celebrate it at least twice. Friends know that if they miss one of our two major Thanksgivings, we will be happy to host a spare feast when they arrive. We have our own traditions — making all the food ourselves, with as much of the meal as possible coming from our home gardens and, at least for the traditional Thanksgiving, making paper blimps to hang around the house.

That’s my husband’s contribution to the holiday — since he grew up near the Thanksgiving college football games in Miami, blimps were as much a symbol of the holiday as the northern-grown food that filled the table.

Part of the reason we love Thanksgiving so much is that it is home-centered, a reason for family to gather and share a meal, to be together without any other expectations. We work off the extra pie with long walks and stay at the table long into the evening talking and playing games.

And we try to hold onto that feeling for the rest of the year, when all our activities have been usurped by voices urging us to buy, buy, buy."

Click here to read the whole thing.

This New York Times graphic show the coastal and low-lying areas that would be flooded if sea levels rise due to climate change.

Not that we should worry about climate change, or acknowledge that it exists, or anything.

Over at the DG, my colleague Margaret Hartley writes about her family tradition of making Christmas presents in her weekly column Greenpoint. 

Here's an excerpt:

"The day after Halloween, my niece posted on her crafty blog that she was making little crocheted snowmen out of yarn scraps as Christmas presents for some little kids she knows.

A couple of days later, I heard 'Feliz Navidad' on the radio on my way to work. The next day, I put my snow tires on the car. So I guess there’s no denying it: Election season is over, winter is here and it’s all holidays, all the time, from now until January.

Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t really mind. Like my niece, I love the holidays — the visiting, sharing meals, doing projects with the kids, doing projects for the kids. We make block prints for our cards, make cookies for everyone, gather pine boughs and pine cones to fill vases and the window boxes, and generally focus on the little things we can do to delight each other.

I can get sick of 'Feliz Navidad' pretty quick. But I can’t get enough of making mittens out of scraps of yarn.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at the DG, my colleage Margaret Hartley writes about we can learn from Hurricane Sandy in her weekly column Greenpoint.

Here's an excerpt:

Sandy, first a hurricane and then a “superstorm,” didn’t do much more than kick up a bit of wind up here. And in a region that hasn’t fully recovered from last year’s tropical storms, Irene and Lee, we can consider ourselves very fortunate.

I was fortunate myself, getting out of New York City a day earlier than planned on the second-to-last train to leave before Grand Central Terminal closed down. I had planned to stay in the city an extra day, visiting my daughter, but figured if I didn’t get out Sunday I’d be stuck there through midweek. As of Wednesday, there was still no train service, so I would have been camping out at my friends’ apartment, playing board games by candlelight, which is how they spent most of last week.

My daughter was more fortunate, never losing power at her midtown dorm. And with schools closed throughout New York City, she and her dancer colleagues caught up on their sleep. “We’ve all been napping,” she told us in one of her many storm and post-storm updates. During the height of the windstorm the residents sheltered in the downstairs lounge, but after a few hours they were allowed to go back to their rooms.

We’ve all seen the photos from the city — subway tracks flooded, tunnels filled with water, water pouring through doors and over streets. The power of water is awesome, and seeing images of cars pushed around, boardwalks smashed, beaches and dunes rearranged, and streets buckled is frightening. My brother’s New Jersey neighborhood saw floods, fires and power outages; my mom in Connecticut couldn’t get out of her driveway to get to a shelter because of the trees and wires tangled together.

Click here to read the whole thing.