By John DeFore

Everyone knows that shade from the sun keeps you cooler, but a new study has quantified the benefit in a way homeowners might want to note. The right kind of shade, it turns out, can easily shave ten percent off your summertime electric bill.

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By John DeFore

As more and more individuals and groups set out to re-introduce gardens to urban areas — often citing WWII’s “Victory Gardens” as proof that a large percentage of our food can come from our back yards and vacant lots — the Detroit-headquartered Urban Farming wants to push edible plants into new spaces — like walls.

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By Kelly Rondeau

The smell of autumn permeates the air. The cool, crisp weather signals fall’s annual crimson-colored foliage. For many an avid lawn keeper, the harvest season often means returning to the never-ending chore of raking and bagging leaves, then setting them at curbside for the weekly garbage haul-off. But stop right there.

Leaves are packed full of nutrients! Under normal growing conditions — with varied values, based on the source and condition of each tree — leaves are jam-packed with nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese, chloride, boron, iron, sodium, copper, and zinc. To simply rake and bag them up, only to be hauled off to the garbage landfill is a total waste of nature’s vast supply of rich nutrients, perfect for replenishing the soil.

So how do you go green in the fall? Start the process by not throwing away your leaves. There are alternatives. Mowing leaves, then mulching, and composting are the most effective way to reuse and recycle leaf mixtures. In addition, leaves can be used for overall soil improvement, directly working them into garden and flowerbed soils by tilling them in.

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By Julie Bonnin

There are many reasons to grow your own food, and recent unresolved food safety concerns about summer favorites like tomatoes and cilantro, the official herb of Tex-Mex cooking – are likely to have more folks cultivating an interest in growing edible plants.

Herbs are the perfect entry-level plant for first-time food growers. Given the right conditions and a minimum of care, they’re quite easy to grow, even if your outdoor space is limited to a small patio.

There are many more fringe benefits — the taste and scent of fresh herbs can’t be beat. You’ll never again pay grocery store prices for a bunch of past-their-prime herbs. Often those prices are only a little less than you’d pay for the plant itself, though growing your own, you will have to invest in pots, good soil and a few other necessities, as well as make a small investment in time.

But perhaps the biggest advantage of growing herbs is what people have known for centuries – that they have considerable health benefits to give.

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By Nima Kapadia
Creating an alternative to the conventional, gasoline-powered lawn mower is “work of art” that has gotten the Neuton recognition at museums this summer.

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By Barbara Kessler

If you’ve been wondering about all the buzz over honeybees, here is some food for thought – or rather some thought about food: Bees play a role in one out of every three bites of food Americans eat.

Pollinators, mainly bees, but also butterflies, songbirds and even bats, perform such a critical function in the food chain that their absence threatens everything from the viability of vast fields of commercial corn and other crops to the tomatoes in your garden. Without the bees and other pollinators, plants can fail to produce the fruits and seeds we eat.

Which is why a San Francisco-based group called the Pollinator Partnership has dedicated itself to the survival of pollinators — from hummingbirds to small mammals to the fragile and busiest pollinators of them all, the bees. Partnership members, along with beekeepers and researchers testified before Congress last week to lobby lawmakers for more funding to research the decline of many pollinators, particularly the loss of millions of bees around the world to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

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By Julie Bonnin

The last thing many homeowners may be thinking about when they yank the plug on their gas-powered lawnmower is their contribution to global warming and poor air quality.

Photo: Clean Air Gardening
Brill rotary mower
But as more and more people attempt to lessen the environmental footprint they leave behind, one of the first areas [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass
and Barbara Kessler
There’s no doubt that community gardens, a tradition that first surfaced in the United States in the early 1900’s, are at the grassroots of today’s urban “buy local/grow local” movement. But today, in places as diverse as New York City and Madison, Wisc., community gardens are also a socio-cultural [...]

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By John DeFore

While it may not be an answer to the mysterious collapse of certain honeybee colonies, researchers at the University of Virginia have identified one unusual threat to the continued well-being of pollinating insects and the flowers they love: Air pollution, they report in the journal Atmospheric Environment, is killing the scent of flowers.
Using [...]

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By John DeFore
They claim not to have been inspired by anybody in particular, but it’s hard to imagine that childhood Disney ballads of Johnny Appleseed weren’t lurking somewhere in Grant Gardner’s and Matt Cortina’s heads when they decided, sitting in a New Jersey coffee shop in December of 2006, to travel the breadth [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
After nine years, Mary Bakatsa’s garden is bearing fruit…and vegetables…and flowers…and herbs. It is a chorus of life, and supports more activity than even Mary imagined when she started gardening nearly 20 years ago with a few potted herbs.
Along with her flowers and veggies, which grow side by side, she has [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass
Ah, the smell of freshly mown grass. It’s the smell of childhood, of school vacations and picnics and lying in the backyard, finding faces in clouds. No one will deny that plush turf is a big part of modern Americana. But the imported, “exotic” grasses of our childhoods, nostalgic and fragrant as they [...]

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