World Fair Trade Day- Black Gold Screening at Burns Court

Thanks to all those who turned out to see Black Gold: A Film About Coffee & Trade at Burns Court on Saturday in honor of World Fair Trade Day.  The event was sponsored by Lucuma Designs and was a great event highlighting the benefits of fair trade practices on small coffee farmers around the globe.  If you don’t already purchase fair trade coffee, you will after seeing this movie.  For more information on the film, see Black Gold the Movie

Vertical Gardening Made Easy: Cool New Product Find

Vertical gardens are all the rage, but professional installation is out of the price range of the average homeowner. Not anymore. While out and about this weekend, we came upon a cool product for modular living wall installations called the Woollypocket Wally. They can be used for indoor or outdoor installations and have a moisture barrier to protect your wall. The best part is that the price tag starts at just $40 for the single. I haven’t tried these yet, but with the reasonable price and easy installation, I may actually get to have my dream green wall after all.


The Wally can be found locally at the Sarasota Big Earth Landscape Supply (bigearthsupply.com) or online at:
http://www.woollypocket.com/wally/wally-one/

Rain Barrels

A question we get regularly from our readers is: Where can a get a rain barrel locally that isn’t going to break the bank?

Easy. Sarasota County Water Resources is offering rain barrels to residents for $37. (including the spigot assembly)

Rain barrel classes are offered throughout the year. Details can be found: Here

 

The benefits of rain barrels are many, but here are just a few:

 

-Protects our rivers, streams and bays! Water stored in your rain barrel is water that won’t rush into our rivers and out to the bay. Instead, as you use the stored rain water around the home and garden, it will absorb slowly into the ground replenishing groundwater supplies. By decreasing the volume of stormwater runoff, rain barrels also help moderate stream erosion and the resulting pollution from fertilizers and other contaminants that are impairing our waterways.

-Reduces flooding in your yard, by collecting the water and using it for watering plants or slowly releasing it and allowing it to sink into the ground.

-Provides your plants with water they will love. Unlike treated water, which is often “softened” with dissolved minerals or has added chlorine, rain water is what plants are adapted to use. Chlorine-free water also helps maintain a healthy biotic community in the soil.

-Saves money and water! Instead of water from the tap or hose, you can use the water you’ve saved to keep your home landscape happy and growing. You’ll also reduce your water bill and sewage bill!

Bioswale Web Page Now Up and Running

Check out our new web page featuring a slideshow of our recently completed bioswale which shows step by step how we created a beautiful bioswale out of our existing drainage ditch. The page also has more information on bioswales and rain gardens as well as some useful links to get you started.

Click the link below to go to the site:

http://ecosrq.com/bioswale.html

O.K. I’m Hooked!

I am newly addicted on To-Go Ware’s RePEat Bamboo Utensils. Recently, on their road trip to Asheville N.C., our friends Dill and Raylon picked us up the most fabulous gift. They got us both a set of reusable To-Go Ware bamboo utensils in a handy mini-bag made from recycled plastic bottles. I haven’t left the house without them since.

Every time I’ve been eating my mid-morning snack at my desk, I stare at my plastic spoon, which although I have washed and reused several times, always fails to meet the grade. Coupled with the view I have from my desk of a poster featuring the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with the caption “Just Say No to Plastic”, I have long been looking for a better alternative. Given that enough plastic spoons and forks are thrown away every year to circumnavigate the globe three times, it is about time we started rethinking disposables.

I have been known to cart around metal utensils with me that jangle in my bag on the way to meetings and always seem to make it to the very bottom of my questionably-clean messenger bag. (Nothing says dedication like wiping lint and the debris of countless field trips off your spoon before dipping in your soy yogurt.) I have been left thinking “there has got to be a better way”. And then gorgeously, our dear friends handed it to me over beers one night. There should have been an angelic choir that rang out in the background Monty Python-style. I absolutely love them. They are sustainable, washable, aesthetically-pleasing and I can clip the holder to a convenient spot on my bag with the handy mini-carabiner.

What’s more, they are absolutely guaranteed to be a conversation starter if you bust them out at a work meeting.

Check out the link to the supplier’s site. The video featuring Conserve, a project based in India that makes the utensil holders out of scrap plastic bags, is a must-see.

http://www.to-goware.com/store/cart.php

Bioswale Demonstration Project Takes Off

The Sarasota Board of County Commissioners today unanimously approved our Neighborhood Grant to install a demonstration Bioswale in our neighborhood! -Our thanks to the County Commissioners for their support and also to Vicky French of the Neighborhood Grants program and to Rob Wright of the Neighborhood Environmental Stewardship Team for all their help and hard work on our behalf.-

So what is a Bioswale and why are we so excited about it?

A Bioswale is essentially a vegetated channel or swale that is planted with native plants. Bioswales provide a multitude of benefits to water quality and the environment:


-Improve water quality by reducing pollutant loads in stormwater runoff including excess nutrients -and heavy metals.
-Increase infiltration and groundwater recharge (very important in Florida’s ongoing drought)
-Reduce incidence of flooding
-Reduce application of pesticides (including mosquito treatment), herbicides and mowing costs
-Provide an aesthetically-pleasing landscape feature
-Provide habitat for birds, butterflies and other wildlife


Bioswales are not only good for our own water supply, but are good for the bay as well. If you stop to think about it, everything that applied to your yard and your neighbor’s yard (including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) makes its way into your stormwater ditch during heavy storms. Coupled with the contaminants that flush off of roadways, driveways and other impervious surfaces, stormwater becomes a contaminate stew that can be toxic to our bay and to the wildlife that call it home.


Our Bioswale project is set up as a demonstration project so that other individuals and neighborhood associations can see what one looks like installed and can learn how to do something similar in their own neighborhood. The more people that are able to participate, the greater the impact to our water quality. We will be documenting our Bioswale project with step by step photos, so that the process can be easily repeated in other areas. Stay tuned for more information as the project progresses including photos and the upcoming date for our volunteer planting day. If you would like more information, or would like to be more involved, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Green Roof for Your Garden Shed

Like a lot of you out there, I wish I could put a green roof on my house. The benefits of green roofs are many including reducing urban heat effects, stormwater runoff, and curbing your carbon footprint. They are also, let’s just be honest, incredibly cool. I have visited homes with green roofs installed and left with a longing to implement this green tool in my own life. Sadly, my home was constructed in the 1950’s, and would require substantial and costly reinforcements to support the additional weight associated with a green roof.

So I was thrilled with a recent discovery that may allow us to implement the idea on a much smaller scale. We have been in need of a garden shed for some time and I have been loathe to purchase a plastic or metal monstrosity. I had decided to construct my own and was looking at my options for roofing when I stumbled on a green roof idea for, you guessed it, a garden shed. Not only is this a wonderfully attractive option, it also fits well with the overall “green” theme of our home and yardscape. Installing a green roof in this manner also turns out to be a much more cost-effective option than traditional shingles or metal roofing. The basic green roof structure involves stapling a PVC or plastic lining onto the wood roofing materials and creating a box structure out of 2 x 4’s to hold the greenroof substrate in place. I would love to plant our garden shed greenroof with native Florida plants and ferns. Not only would it be a great way to reduce impervious surface associated with our home, it would be a wonderfully attractive place to store our electric lawn mower.

See the link below for more information on this project.
http://www.greenroofs.com/projects/pview.php?id=455