Urban Gardening: A Starting Guide

- Adam Clare 3 Comments

Following up on yesterdays post about greening your garden I bring you today’s post about urban gardening. If you’ve ever wanted to garden in or on your urban dwelling Inhabitat has a starter guide to urban gardening.

When choosing seeds, consider growing a bunch of herbs in a pot together. As for vegetables, almost everything will grow in a container. Leafy greens (chard, kale, collards) are one of the healthiest options with the most nutrients for your buck, but you can also try out tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, carrots and onions. For a little color, calendula and johnny jump-ups (violas) can be planted next to the vegetables and their petals are delicious sprinkled over a salad.

This Spring Make Your Landscaping Green

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

If you have property, you likely have a space that can be used for planting (at least in North America), so why not take that space and shape it to reflect your care for the environment? Here’sa list of ten things to make landscaping greener around your home.

Two: Scale back too much lawn.
By its very nature, grass lawns are very durable and easy to maintain. But with the perfecting standards we’ve come to expect today, lawn care perfection has practically become an intramural neighborhood competition. Having a green and luscious lawn is certainly desirable, but why not scale the proportions back a bit to reduce the need for all of that extra fertilizer, pesticide, and water use?

Three: Eliminate strong chemical products.
Believe it or not, one of the best possible ways to achieve a healthy, thick lawn is to wean it off of all of the complex and harsh non-organic fertilizers and pesticides. Traditional organic substances like manure and lime can help your yard find a perfect balance-effectively creating a stronger root system and a significantly higher resistance to weeds and other common turf problems than a chemically-supported “surface only” lawn will ever develop. Plus, with an all organic lawn, there’s no need to worry about letting the little tikes play in the grass to their hearts’ content!

Four: Manage your landscape’s watershed.
Landscaping designs with lots of concrete and other unnatural “hardscapes” all to often have the unfortunate effect of directing a great deal of rainwater into the storm sewer system-along with all of the chemicals and non-organic materials it mixes with along the way. Eventually, all of these non-organic substances end up polluting the clean water sources we rely on. By allowing much of the runoff water to be naturally absorbed by the organic landscape, you’re home’s land

Collection of Talks for Inspirational Self-Improvement

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Nobody is perfect and everybody can improve their life, the hard part is doing it. Lucky for us Select Courses has a list of 100 talks for self-improvement on topics like how to better respect the environment to relationships and society.

These days, it’s hard to get motivated enough for anything. The economy is down, your savings–if you had any to start with–have probably dwindled, and it’s still easy to get depressed about the housing market, the environment, foreign policy, and even the possibility of sending your kids to college. But that’s exactly why we need inspiration and mood boosters at any cost. Luckily for you, these are free.

20 Amazing Facts About Happiness

- Adam Clare 5 Comments

Family Health Guide has compiled a neat list of twenty facts about happiness, here’s some good ones:

5) People who rate in the upper reaches of happiness on psychological tests develop about 50% more antibodies than average in response to flu vaccines.

6) According to researchers at The World Database of Happiness at Erasmus University in Holland, Denmark is officially the happiest nation in the world, followed closely by Malta, Switzerland, Iceland, Ireland and Canada.

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13) Having 100-200 belly laughs a day is the equivalent of a high impact workout, burning off up to 500 calories.

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