Green Cleaners

I just finished a batch of home made cleaners. Alice's Wonder Spray is commonly known. I find that this recipe really can take care of most every day wipe-ups. Further it is cheap. Making your own cleaner is another small way to take control of your sustainability. Proctor & Gamble just is not always needed.

This type of mix-your-own cleaner that is available at the SE Como neighborhood's refill station and that the Mighty Midway 4h group did as a event in Midway neighborhood. The Mississippi Watershed Management Organization sponsors/ed these. The point of their interest that these cleaners are safer for you and safer for our surface waters (i.e. the Mississippi River). Having different scents available makes the mixing task fun! Lemon, and cedar are very nice.

Here is the basic wonder spray recipe:

Ingredients

2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar
1 teaspoon borax
1 1/2 cups very hot distilled or purified water
1T liquid dish soap
3-15 drops essential oils (optional)

Directions

Fill bottle with the hot water. Add the the vinegar and borax in a 16oz spray bottle,
and shake to dissolve the vinegar and borax. Add soap LAST and then scent with essential oil.

Horton Park Native Community Garden Reconvenes.

Friends of Horton Park reconvenes for the season. Be a native plant enthusiast while enjoying the greater Horton Park with fellow neighbors. Garden sessions are monthly on Sunday's at noon until 2pm. Dates are April 19th, May 3rd, June 14th, July 12th, Aug 9th & Sept 13th.

This little community garden was started by neighbors in the Midway to diversify the plantings at Horton Park in Saint Paul, and to provide an additional reason to enjoy the park. Horton's garden gatherings are a great place to see and learn about native plants that can be used in your landscape. We have prairie and savanna species as well as woodland species.

Garden website is http://groups.google.com/group/hortonpark. FFI, or to get on this community garden's list contact hortonpark@gmail.com.

Como Green Village Day on Saturday April 18th- All invited

Celebrate the beginning of spring, Earth Week AND the first year of a successful Como Green Village with SECIA on

When: April 18^th, 2009 11:30 AM – 2:30 PM, rain or shine!

Where: Van Cleve Park and Van Cleve Recreation Center (here)

What: Como Green Village Day

• Como Eco-Exchange, a re-use event where residents in the neighborhood will trade and barter used goods;

• Bicycle Auction, a rehabbed bike auction supplying very affordable green transportation to students and residents;

• Green Talk, a round of demonstrations and presentations from local experts and organizations, including rain barrel painting!

• Rain Gardens, information about this beautiful way to improve water quality and the resources available to install yours.

• Rain Barrels, See how they work and place an order for your low-cost barrel
  

• Resource Fair, organizations, including student groups, exhibit their cause to participants of the event!

The event is sponsored by SECIA, the Southeast Como Improvement Association; the Neighborhood Revitalization Project; The Mississippi Watershed Management Organization; Metro Blooms, and the McKnight Foundation.

Community Gardening season opens in SE Como with a harvest at Como Corner!

From time to time, I will be featuring news from the community gardens I support. Today, its a SE Como perennial garden, where we convened last weekend to move a tree.

Hmmm a harvest on April 4th? How about harvesting rocks? Once again, there is road construction adjacent to Como Corner Community garden. With road construction comes large piles of dirt which happen to contain a lot of rocks, right along the boulevard. So after moving a black hills spruce tree, we hunted for treasure, rock treasure. This community garden was started in 1992, coincidentally using garden bed edgers collected from street construction remnants. Sixteen years later, more edging material is in order, and what could be better than having them turn up in the street?

The official community gardening season is beginning this month. All garden dates are updated at the SECIA calendar. Upcoming dates for April & early May:

• 4/18 at 10 am at Accord Community Garden, (and then have fun at Como Green Village day in Van Cleve Park!)
  
• 4/21 at 6:30 at Como Corner
  
• 4/22 at 6:30pm at Gateway Garden
• 4/26 at 1:30pm at OWLS Community Garden
  
• 5/5 at 6:30 at Como Corner
  
• 5/6 at 6:30pm at Gateway Garden- Paint the Chairs Block Party!
• 5/16 at 10 am at Accord Community Garden
• 5/19 at 6:30 at Como Corner
  
• 5/20 at 6:30pm at Gateway Garden

Is this the year you become a Community Gardener?

Bag Laundry

Its an odd picture. This is a shot of my Bag Laundry. As far as I know, Bag Laundry is a term coined by members of the Hamline Midway Environmental Group (HMEG). This group of eco-volunteers spend a lot of time thinking about waste reduction. Plastic waste is a current obsession.

Ziploc bags just appear in my life. Have not bought any in a long while because many foods from the grocery store are coming in ziplocs and we seem to get them from other folks too. To get more out of the zip bags we have, our family set-up a bag laundry line above our kitchen sink. Washing and reusing allows us several of uses of the same bags.

The zip feature of a ziploc bag is not recyclable, so bag recycling around here (if you can find them) frowns on zip bags. So instead of tossing after a single use, we wash the Bag Laundry, hang on the line and reuse.

We have found that washing is done easiest (and least water required) by putting all the zips into a larger zip bag that is filled with hot soapy water. Swish and slosh each bag inside and then cycle through hot rinse water. Turning each bag inside out works best for this method. Note: we do not generally have meat products stored in zip bags and would never use this method with bags that contained raw meat.

ideas to reduce plastic bag waste:

• cloth shopping bags- they are ubiquitous now
  
• reuse food packaging- tortilla packages are a favorite here
  
• use other types of reusable containers, glass even i.e. your old peanut butter jar
  
• encourage stores to at least ask customers if a bag is needed
  
• stop using lawn & leaf bags, instead find a big sheet or tarp and bundle your yard waste inside. I can recommend garden containers like Fiskar's Kangaroos, which have been used for 6 years now in SE Como's community gardens. They loose their toggles for collapsing, but otherwise have held up to kids, sticks, compost, trimmings etc during endless trips to the compost piles.
  
• Bag Laundry!

Thinking about Stuff

This series of videos help me stay grounded when faced with more stuff. My kid's stuff. Stuff gifted to me. My stuff from relatives. My stuff that breaks. My stuff that I cannot recycle. When I have to get stuff for others. Go to The Story of Stuff for the full animation.

Ramsey County compost sites open March 30th

For those living in Ramsey County Minnesota, Tuesday is a big day. The county yard waste sites reopen (may be delayed if the predicted snow hits). While I do make use of most of my garden waste/leaves for my hen operation and own backyard compost, these county collection points are useful for woodies and items that are trickier to compost at home- such as thick tomato stems.

I tend to grow a largish pile of brush over the winter due to the branches I collect from these same yard waste sites for use as winter decoration in both my yard and at community plantings. The photo above shows a Midway business and community members adding branches like these to a planter. The branches all end up back at the yard waste site in the spring.

The urban/suburban brush collected at Ramsey County goes to St. Paul's District Energy, which supplies heating, cooling and electricity to downtown St. Paul all created from that biomass.

That's a tight closed cycle for these decorative woody branches used in the Midway.

St. Paul yard --> Yard Waste Site --> St. Paul Yard--> Yard Waste Site -->District Energy in downtown St.Paul ---> heat & energy to St. Paul business & homes

ahhh, sustainability.