Honor Your Mother by Creating a Backyard Habitat Environment in Your Yard.

In a reply to Bull's Shoals comment I gave the wrong site address for the Montclair Backyard Habitat Community Project. It should be www.montclairwildlife.com .

By 2010 we intend to have our entire town of about 36,000,  certified as Backyard Habitat Community by the National Wildlife Federation.

So far we have most of our town's schools, many of its churches and synagogues, many homes, and some businesses.

When I moved here from Newark, NJ, where I also gardened without pesticides and other toxic additives, I began converting my yard to organic immediately. That means I stopped using anything on my lawn except grass clippings--the ones that fell back on the lawn when they were cut.

Each blade of grass is mostly water and the rest is minerals and cellulose. So when you rake or bag your clippings you are robbing your lawn of free water and feeding.

You have to retrain your mind to see a lawn as a patchwork quilt instead of an indoor outdoor carpet. In other words, the "weeds"  that pop up are really wildflowers. 

Ten Tips for backyard habitats: Ten Tips

LECTURE TONIGHT: I am lecturing tonight! (Yikes, it's late) on China, so this post will be it for this week unless I get inspired and find some time over this busy weekend. My lecture is called, "Think 'Go' not 'Chess': The Chinese Global Encompassment." With production, technology, raw materials, debt, and such moving to China, we urgently need to look to our inventive future and go green in our economy and thinking. While we individually can Go Slow Green in our daily lives--our best creativity needs to be in high green gear. I hope to be able to put up some of my lecture on Youtube.

Below is the Youtube film on my book, "The Dragon's Daughters Return." It gives an arm chair view of contemporary China seen through the eyes of middle school daughters returning to visit the country of their birth with their adoptive parents. Very heartwarming story.

Go to  Thimble Berry Press to order the book.

Remember make peace this Mother's Day. Don't buy anything. Plant something. Give hugs and kisses. Write a poem. Start a backyard habitat yard. Honor all the mothers that gave and give you life.

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Of Interest:

Love is Out at the Pond   (why we need natural spaces)

Gift Ideas:

 

Tomato Heirloom seeds:   Mariseeds

 

 

   
Make an  Eco-Shopping Bag:  Long Meadow Farm

Comments

[Virginia]

Cathy, the only way one of my friends uses leaves in big black plastic bags is over the winter to act as comforters over her winter greens and root vegetables. Her husband collects about a ton of leaves from other peoples yards and she bags them loosely in big bags. She then lays them on top of her green and root crops and harvests all winter--going out to sweep snow off reach under and pick even in the worst of winter weather. I don't know if this would work in a snow climate with many many feet of snow, but in northern NJ, she does fine.

[Cathy Warren]

Wow! I think this is great! I am all for the backyard habitat. I could never figure out why people put natural grass clippings. in a huge garbage bag that will sit in a landfill for a hundred years, or maybe more if it's a Hefty. What about all those leaves? Use them as mulch. Again, leaves in a plastic bag, what are we thinking? And those bags aren't cheap either. Save some money and the environment.

Cathy Warren
www.Over60exchange.com