Earth Day Education

Happy Earth Day!
I hope you don't mind if I take a partial step up on my soapbox today. This post is partially brought to you by my Tuesday morning Sustainability Studies lecture. The guest lecturer started out by wishing us happy Earth Day and briefly talked about how Earth Day is really about education. Education about the environment, education on how to keep our planet healthy and education on the importance of conserving the limited natural resources we have.

Since I've recently been teaching Horticulture in 3rd and 4th grade classrooms, my mind immediately jumped to the importance of educating kids, in particular, about this topic. If we're educating our kids to love gardens, isn't it a natural step to educate them to love the planet as well? "The kids are our future" is a cheesy saying, but that doesn't make it less true. Helping them to understand that the Earth's abundance is not infinite is something that should be one of our top priorities. I don't have kids, and probably won't for a while, so it's hard for me to definitively say how you should go about doing this or even tell you that you should be doing this in the first place. But I have seen the differences between the kids who have been taught to not be wasteful and those who don't have it as a priority at all and the difference is striking. Kids who are taught that the Earth needs to be cared for and protected tend to be more empathetic and curious about the natural world than kids who have not been educated on these things. And by "kids" I mean college students. It's often easy to tell which of my peers were brought up in houses where they were told to turn off the lights when they left a room and to recycle their plastic bottles. I know I don't need to be telling any of you that what you teach your kids influences how they live their lives once they leave the nest.
So to make this a rant a little bit more interesting, I've took the time to list some good topics to go over with kids (or adults!) this Earth Day that could really be beneficial. They also are just great practices for families to have so that you can teach by example!

Conserve Water
This is a biggie. Water is something that is becoming a big problem in many places, especially those prone to drought. There are many things you can do to help conserve water but a few you can do on a daily basis are:
1. Taking shorter showers. Seriously. You hear this one all the time but there's a good reason for that. An article from Boston University puts this in an easy to understand format. The average shower uses about 5 gallons of water per minute. If you shorten your shower time by just TWO MINUTES you can save 10 gallons of water every time you take a shower. That's 300 gallons per month per person!
Garden Connection: Does your shower/bath spout drip or even gush water right after you turn the shower off?Have a bucket near the side of the tub to put under the spout right after you step out of the shower to catch all that water, then use it to water your plants!
2. Dishes. We use a lot of water to do our dishes but, thankfully, there are multiple ways to conserve water while doing this chore.
-Dishwashers use less water than washing by hand. If you have one, use it. I'm assuming that wasn't too hard. Now that you've got that basic first part down, load that sucker up so it's full before you run it. Less loads means less water. If you have food that is caked on to pots and pans, soak them instead of running them under water for you put them in the dishwasher.
-If you don't own a dishwasher, don't let the water run constantly while washing the dishes. Fill up the sink and use that water instead.
3. Fill up a pitcher with water and drink you water from that. This way, every drop goes into your glass and you don't stand there running (wasting) water until it's cold enough.
For more ideas, I highly recommend this site.

Cut Back on Waste
Household waste is another huge problem. The United States generates 230 MILLION TONS of "trash" every year. That means that the average person is producing 4.6 pounds of waste EVERY DAY. How crazy is that??? Luckily, there are lots of ways to reduce and many fun and crafty was to reuse things in creative and functional ways.
1. Stay away from excess packaging. Do you really need that shrink-wrapped package of bell peppers when there are fresh, un-packaged ones right next to it? Didn't think so.
2. Reuse! Can that plastic container or egg carton be used to start seeds in? Darn right it can.
Kid Tip: Keep these containers and reusable items with the craft supplies. They can become beautiful works of art or just useful containers for all those glitter pens.
3.Compost! Us gardeners love this one. This might take a bit of research, but it saves you TONS of waste every week. If you don't have the space for a compost pile or bin, vermicomposting (composting with worms!) might be a good option. Find out how on this website.
Kid Tip: Many kids find worms fascinating, so vermicomposting can be a fun option for learning activities.
4. Watch this awesome TED Talk on how to only use 1 paper towel to dry your hands. Americans use 13 billion paper towels a day! Cut down on how much you use.

Recycle
This one is just obvious.
1. Check your city's recycling policies to see what can and can't be recycled, then go to town!
2. The most commonly recycled plastics are 1 and 2. Check plastic containers before you buy to make sure the plastic is recyclable.
3. As a general rule, check recyclable products before you buy them to make sure that they line up with your community's recycling . Just because the package says "recyclable" doesn't mean it's recyclable in your area.

I hope that my suggestions made up for making you sit through my Earth Day rant. But I really hope that you and many others make a resolution to live greener in the next year. Goodness knows our Earth really needs it.
For more ideas on how to re-purpose items, reduce waste and find out more about living sustainably, follow my Sustainability Board, Craft Board and Garden Tips boards on Pinterest. If you have any good Earth Day tips to share, post them below! I'd love to hear from you!

New Semester, New Classes!

Hello all! Apologies for being quiet on the blog front lately, but the beginning of the semester has kept me with very little free time for blogging. (Pro tip: Follow me on Twitter, I'm much more active there in busy times than on my blog!) But now that I have a quieter night to myself, I get to sit down and attempt to capture your interest with the new classes I'm taking.
First up, we have Successful School Gardens. If you saw my last post, you'll know that I'm traveling to England over spring break in March to learn about and teach in schools there with school gardens. This class runs for the whole semester, so we'll be preparing for our trip, as well as writing the lesson plans for teaching a class to students in multiple schools there. After we come back from London, we'll be paired up with schools here in the Twin Cities and will be teaching lessons about apples and microgreens to K-12 students. All the schools we will be paired with have existing school garden programs so we can learn how they work as well. I don't have too much to report on this since I've only been to the class once. It only meets once per week and the first class got cancelled due to extreme cold. (Don't even get me started on how cold it's been in Minnesota this winter!) This class also has a blog so I'll post links to those updates when they start rolling in.
Next up is Organic Farm Management. This is a class that really ties together a lot of things I find interesting. The first thing is, obviously, food. We're learning how to best grow good food in the climate we live in. The second thing, is organic farming. This class works specifically with the "Cornercopia" Student Organic Farm on campus to help them start a lot of the produce that they raise and sell over the course of the summer. Expect a lot of pictures from this class once we start growing all of those.

One of the seedlings from our seedling identification lab. Hard to tell it's an eggplant when it's that small!

Plant Physiology is the most lab intensive courses out of everything I'm taking. The course is actually classified as a "Writing Intensive" course (we need a certain number of these in order to graduate) so a lot of emphasis is put on scientific writing for lab reports. Most of our lab work is focused on environmental effects on crops such as amount of light, nutrient deficiencies, heat/cold, and how all of this affects the plant's growth. We've got a lab going right now testing germination and growth of plants with 16 hours of sun, 8 hours of sun and zero hours of sun. Pretty easy to tell what's going to happen, but the results are interesting to watch nonetheless.
Last but not least is "Sustainable People, Sustainable Planet". This is the only non-Horticulture class that I'm taking this semester and I LOVE it. We talk and read about sustainability as it relates to all different parts of life. Social justice, economy, environment, food systems, you name it. We've only been in class for around three weeks and I've already learned so much. My next post is probably going to be a bunch of stuff I've learned so far that I think everyone should be aware of. Our readings are incredibly interesting as well, so I'll definitely start posting links to those on here and on my Twitter account for you all to check out. Most are very accessible and thought-provoking reads. One big thing we started out looking at is planetary boundaries. I've included a diagram below. It's pretty self-explanatory, but basically the outer ring is the ceiling of where we should keep ourselves to stay within the Earth's resources and the inner ring is the floor that we should be above in terms of poverty, individual rights, education, etc.

Then this is where we are in terms of the inner circle. This means we're below where we should be when it comes to these things.



And then this is where we are in terms of the outer circle (the planetary boundaries) for things related to the environment and our impact on it.



Quite the difference, huh? This class has definitely put a lot of things in perspective for me. There's a lot I still have to learn about sustainability, but I really hope after this class I know how to communicate these ideas to people better so we can all work together to help change the way we interact with the natural world.
And that's all folks! You'll likely see more class related blog posts coming soon, and in the meantime don't forget to follow me on Twitter and Pinterest to keep up with my day to day activities and see what interesting things I've found around the web!

Lots of Plants, Small Spaces

Today, being the last day of our long Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to spend the day browsing gardening blogs, pinning great garden projects to Pinterest and getting sucked into some great videos about urban farming and hydroponics on Youtube. I found these through one video I saw while browsing the blog The Blogging Nurseryman by Trey Pitsenberger.
I thought I'd share a few.

1. Internet of Food: Ardunio-based, Urban Aquaponics in Oakland
This video was the one I found on Trey Pitsenberger's blog and led me to the others. The concept of aquaponics with a garden fed by water from a fish tank was new to me and the video was really informative. I also loved the technology element, one in which the gardener can interact with their garden through the internet. Figuring this technology out now in order to pass it on to younger gardeners, ones who will be inheriting a world where there's a need for smaller gardening spaces and new ways to grow what we need.

 

2. Biointensive Mini-Farming: Grow More Food in Less Space

This video was a neat look into how one person can grow all the food (if you're a vegetarian that is) they could need in a small space. One of the most interesting things to me was the grains being raised and how many of them were alternative grains to regular wheat.

3. Urban Forest Erupts in San Fransisco's Edgy Tenderloin

I loved this video. This is about a garden springing up in an alleyway between apartment buildings in the middle of a densely populated area of San Fransisco. The greenery just seemed that much, well, greener surrounded by all that concrete. The local art decorating the buildings and the clay oven they actually cook were really cool touches. My favorite part was the the words "Our Lady of the Alley" painted around the oldest resident's kitchen window that looked out upon a cherry tree they planted just for her.

4. Soil-less Sky Farming: Rooftop Hydroponics on NYC Resteraunt

The last video was about a resteraunt in New York City that grows it's fresh produce on the roof of it's building. Climbing up six stories, you'll find the roof covered in tall, very thick PVC-looking pipes that have notches cut into the sides where the produce grows, fed by water that is mixed with fertilizer and pumped through the top of the pipe to rain down the sides and water the plants. It was another really good look at a method of hydroponics I'd never seen and was interesting to see how much faster the plants grew in this way and how high a yield the restaurant gained from it.

 All of these videos certainly inspired me because at this point I'm starting to look at focusing my major towards things like urban farming and other sustainable methods of growing food in the spaces left to us, ones that just keep getting smaller and smaller. I find it fascinating how resourceful we can be when it comes to feeding ourselves and the new ways we find to go about doing so.

The videos were found on the channel of the co-founder of *faircompanies where all of these videos and a lot more can be found. The channel has a lot of videos on individuals, small companies and businesses who are doing projects in a much more different and sustainable way. I certainly enjoyed the one about the couple who build hobbit holes as playhouses, chicken coops and even tiny cottages. I'd definitely check some more of them out because there will probably be quite a few more of interest to you.