Change the World Wednesday - A Green Halloween

It's Change the World Wednesday time again! This week, the challenge was to celebrate a greener Halloween:

Halloween is coming up so ... this week consider the environmental impact of the treats we give out and offer suggestions for better alternatives. Let's expand on the idea and include parties, costumes, etc.

Change the World Wednesday: Reduce your Emissions

Time for another Change the World Wednesday (#CTWW) challenge at Reduce Footprints. In case you're reading about this for the first time, the goal of CTWW is to get a bunch of people to make a small change that has a big impact on the environment (in a good way), especially if they all do it at the same time.

Last week's challenge was to go car free for a day. Or longer.

Composting 101: How to Make Compost (The Easy Way)

We have been talking a lot about gardening and natural products. Well, composting is one of the best, most natural things you can do for your garden and your environment. You probably know what composting means—it’s becoming pretty popular—but how on earth do you do it? Composting is essentially combining scraps of organic material so that it breaks down into a nutrient- and microbe-rich “soil." This happens in nature all the time. It’s how plants existed before people arrived to fertilize and mess with them. As organic matter breaks down, it feeds other plants, giving them what they need to fight disease and grow.

If you have ever researched information about composting, you may have become overwhelmed. A lot of resources make it sound like if you don’t do everything perfectly right, you’ll have a rotting, stinking mess. I used to worry about this and even went so far as to buy a thermometer to make sure my compost pile was getting hot enough for proper decomposition. I turned it religiously and tried to monitor my ratios of brown to green stuff.

And then I had two kids, got lazy, and didn’t touch my compost bin for a year. When I started gardening again, I stuck a shovel into the bottom of the compost bin and pulled out … COMPOST!

So this is the lazy, beginner’s version of composting. The point is that it works. It gives you a foundation to start from, and you can perfect it as you go. This is the lazy person’s guide to making compost.

Green Business Spotlight: Progressive Gardens

My fall garden

When you walk into Green Baby Diaper Service, you’ll often find a new or seasoned mom or dad chatting with one of the ladies there. They might be asking about diaper creams, wondering about the newest cloth diaper covers, or sharing parenting advice.

The same thing happens when you walk into Progressive Gardens, the organic gardening store in Wilmington across the street from Green Baby Diaper Service. Except people aren’t asking about how to raise their kids, they are asking about how to raise their plants. Progressive Gardens is one of those places where you can shop for gardening supplies, seeds, rain barrels, or nursery containers, or you can go to find out about local organic farms, natural approaches to lawn care, and more.

You know how there is so much information out there about cloth diapers that if you try to research it on your own, you end up completely overwhelmed? Gardening is similar. It’s best to do a little planning, but then jump in and ask questions as you go along. And even with all the information out there on the internet, I find it’s so much more straightforward to just go into Progressive Gardens, ask about your specific issue, and buy what you need right there.