Keep Your Garden Green

*Plant some bamboo. Bamboo contributes to the balancing of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

*Don’t use a leaf blower. The horrible noise is reason enough to avoid these machines. Compost instead, and never burn leaves!

*Plant a garden using xeriscaping-no water needed. Find out more at ecolife.com/garden/natural-lawn/xeriscaping.html.

*Capture rainwater for gardens.

*Fertilize with grass clippings.

*When watering your garden, turn on the water early in the morning to minimize evaporation.

*Try not to fertilize before a storm to avoid the fertilizer being washed away.

Tend Your Garden

Grow your own garden, even if it is just on a stoop, window-sill, or fire escape. Fruits, vegetables, and herbs, oh my! Think of the recipe possibilities if your ingredients were right in your own backyard. Growing your own produce can save you money and time spent picking through the bruised and aged produce some grocery stores offer. This is also a great way to get organic!

Unplug (and Recharge!)

Forego using technological devices today. Texting your friend, watching your favorite show, checking your email-all can wait until tomorrow! Turn off your devices and turn on your senses! Read a book, cook a meal, and enjoy the outdoors by taking a walk or tending to your garden. Technology distracts us from the real world, occupying our attention with game applications, chat rooms, social media websites, commercials, and so on. Want to know what’s going on in the news? Read a newspaper. Be aware of the here and now by finding activities that don’t require electricity or a battery. Make your own entertainment!

Gaggles For Good

Plan an outing with a group of friends that will positively impact society. Instead of just going to the movies again, gang up for the good of all. Together, plant a community garden, help clean up a schoolyard, or volunteer for a nonprofit organization. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there are regular beach clean-up efforts and it is enormously rewarding to see the unmarred beauty beneath the trash. Find your local chapter of “Heal The Bay,” and get a little sun, sand and healing for you, your friends, and your closest coast.

Tend Your Garden

    Grow your own garden, even if it is just on a stoop, window-sill, or fire escape. Fruits, vegetables, and herbs, oh my! Think of the recipe possibilities if your ingredients were right in your own backyard. Growing your own produce can save you money and time spent picking through the bruised and aged produce some grocery stores offer. This is also a great way to get organic!

Just Say No to GMO

Buy organic heritage seedlings whenever you can. Most fruits and vegetables have an incredibly diverse range of varieties, but we typically only see one or two different kinds in the grocery store. By choosing to grow heritage plants we can preserve that diversity and give a big green thumbs down to monoculture.

Keep Your Garden Green

• Plant some bamboo. Bamboo contributes to the balancing of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
• Don’t use a leaf blower. The horrible noise is reason enough to avoid these machines. Compost instead, and never burn leaves!
• Plant a garden using xeriscaping-no water needed. Find out more at ecolife.com/garden/natural-lawn/xeriscaping.html.
• Capture rainwater for gardens.
• Fertilize with grass clippings.
• When watering your garden, turn on the water early in the morning to minimize evaporation.
• Try not to fertilize before a storm to avoid the fertilizer being washed away.

Tend Your Garden

    Grow your own garden, even if it is just on a stoop, window-sill, or fire escape. Fruits, vegetables, and herbs, oh my! Think of the recipe possibilities if your ingredients were right in your own backyard. Growing your own produce can save you money and time spent picking through the bruised and aged produce some grocery stores offer. This is also a great way to get organic!

Have a Good Neighbor Policy

    If you live next to an elderly couple or someone who is disabled, volunteer to help them around their yard by raking their leaves or mowing their lawn. Consider it good exercise and a good deed.

Plant Flowers in Abandoned Lots

    May Day was a sacred celebration of Spring in ancient times and remains a special day for common folk. I have attended several marvelous festivities complete with garlanded Maypoles; one held by Z Budapest is a treasured memory. I have my own tradition for this merry month, which is a really simple and easy way to celebrate spring: I plant flower seeds in neglected plots of land all around the Bay Area, particularly nasturtiums, which thrive on neglect and can bloom anywhere and under any circumstances. I could give a driving tour of San Francisco and the East Bay and show you the brightly colored patches that are the result of my Johnny Appleseed-style scattershot approach. You can even eat them! I always have a lot of nasturtiums growing in my garden and I collect the seeds once they have flowered in plastic baggies. I joke to my friends that I would like my legacy to be that I was "Fiesta Brenda," the name of a mix that yields a riot of color that can turn any former parking lot or weed patch into a pocket of red, yellow, and orange sunshine. I will add that some of my tenth-generation crop mutated into a lovely variegated leaf, which only adds to the glory. This bit of freeganomics feeds my should like almost nothing else. I would say it is a sensible act of beauty.

Ditch the High-Maitenance Front Lawn and Plant Natives

    As a Northern Californian experiencing a serious drought, I am thrilled to see more and more gardens being cultivated with plants that need no water. This method is called xeriscaping and is gorgeous and has enormous variety. If you're tired of the constant mow/water/fertilizer cycle of your lawn, consider getting rid of it altogether. It's not as bizarre as it sounds. Some water conservationists estimate that up to 40% of a household's water usage during the summer months is spent on outdoor watering, so ditching the lawn altogether can save you time and money, not to mention a precious resource. One eco-friendly option is to replace that turf with plants indigenous to your region, which will require less water and look far prettier than any ol' square of green grass could ever. Start a xeriscaping movement on your street

Just Say No to GMO

    Buy organic heritage seedlings whenever you can. Most fruits and vegetables have an incredibly diverse range of varieties, but we typically only see one or two different kinds in the grocery store. By choosing to grow heritage plants, we can preserve that diversity and give a big green thumbs down to monoculture.

Making the Most of a Rainy Day

    Get a rain barrel:

    *Install the rain barrel at least six feet from your house. Locating it near an area, you'll be watering the most makes for convenient use later.

    *Ensure that your rain barrel has an overflow at least as large as your inflow- for example, if you have rigged it so that water is collected directly from your eaves' trough downspout, your overflow value should be as large as your downspout as well. This will allow your rain barrel to get rid of excess water as fast as it collects it, which might be necessary if you live in a city with crazy, unpredictable weather like my brother does.

    *If you are using the rain barrel to water your garden, consider using a soaker hose. You can attach the hose to the rain barrel and then run it through your garden so that it covers the area you'd like. Now, every time you see a rain cloud, you'll get really excited.

Breathe Easier

    Having plants around is great for where you live and where you work. Not only are they lovely to look at, they improve the air you breathe! The following air-purifying plants look great, produce oxygen, and can even absorb contaminants like formaldehyde and benzene (commonly off-gassed from furniture and mattresses). The best part? Nary an electrical cord, nor a battery, in sight. Ahhhh.

    *Spider plant

    *Peace lily

    *Snake plant

    *Elephant ear

    *Weeping fig

    *Rubber plant

    *Bamboo palm

Support Farm-to-School Projects

    By teaching kids exactly where their food comes from, they will grow up to make informed grocery choices and strengthen their local economies. Start a farm-to-school project in your school district; all the know how is at farmtoschool.org.

And don't Forget the Senseless Acts of Beauty!

    Ann Herbert, the poet artist who inspired Random Acts of Kindness, also implored us to add prettiness to the world. There are so many ways to do this: plant flower, pick up trash, or paint a lovely mural for the entire neighborhood's pleasure.

    What beauty can you bring to the world?

Save Seeds

    My Aunt Ruth in Flat Rock, West Virginia raised me to save seeds. A child of the Great Depression, my aunt Ruth was teaching me the virtue of thrift when she showed how to harvest, dry, and save seeds from veggies and flowers. Thrift was an important survival skill for that time and I see it as a forgotten virtue whose time has arrived once again. I remember being very impatient about how long it took for spring to come so I could sow the marigolds, alyssum, and four o'clocks that I had collected.

Be a Fixer-Upper (Plus Weeding is Good Therapy)

    Assist seniors near you with tasks like raking, shoveling, or doing minor home repairs through Volunteers of America's Safety of Seniors Handyman Program (voa.org). I pull my 98-year-old neighbor's weeds and it is a good exercise for me, it benefits the neighborhood, and she appreciates the weekly attention she and her yard enjoy!

Scatter Joy All Around

     Think about how you can create little moments of happiness for others. Help a friend plant her garden, buy an extra coffee for a coworker, pay the toll for the car beyond you on the bridge, and even take your kids to a movie. All those little things can add up to big joy.