Your Own Kitchen Garden

Have you been thinking about planting a kitchen garden this spring with vegetables and fruits you love to eat?

Food grown in your own garden will be fresher than anything you can buy -- even from a farmer's market. In many cases, it will be tastier, too. My favorites are just-picked, sun-warmed tomatoes and sweet peas straight from the pod.

Home-grown food is also cheap. If you start from seed rather than starter plants, it's practically free. Growing from seed also gives you the option of many more plant varieties. It's not that hard either, as this video from retrovore.com shows:



If you do go with starter plants, get yours from a local nursery that grows their own, rather than a big box store. Superstores don't tend to have good controls in place for monitoring plants for disease. If you unwittingly buy diseased plants, you can not only ruin your own harvest but spread the disease to other gardeners and nearby farms. Just last year, diseased tomato plants bought by home gardeners at big chains ended up destroying tomato crops across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

Also, keep chemicals out of your garden. They're not something you want on your food, seeping into groundwater or running off into rivers and streams.

Read my February column for NRDC, Kitchen Gardening -- Not Just about the Food, to learn more and subscribe to This Green Life to get the column by email every month.

Switch to Green Power in NYC in 3 Clicks

New Yorkers: if you've been meaning to sign up for green power, but found it too difficult till now, head on over to greenpowernyc.com. Pick a wind product or a blend or let the site choose for you. Any which way you'll reduce your contribution to global warming for a few dollars a month. (The exact amount will depend on how much electricity you use.) The site is a project of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and ACE NY -- and was designed by my web development firm, Mixit Productions. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

What do Americans think of global warming?

In the new interactive anthology, Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming, new and established writers speak out from the depths of their own experience about the climate crisis.

The 67 works in the anthology were selected from "nearly 1,000 submissions about beloved places, animals, plants, people, and activities at risk from a changing climate and the efforts that individuals are making to save what they love." Contributors include scientists, students, grandparents, activists, veterans, journalists, evangelical Christians, artists and businesspeople.

The book, which will also be available soon in a limited hardcover edition, is published by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Penguin Classics. My own firm, Mixit Productions, designed the interactive version.

Take a look and while you're at it, get yourself some free wallpaper featuring striking nature imagery and quotations by great environmental writers.