Archive for August, 2010

This is a shameless plug, but it’s for a good cause.  It will make you smile on a Monday morning.  My friend Nichole, over at The Daily Bun, has been “snorging up the world since 2006.”  What does that mean, you might ask?  Well, Nichole, with her slightly twisted (yet hysterical) sense of humor, has been sending a select list of people daily pictures of bunnies for the past 4 years.  She’s added words such as “kronchable” and “blobule” to my vocabulary along the way.  It never fails - when I am having a bad day (or even a fantastic one), an email from “The Daily Bun” is a “must open” and puts a huge grin on my face.  Last year, she started a blog, and has been using that to “snorg up the world” ever since.  Check out this post, which overlaps the content of this site, entitled Organic Bunny.  I promise

…getting a text from my sister, who has been reading my blog and has just started paying attention to local food, that says: “Ten bucks at the farmers market!! ” along with this great photo.  Yes, local food can be cheap!  Enjoy the veggies, MC!

I attended the National Capitol Planning Commission’s speaker series, Seven Minutes & Change Toward a Better Region, and it was an urban planner’s geek heaven!  9 presentations, and the best part is – they were all distilled down to their core, as participants only had 7 minutes to get their point across.   Several people echoed my sentiments that there is a lot of filler in most presentations, and “all should be limited to 7 minutes.” While they were all fascinating, the one that was most applicable to this blog was a presentation by Gül Güleryüz (Prince George’s County) entitled: Urban Agriculture: It’s Good Food, it’s Jobs, and it’s Fun! I learned a few interesting facts in the seven minutes, the most interesting being: Will Allen’s Growing Power is working with  a farm in Prince George’s county on gardening as an economic development strategy.  They have three hoop houses, vermiculture, and

Salazar Green is a landscape project that includes a new track + field and community/school garden. Located in Santa Fe, NM, this project was designed to encourage positive habits of physical health and nutrition.

The thing I remember most about my first summer (2004) in the Baltimore-Washington region was most certainly the afternoon thunderstorms.  It seemed inevitable that each afternoon, while driving home from the office around 5:30 or 6:00, I’d drive through a string of ferocious storms.  This summer has been no different.  Seemingly every afternoon, a powerful storm blows through.  Within minutes, it’s sunny again. Here’s a sunshower I captured from my balcony.  The plants are loving it!

Anyone out there know what these little critters are?  I noticed them on the underside of my Tuscan Pepper plants.  In all my years gardening, I have never seen anything like them.  They look like tiny lady bugs, but I want to ensure they aren’t something destructive to my tiny ecosystem.  Here’s the specifics: A cluster of papery, white eggs (punctured perfectly at the top where they hatched) Small bugs that are brick-red, with six black spots on them This morning, I noticed another clump – the small bugs were all black and looked more like spiders. Anyone have ideas?

Ari Hart, a contributor from the Huffington Post, weaves the aspects of his faith (Judaism) into his blog post, Sustainable Food, Sustainable Faith. “What religious values inform sustainable Judaism? The Torah, the Jewish Bible, is centered around farming and the agricultural cycle. Almost every Jewish holiday has a strong connection to the Earth. But Jewishly, what is the religious meaning of land? Is it just to serve humanity? In Genesis 2:15, the Torah says that God placed humans into the world to “till it and tend it.” Finding balance between working the land while caring for the land is at the heart of the Jewish approach.” It brought me back to my own thoughts about religion, spirituality, and faith.  Growing up, in times of religious doubt, my father would often tell me “even if you don’t go to church, you must make time to connect with your creator.”  We’d go