Soil Conservation

And what is that scent after an early Summer rain? Short answer:  the scientists call it Petrichor.  The internet definition: a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather….and there’s a much more interesting, albeit a bit longer, answer. Rain is one of the most beautiful, and… [Read More]

Saturday morning and it’s off to the garden center for topsoil to get the planting started.   Go ahead, pick out a likely bag from the selection. After all, you’re a gardener and you know your dirt. In grabbing a handful of topsoil, what sort of rating process do you apply? For example, does it look… [Read More]

When we look at a field of dairy cows chowing down on alfalfa and clover, think of all the milk products they give us — butter, cream, ice cream and ingredients for our favorite chocolate bars, to name some. But their diets of all that roughage produces a totally unexpected cash crop: manure. Today’s dairy… [Read More]

Why not? Egg shells, banana peels and leftovers are biodegradable, so they’ll just go into the landfill and decompose, right? Probably not.  Are you aware that because of federal regulation landfills are equipped with liners to prevent any food scraps from touching the soil?  So instead it decomposes, releasing methane gasses that municipalities recapture as… [Read More]

It’s been estimated the average air passenger leaves behind three pounds of trash when deplaning. It breaks down to 33% discarded or uneaten food, 28% paper and cardboard, and 12% plastic. (The rest must be soda cans and all those little liquor and wine bottles.) When you multiply that by four billion passengers per year,… [Read More]