Have you heard this term before, localvore? It’s about committing to eating food grown in one’s local food shed. There are plenty of health and evolutionary reasons to do it, of course, but environmentally speaking, it has huge advantages. Smaller carbon footprint, obviously, as the food needn’t travel so far to get to you. Support for smaller, natural and organic farms, for another.

I love this time, as spring segues into summer, when it comes to food. There’s all sorts of wonderful, local produce that’s readily available, not to mention the food we’re growing in our own backyard! But typically as the season winds down and we get back into fall and winter, I’ll go back to buying imported produce at the supermarket, because “otherwise we couldn’t eat anything but apples.” (Yes, that’s an exaggeration.) This year, I’m extending my commitment to being a localvore by freezing many of our favorites.

For the next few months, I’ll be loading up at our local farmer’s market, and in our garden, and freezing the excess to use this winter. I always thought I’d have to learn how to can to preserve many of my favorites (like tomatoes), but berries freeze beautifully just as they are, and many veggies freeze well after a quick blanch (including tomatoes). Come fall, my freezer will be full, and I can continue eating locally, even after our favorites have gone out of season.

I can’t wait. Local strawberries in December? Bring it on.

I was feeling proud of myself about all of the food my family has planted this year, which usually signals that it’s time for something to go wrong. (No, this isn’t being pessimistic. It’s realistic.) So, first I found myself dealing with various critters eating our plants, and then this weekend something else happened.

Our strawberries are ripening. And as much as my children wanted to pluck them immediately at the first sign of red, I cautioned them to wait a bit longer. I told them they wouldn’t taste good, and needed more time to ripen. So we waited. And waited.

And then this weekend several were undeniably ripe, so we picked them with great anticipation.

And they tasted… sour.

I’m perplexed. They were beautiful, but they weren’t sweet. Is it the variety? Something about the way we grew them? Did they need some time to sit and further ripen after picking? (That seems impossible, given how red they were.) I just have no idea.

So much for the joys and sustainability of growing our own berries. Blech.

Next weekend we’ll head to a local farm, where we can pick our own berries. It’s a little more green than buying at the supermarket, and they’ll taste a heck of a lot better than the ones we’re growing here at home. And this way the squirrels can eat ours, I guess, and we can call it kindness to the local wildlife. Or something.

I came across this video online the other day, and it made me laugh so hard, my kids came running. So then I let them watch it, and they laughed so hard they then begged me to play it again. And again.

But seriously, it’s a valuable lesson about water conservation! Honest! See for yourself:

See? I’m sure the Navy Shower is Waverly-approved for conserving water, and if this video gets your kids into the idea, well, that can’t be a bad thing.

… just ask the bugs!

I promised myself two things this year, when it came to our gardening efforts. First, that I would planet enough that we could eat fresh veggies for the bulk of the summer and even have surplus to freeze and/or can; and second, that I would keep the garden organic.

That means no commercial growth solutions (and I have used that thing that rhymes with, um, Piracle-Mow, in the past), no chemical pesticides. While I’ve not had a problem with the first item (owing, in part, to having found some nice organic fertilizer options), my garden is currently bursting forth and Houston, we have a problem. Specifically: We have bugs. Lots of them.

I’m already planting basil alongside the tomatoes (to help keep tomato-loving bugs repelled) and scattering eggshells around the base of the plants the slugs love (they’re too sharp for the slugs to cross), but we also have beetles and flies and who knows what else.

So I’m spending a little bit of quality time doing some research. I’m digging this Natural Pest Control overview from Green Living Ideas, and because I love a good chart, I’m also liking this Organic Pest Control Guide from Extremely Green. And I’m feeling confident that I can rescue our plants and still keep our garden green. That’s a nice way to start off the week!

Yesterday on Twitter (you are following us on Twitter, right?) we got to wondering (out loud, and in 140 characters, naturally) what would be the most environmentally-friendly coffee to pursue.

This is one of those iddy biddy things you may not think about. But many of us start the day with a cup (or three) of coffee, and it matters. It matters because there’s a lot of ecological damage that happens when rainforests are clear-cut to make room for more coffee fields, and it matters because paper cups from coffee shops are filling up the trash. So what’s a java lover to do?

Obviously, brewing at home and using your own reusable drinking vessels is a good start, but seeking out beans grown in a sustainable, earth-friendly manner is part of it, too. I really like this piece at Eat. Drink. Better. explaining the various terms and what they mean. Like, did you know that the USDA allows a product to label itself “organic” even if it’s only 30% organic? I sure didn’t.

When it comes to greener coffee, organic or not is only a part of the story. You also want to consider whether it was shade-grown (which allows for less deforestation and less disturbance of the local ecosystems) and Fair Trade (which keeps farmers from having to grow more and more just to make a decent wage), as well. There are many factors to consider, is my point, and the above-referenced article covers them in an informative and easy to understand way.

Now I’m sort of wondering about the ecological impact of the tea I drink, too, but I think I need to finish this cup of coffee before I can start thinking about that.

Remember when I told you about the Care and Share contest being run by The Weather Channel Kids in partnership with Idbids and others? Well, the contest ran, and the winners have been announced.

The class winners hail from Curlew Creek Elementary in Palm Harbor, Florida—their project was titled S.I.S.T.E.R Earth (Stop Idling Save The Earth’s Resources). They tackled the bane of my existence, the carpool line! Evidently their efforts to reduce idling cars while waiting in line for school pick-ups were quite impressive.

The family winners are the Northrops of Dunwoody, Georgia, who’ve been protecting their local watershed by cleaning up trash along the Chattahoochee River as part of the Rivers Alive Cleanup.

Congratulations to all the winners! I hear Waverly is headed to the beach to hang out at Curlew Creek, and if any of the winners don’t want the Ben & Jerry’s portion of their prize winnings, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Because, um, I’d hate for that ice cream to go to waste. Yes. That’s it. I’m just trying to reduce and reuse. This has absolutely nothing to do with my addiction to Cherry Garcia. Ahem.

It’s finally here—today is Earth Day!

How will you celebrate?

Maybe you’d like to send a few free Earth Day e-cards to those you love; I promise they have just an iddy biddy carbon footprint, and no trees were harmed in their creation.

Or maybe you’d like to try some recycled tinfoil (yes, really), but you’ve noticed it’s pretty pricey, at the store. Reynolds is willing to let you try it for free, so you can decide if you like it (or if you just want to save some money).

Need some other ideas of green resources and/or steps you can take today? Msnbc has a great round-up of suggestions—I particularly like 70 Park Avenue Hotel’s new Eco-Step Challenge. (If ever you needed an excuse to hit NYC….)

Of course, surely you already have your Idbids gear, but if not, it’s always a good time to shop the Idbids Store for all sorts of earth-friendly Idbids merchandise.

Let’s all keep working towards making it Earth Day, every day!

Sometimes I come across something online where I think, “Wow, that is such a good idea. I’m totally going to start doing that!” It’s thanks to the wonders of the Internet that I learned about rain barrels. And square-foot gardening. And lots of other things which I feel have raised my eco-IQ, as it were.

Without the Internet, I probably wouldn’t be baking my own bread. (I used to think baking was scary. I don’t know why. And sure, I have cookbooks, but being able to read about people’s personal experience—particularly folks saying, “This recipe was so easy! Thanks!”—helped me to brave a new undertaking.) My point is, there’s a lot to be said for having such easy access to both information and the experiences of others. Going green in small steps is made a lot easier when you can compare notes and get ideas from people all over the planet.

But sometimes I read about people taking big, radical steps… and sometimes I’m impressed, and other times… well… here, I’ll let you be the judge: Have you heard of freeganism? The good news is that they’re sort of uber-recyclers. The bad news is that they eat out of the trash. Yes. I want to applaud their ingenuity, their eco-consciousness, their resourcefulness. I do. But… they eat trash.

(Here’s to smaller steps, the kind that don’t make me gag.)

My children have always helped me in the garden, even when they were iddy biddy things and “helped” by kneeling beside me with their plastic tools, pretending to weed. Nowadays, they can do actual weeding (much to their chagrin), and they help with the watering and harvesting. (You understand that by “harvesting” I mean that my son eats handfuls of parsley until his tongue turns green, and my daughter pops tomatoes in her mouth while assuring me that it’s okay because more will grow, Mom, and this one was bruised, honest.)

This is the first time that one of my children has owned their own garden plant, though. My son’s class is participating in Bonnie’s 3rd grade cabbage program this year. So he came home with a cabbage and informed me that he was going to take care of it all by himself.

I was game. We set aside the necessary 4-foot square and planted it and darned if my son isn’t taking this all very seriously. He checks on it every day, and waters it when necessary, and looks it over for bugs, and chats with me about fertilizer. He’s started asking me things like, “Why don’t we grow all of our own food?” (answer: “Hey, look over there… something shiny!”) and “How big do you think my cabbage will get?” (answer: “Really big. We’ll eat it for a week straight!”). He’s having a great time, and I’d admit to getting more than a few chuckles out of listening to him talk to his “baby.”

Now I just need to find the perfect recipe, because I haven’t the heart to tell him that every time I’ve fed him cabbage in the past, he didn’t like it.

I confess that… I am not very good with moderation. I’ve always been about black and white and not so much about gray. It’s not intentional, it’s just how I am.

And so, shamefully, I admit that long ago there was a time when I didn’t even recycle because it was “too much trouble.” Fast forward to today, and I’m the Plastic Police. I pull things out of the trash and scold my family for not rinsing and recycling. All or nothing, baby.

Last year, my husband built us a 35-gallon rain barrel. Our area has been in a pretty significant drought for the last few years, so I only planted a few things and used the water from the barrel to keep them watered, but this year I planted a lot more. So I asked him to make me another barrel.

He came home this weekend with three 55-gallon drums and rigged us up an additional containment system, much to my delight. And you’d think that with an extra 165 gallons of preserved water, I’d be a happy camper, right? Well, it’s been raining all night and all morning, and I went to check on the barrels, and they’re all full. Water is gushing out of the overflows, and it’s still raining.

Instead of being happy, I found myself wondering how many more containers I could set out to catch that other, wasted water. You know, because 200 gallons of preserved rain water might not be enough. (I know. Don’t say it.)