An AK-47 transforms into a plow. Or an AR-15 turns into a spade. Gun barrels become mattocks, hoes and trowels. These garden tools will be sold to buy more guns by Guns to Gardens, a buyback program dedicated to creating a cycle of awareness around gun violence.
New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV), which hosts the program, is a nonprofit that works to reduce gun violence. The program started about two and a half years ago and was modeled off of a similar program called RAWtools. Guns to Gardens allows gun owners to anonymously turn in their weapons and receive gift cards in return. But the gun’s life doesn’t stop there. The guns are dismantled and brought to an artist, who reshapes them into gardening tools.
A program like this especially important in a state like New Mexico, which has higher firearm mortality rates than the country’s average — a rate that has increased nearly twice as fast in New Mexico than in the rest of the country.
NMPGV has hosted seven gun buybacks in the past two years and has collected over 400 guns.
To learn more about Guns to Gardens, watch the above video.
Tag: gardening
Four Tips To Build an Eco-Friendly Garden
Gardens are good for the environment and, arguably, good for the soul. But you’re undercutting your good work if you’re still using, say, a gas-powered lawnmower or irrigating your lawn more than it needs.
Here are four ways to make gardening more eco-friendly.
USE A BARREL
Just think for a moment about all the water that hits your roof during a rainstorm. Now imagine all that water being put to use.
Using a rain barrel is a great way to capture much of that roof runoff.
Typical rain barrels can hold 40 to 90 gallons of water. All of that can be used to water plants or wash cars. It’s also great for your wallet, as you will be able to decrease your municipal water usage.
If you don’t know what size of rain barrel to buy, use this formula to help you calculate how much rainwater you can collect based on the square footage of your roof and the annual rainfall in your area.
GO NATIVE (WITH YOUR CHOICE OF PLANTS)
Pro-tip: Pine trees are pretty, “fir” sure (get it?). But they don’t belong anywhere near your Florida beach home.
Instead, use native plants when you build your garden. Drought-resistant plants native to your area means that you can water them less. “Going native” can save your water consumption by as much as 60 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In New Orleans, a program pays homeowners to replace pavement with native plants on their property, as part of a larger project to help mitigate flooding in neighborhoods where green space is limited.
Local plants also attract local fauna, which is great for pollination. For example, agave plants native to the American Southwest produce massive flower stalks that hummingbirds find irresistable.
GET SMART ON IRRIGATION
If you rely on irrigation to water your lawns and gardens, then you know the amount of water wasted when your lawn is irrigated the same day of a massive rainstorm.
But there are smart ways to irrigate your lawn without overwatering. It just takes a little advance planning.
Evapotranspiration relies on sensors to measure how much moisture is in the ground and irrigates based on the exact needs of your lawn.
But if investing in fancy sensors is not your thing, or you want a more DIY approach to setting your irrigation schedule, here are a few tips:
- Irrigate early in the morning or late at night to lessen evaporation
- Try a drip technique, in which you line your garden with a soaker hose that slowly drips water directly on the roots of your plants
- Capture gray water to reuse in your garden. You can even rig your home so that water from your washing machine or shower flows directly into your garden
DON’T TOSS THE SCRAPS
You know that entire plate of food you’re throwing away after Thanksgiving? Here’s the problem with that:
When we discard uneaten food and scraps, it goes directly into landfills. As it rots, it releases methane, which is almost 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Western Australia, for example, dumped nearly 700,000 tons of organic waste in 2012, each ton releasing about one ton of greenhouse gas, mostly in the form of methane. In America, we throw away way more than that — about 30 times more, in fact, with roughly 25.9 million tons of food waste filling American landfills each year, according to a 2009 report by the U.S. Agriculture Department.
That is food — or wood chips, or grass clippings, or leaves, or even t-shirts — that could easily be composted and made into fertilizer for your garden.
And composting also helps the soil in your garden. It can help clean up soil contaminated with pesticides, and it helps retain moisture so that you don’t need to water your plants so frequently.
New Orleans Floods With Heavy Rainstorms. Magnolias Could Be Part of the Solution
Louisiana weather in the summer is temperamental — and residents brace for the worst every year.
People who live in this swampy coastal state know that a light rain could easily turn into a torrential downpour, resulting in sheets of water that spill from rooftops and flood the streets or overflow estuaries that feed into larger lakes.
That’s exactly what happened in New Orleans earlier this summer, and last summer and the summer before last.
“If there’s a half inch of rain falling, my street is flooded,” says Ramiro Diaz, an urban architect who sits on the board of the city’s Zoning and Adjustments Commission. “It’s an intensity thing. For us, a regular rain here is like monsoon rains for people in California. We can get half an inch of rain in 15 minutes.”
The problem isn’t just that New Orleans is a wet city that sits on top of water tables, or that it’s surrounded by swampland and is also partly below sea level (and sinking even more). It also has a lot to do with the way the city looks: It’s completely gray.
Pavement in New Orleans is everywhere, especially in the suburbs. Those areas — some of the lowest-lying in the city — are where water is meant to drain from the higher elevation areas, such as the French Quarter. But the excess of pavement covering such neighborhoods has transformed permeable land into impenetrable surface. As a result, water that should flow to the suburbs at a pace slow enough for the city’s drains and pumps to manage it is moving too quickly. And there’s just too much of it.
But a city-backed initiative is helping city residents manage flooding on their properties. The project, Front Yard Initiative, reimburses homeowners to tear out pavement in their yards and replace it with rain gardens, local plants that can absorb large amounts of water and rain barrels. So far, the Front Yard Initiative has been adopted by 43 homeowners in three New Orleans neighborhoods, and city planners have argued that the project — if adopted by enough people — might help reduce flooding throughout the city.
A GRAY CITY
Vivek Shaw lives just off Broad Street, a main thoroughfare in the Mid-City neighborhood, north of the French Quarter. His street is standard-issue New Orleans suburb: shotgun homes and Creole cottages, many raised on stilts, lined up side-by-side. All of the landscape is paved.
“All this [pavement] contributes to flooding,” Shaw says, pointing to one home on his street that is paved all the way around its perimeter. Next to Shaw’s home, crates have been placed for residents to cross the sidewalk to their stoops when the street floods. In August of last year, Shaw’s street, St. Ann, had 22 inches of flooding due to a heavy rain.
St. Ann is designed like most of the streets in New Orleans: The road has a slight downward tilt so that rainwater can run to the catch basins on Broad Street. The slope is slight enough so that instead of rushing down, the water moves in a measured way to the main thoroughfare, where the city’s five massive turbines and 120 water pumps push water back out to Lake Pontchartrain and, eventually, the sea.
But concrete has made that process cumbersome. Plants, sod and general greenery could easily absorb thousands of gallons of water so that the pumps aren’t overwhelmed, but most of the natural flora is gone.
“It’s like trying to drain a bathtub into a pipe the size of a straw,” says Diaz. “The more we pave the city, the faster the water runs off to those drains. And the drains are undersized and overwhelmed with rainstorms.”
(It’s also worth noting that the city found the drain pipes clogged with, literally, tons of Mardi Gras beads.)
It’s unknown how much pavement actually covers New Orleans. The city has never had a GIS — a software approach to mapping geographic and architectural layers of a city — officially in place. Heavy construction of the city after WWII meant that the suburbs were booming in Orleans Parish, but that also meant draining away the water shelf and paving over the land.
Paving land in this part of the South was deliberate, in order to fend off disease — stagnant water and natural ditches in the ground are breeding grounds for mosquitos, says Diaz.
“Ditches were vectors for disease. Once we realized, for example, yellow fever was water-related, we got rid of the water everywhere,” says Diaz, whose architecture firm was key in creating an urban water plan proposal. “To get rid of mosquitos you have to annihilate everything.”
New Orleans is built on a foundation of wet clay. By paving over it indiscriminately, the clay is drying out and shrinking, a process called subsidence that leads to infrastructure nightmares like cracked roads and shattered pipes.
As a result, the city is falling ever deeper below sea level — and that’s making the situation even worse. A city that once did its best to keep the swamp away is now swimming in water.
TEAR IT UP
Walk through any garden party in New Orleans and you’re bound to encounter a whiff of honey and spice. It’s the telltale smell of swamp milkweed, pink bushels of flowers native to the South.
Swamp milkweed is one of dozens of plants in the area, including sweetbay magnolias and dwarf palmettos, that can absorb large amounts of water. They’re just a few of the plants that Front Yard Initiative recommends using when decorating water-absorbing lawns, says Felice Lavergne, a project manager for the Urban Conservancy.
“These plants practically live in water,” says Lavergne. “They have deep roots that take in the ground water which helps with absorption.”
Front Yard Initiative’s reimbursement levels for pavement removal are small, Lavergne admits, only $2.50 a square foot, up to a max of $1,250 per property. The cost of removing pavement is often three times that high — which doesn’t factor in landscape and gardening costs — but it’s an incentive for homeowners to take action in communities that suffer consistent flooding. (The program has reimbursed homeowners a total of $42,446 to date.)
So far, Front Yard has been able to clear over 25,000 square feet of pavement. That’s only half the square footage of a typical football field, but breaking it down by household, an average of 600 square feet of pavement has been removed from 43 homes.
One Broadmoor homeowner tore up 343 square feet of pavement around his home and replaced it with bioswales, gravel and underground water storage that holds 11,000 gallons of water — enough water to fill a small swimming pool. The home takes in water for the whole street.
And that makes a difference, says Lavergne.
“We can’t say that replacing pavement with a rain garden is going to stop flooding, but it absolutely alleviates it,” she says, adding that Front Yard Initiative’s collective yard-greening so far captures over 35,000 gallons of water.
It’s exactly what Shaw, the homeowner on St. Ann Street, did when he first moved in. He removed less than 100-square feet of concrete from his front yard and replaced it with a rain garden that holds 80 gallons of water.
“It’s small, but if everyone does it, we might not have as much flooding,” he says.
That’s not untrue, says Diaz. He and his team found that if everyone in New Orleans Parish had some form of water storage — even 30 gallons worth, or enough to fill a rain barrel — pumps wouldn’t be inundated with rainwater during heavy rains.
The Front Yard Initiative has received verbal support from the city, which has been under increasing pressure to build a more resilient New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. After 12 years, the storm still wreaks havoc on city budgets that are geared towards rebuilding streets via FEMA grants that only permit streets to be rebuilt exactly as they were before the 2005 storm.
“We got all this money from FEMA to fix our streets, but if you [fix] a street back to what it was when it didn’t work, it doesn’t make much sense,” Diaz says.
City officials have struggled for years to find money for projects to revitalize roads and allow water to flow down them in more sustainable ways, and city councillors have turned to federal grants to fund more resilient landscape programs that resemble the Front Yard Initiative’s program.
In the Gentilly neighborhood, for example, $141 million in Housing and Urban Development grants will fund the creation of a massive rain garden which could hold up 1.23 million feet of water.
And Urban Conservancy, Front Yard Initiative’s parent organization, has partnered with Greenlight NOLA to incentivize homeowners to replace their pavement in conjunction with the resiliency project.
“This is a community effort,” says Lavergne. “In New Orleans, you know your neighbors, you care for your neighbors and hang out with them and know each other’s kids. By protecting your home in this really simple way, you’re protecting your neighbor.”
How Does This Sheet Make Healthy Food More Accessible?
Let’s be honest, most of us probably love the taste of homegrown, fresh vegetables, but we don’t want to do the work required to start our own garden. Between weeding, planting and watering, the upkeep of a garden requires a lot of time that many of us simply don’t have.
All of that might change, however, with the invention of the Seedsheet, a seed-loaded sheet customized to your needs.
Seedsheet is the product of the new Vermont-based company Cloudform. A Kickstarter campaign to fund its production launched on Nov. 14.
Green thumbs can design their garden using the Seedsheet’s website, and according to CEO and founder Cameron MacKulger, it’s as simple as paint by numbers. Users plug in their garden dimensions on the website and and their zip code to learn which plant hardiness zone they live in. Next, users customize garden by dragging, dropping and arranging fruits, vegetables and herbs in their virtual garden.
Seedsheet will then create the sheet and all the customer has to do is prepare the soil, put the sheet in the soil and water. The sheet eliminates the need for seed selection, planting and weeding (thanks to the weed-barrier fabric in it).
Making gardening easier is not MacKugler’s ultimate goal, however.
“The primary aim of the Seedsheet, and our company, is to make healthy food accessible for everyone,” MacKugler tells Motherboard. “The Seedsheet is a value-add to people that already garden, as it is an innovation that will save time and improve upon the process that they already love. By incorporating a user-friendly software program, we make gardening approachable to millennials that would otherwise be intimidated by a 100-page seed catalog.”
Additionally, because Seedsheet warms the ground beneath it, it makes the soil and seeds more stable to fight erosion, plus, it requires less watering.
Sounds like a dream come true for green thumbs everywhere.
MORE: From Farm to Patient: How One Medical Facility is Rethinking Hospital Food
How Digging in the Dirt Improves the Health of Immigrants in America
As anyone who’s traveled to a foreign country can attest, food can vary greatly from land to land.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that when some immigrants move to America, their health declines because they don’t have access to the fresh produce that enriched their diets in their native country.
In rural western Colorado, a unique program is solving this problem by helping immigrants learn English while they grow healthy food for their families — and it’s giving the farmer who hosts them some new notions about what crops to grow, too.
In the town of Delta, immigrants from countries including Mexico and Myanmar who sign up for ESL classes learn about a program at the Thistle Whistle Farm, located near Hotchkiss, Colo., about 45 minutes away. The immigrants help out at the farm and in doing so, get tips on how to cultivate and grow their own food. Plus, they can practice their English writing skills while taking notes on gardening techniques.
Their ESL and farming teacher, Chrys Bailey, tells Laura Palmisano of KVNF, “A lot of what has brought them to the program is that they are noticing that their families and themselves are beginning to suffer from health issues that they had not suffered from before and they are making the connection that some of their food choices are not serving them.”
Some students bring their children to Thistle Whistle to help out, filling idle summer hours with a productive and fun activity. “My kids enjoy coming to the farm and they like it because they learn about plants and how to grow some vegetables,” Yadira Rivera tells Palmisano.
The participants then take their new found gardening skills back home, planting their own vegetables, even if the only space they have is a couple of pots.
The program, which has run for three years through a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation, needs funding to continue.
Meanwhile, Mark Waltermire, the owner of Thistle Whistle Farm, has benefitted from the program too. “They’ve suggested or requested I grow a lot of vegetables and herbs I haven’t heard or tried before and I’ve been introduced to all sorts of fun, new varieties and fun new vegetables that I would otherwise not have been exposed to. So it has changed my diet too. I eat all sorts of things that I previously never knew about.”
MORE: Bringing Bhutanese Village Life to Refugees in New Hampshire
For Homeless Veterans, Gardening Can Be the Therapy That Gets Them Back on Their Feet
It’s commonly known that gardening can be good for the soul, but for a group of veterans trying to leave homelessness forever, it can be a complete lifesaver.
Which is exactly why early last Wednesday, Coralei Kluver, an assistant manager at Home Depot was hard at work shoveling dirt to help build a greenhouse that will benefit a group of veterans living at Independence Hall, a 20-bed transitional housing center in Billings, Mont.
Home Depot provided a $10,000 grant for the greenhouse project, and the store’s employees brought the volunteer muscle. Many of them came to help in the morning before working a full shift at the store. “It’ll be a long day, but it’s worth it,” Kluver tells Zach Benoit of the Billings Gazette. “It’s good to be here and we’re glad to be helping.”
Kluver has a special motivation to help veterans: Several years ago, her cousin was killed while on active duty.
Since 2011, the veterans at Independence Hall have run a thriving garden, but the greenhouse will help extend the growing season in the chilly Rocky Mountain climate. Some of the produce grown is used as food for the vets at Independence Hall, while the remainder is sold at the farmer’s markets held in the center’s parking lot or donated to the community. One year, more than 800 pounds worth was dolled out.
Bill Holder, the director of veterans services for the local chapter of Volunteers of America (VOA), the nonprofit that runs Independence Hall, tells Benoit, “We’ve already got our community garden here, so hopefully we’ll be able to start earlier and grow more.” Holder says Independence Hall is “not a shelter. It’s a program where they transition to a self-sufficient lifestyle.”
Gardening “gives the opportunity to have something that’s therapeutic,” says Dave Shumway, the director of communications for the Northern Rockies division of the VOA. “They’re transitioning from being homeless to a more normal life and what’s more normal than working on a garden in your backyard?”
MORE: Meet the Marine Who Planted A Special Garden for His Fellow Vets
The Surprising Threat to the Honeybee
We’re a big champion of the honeybee. And who wouldn’t be: About one-fourth of the foods Americans consume are the result of bee pollination.
However, while some new plants in stores like Lowe’s, Home Depot and Orchard Supply tout themselves as bee friendly — they’ve been found to contain pesticides that kill the very same insects they claim to be buddies with.
The pesticide under suspicion is any type of neonics, including neonicotinoid. According to Scientific American, scientists, consumer groups, beekeepers and others say bee deaths are linked to neonic pesticides.
In a study released by Friends of the Earth, an international network of environmental groups, and BeeAction.org, the pesticide neonicotinoid has been linked to 51 percent of commercial nursery plant samples — meaning consumers are quite likely to pick up a plant to boost bee production in their garden only to have it kill the bees they wanted.
In a move that should definitely help the beloved honeybee, Home Depot and other U.S. companies have begun to eliminate this type of pesticide. For the plants that the pesticide has already been used on, a label will warn customers.
MORE: Landing At This Airport: Millions of Bees
Ron Jarvis, Home Depot’s vice president of merchandising/sustainability explained, “Home Depot is deeply engaged in understanding the relationship of the use of certain insecticides on our live goods and the decline in the honeybee population.”
Other stores like BJ’s Wholesale Club and other small retailers across the country are doing their part to eliminate pesticides when possible, too. They requested their vendors to provide plants without any neonics by the end of 2014, or to label them to caution consumers.
This past winter alone, the total losses of the managed honeybee colonies were at 23 percent, as noted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The problem is so serious that the USDA has provided $8 million to Midwest states to try and boost the honeybee population through added habitats. And according to Time, the White House has also issued a task force to study why the honeybees are dying and how to reverse these declines.
Despite the correlations that seem to have been found, there are still naysayers like Bayer, Monsanto and other agrichemical companies. When speaking about neonicotinoids, Bayer spokesperson Becca Hogan explained, “the fact that residues of a registered product were allegedly found in some ornamental plants does not…indicate causation for colony decline, which most experts contribute to a number of factors.”
However, the European Union seems to disagree with Bayer and others because they recently banned all neonicotinoid pesticides in an effort to save the bees abroad.
Let’s hope that the U.S. makes the same move soon. Or the days of biscuits topped with sweet honey could be a thing of the past.
DON’T MISS: This City Has Taken a Very Important Step in Protecting the Honeybee
From Seed to Harvest, These Green Thumbs Nourish Chicago School Gardens
Gardens are a good thing. Period. But in an inner-city school, they’re wonderful. They provide hands-on lessons on how plants grow and encourage kids to eat nutritiously. Plus, the green space beautifies the school.
But starting a school garden and maintaining it turns out to be more complicated than some might think. That’s because everyone is excited to plant one initially, but if teachers are solely responsible for their upkeep, they can become too busy with classroom duties and might not be around over the summer when the plants need tending.
Fortunately, that’s where the nonprofit Gardeneers comes in. It offers a program to plant gardens at Chicago schools and maintain them while also providing lesson plans and a weekly visiting teacher.
Teach for America alumni May Tsupros and Adam Zmick, who founded the Gardeneers, explain on a crowd fundraising website that their model for becoming rotating garden specialists is based on the idea of a visiting speech pathologist, who rotates to a different school each day of the week. The Gardeneers rotate among schools, teaching lessons during school related to the curriculum in such subjects as chemistry, biology, and nutrition, and then enlist the kids’ help to tend the plants in the after school garden clubs.
During the summer, the nonprofit organizes neighborhood volunteers to help keep the plants thriving. The Gardeneers make sure the garden’s produce reaches the children’s lunch plates, coordinating with cafeteria staff to ensure everybody gets to taste the bounty.
According to Cortney Ahem of Food Tank, the Gardeneers offer their services throughout the growing season to schools for a maximum of $10,000, compared to the $35,000 some companies charge for garden installations alone.
Three Chicago schools have jumped at the chance to work with the Gardeneers this growing season, and Zmick and Tsupros hope to expand that to 50 schools during the next five years. They plan to focus on schools where 90 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Zmick told Ahem, “School gardens are incredibly important from an educational perspective. There’s so much data about how these gardens can improve academic outcomes, reduce discipline problems, develop job skills, and strengthen the local community.”
Tsupros thinks gardens can be the key to national renewal. “I believe with all my heart that food, nutrition, and community are the foundations on which we need to build and focus our attention regarding education in Chicago and all the United States. One small seed can grow a bountiful harvest, and I hope that Gardeneers can be that seed.”
MORE: Read About The Nonprofit That Grows Not Just Food, But A Community Too
Read About the Nonprofit That Grows Not Just Food, But a Community, Too
What activity can decrease a low-income family’s dependence on food assistance, promote health, reduce crime, and bring people of different income and education levels together? Gardening can accomplish all this and more.
Since botanist and garden enthusiast Larry Stebbins responded to the lack of community gardens in Colorado Springs, Colorado by starting the nonprofit Pikes Peak Urban Gardens (PPUG) in 2007, hundreds of volunteers have become involved in creating plots in low-income neighborhoods and educating their new owners on how to tend them. “By teaching others how to [garden], you empower them to be more in control of their food supply,” Stebbins told J. Adrian Stanley of the Colorado Springs Independent.
Case in point: Stebbins said that one low-income family participating in the PPUG expanded the garden volunteers had helped them plant and were able to reduce using food stamps by 70 percent during the summer months when tomatoes, zucchinis, and other produce was abundant.
Another benefit to gardening? The nonprofit has learned over the years that when the plots are physically close together in proximity, not only is a feeling of community created, but also an atmosphere in which gardeners learn from and share with each other. Now it plants “pods” of gardens, such as the nine clustered gardens they established in a low-income neighborhood this year with the help of a $3,000 grant from the Colorado Home and Garden Show.
In addition to helping people plant their own gardens, Pikes Peak Urban Gardens has established two urban farms that grow produce for charities; some of the homeless people that benefit from the produce pitch in to tend those crops, alongside volunteers from all walks of life. Stebbins told Stanley that one year, a doctor and a man who lived in subsidized housing struck up a garden-based friendship. “People come in their dungarees,” he said. “You don’t know if they’re rich, poor or whatever. And it’s a great equalizer, and it’s a great way for people to come together.” After all, we’re all united in our quest for that perfect tomato.
MORE: Thriving Gardens Now Grow in a Denver Food Desert
Meet the Marine Who Planted a Special Garden for His Fellow Vets
When San Bernadino, Calif., Vietnam vet Richard Valdez was coordinating a rehabilitation group at the Jerry L. Pettis Memorial Veterans Medical Center, he noticed something that would change his community forever. Therapy sessions would leave many vets intensely stressed, but when they returned a few hours later, a few seemed more relaxed than the others. Valdez asked the veterans what had changed. “They would say, ‘I tended my roses or lemon trees and that calmed me down,'” he told Michel Nolan of The Sun. “So I thought, there are veterans out there who don’t have the chance to do gardening, and maybe we could make it available to them.”
Valdez pursued his vision of creating a healing community garden for veterans with the help of members of Disabled American Veterans, San Bernardino Chapter 12. They planted a three-quarter acre organic garden in Speicher Memorial Park called the Veterans Exploration Garden. For two years they’ve planted and harvested a variety of vegetables and herbs—1,000 pounds, which they give to veterans, community centers, and passersby who lend a hand with the garden—and also host barbecues for veterans.
Maintaining the garden is a lot of work, but now the veterans are getting a hand from Home Depot, the Incredible Edible Community Garden, and volunteers. 65-year-old Marine veteran Rudy Venegas told Nolan the garden is incredibly valuable to him. “This is an outlet to help those who have fallen, are injured or are disabled,” he said.
MORE: These Sisters Created an Incredible Place to Help Vets