I love buying my groceries from the farmers who actually grew it.
I just started going to the farmers market at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. In the past I’ve frequented markets in Carrboro, NC, DC and Vermont. It can be hard to get up on a Saturday morning, but it’s worth it. Just check out this video of the farmers market in Burlington, VT!
But once I get home, I’m stumped. I just bought 3 lbs of strawberries! What do I do?
A few years ago, a neighbor moved out of our apartment building and gave us her washer/dryer. Instead of doing our laundry in the building’s basement, we could now do it at home. But there was one catch: our building prohibits the use of dryers. To solve that problem, we decided to keep the washer, pass on the dryer and become air (aka line) dryers with the help of a couple folding metal racks.
It’s a little more work, but I enjoy it, much in the way I like composting or cooking. It’s a welcome contrast from my digital existence and makes me feel a bit more grounded. It’s also a household chore that my sons can participate in (with only a limited amount of grousing).
Last year, I read an article about a non-profit called Project Laundry List that was fighting for people’s right to line dry their clothes. Apparently, some towns ban line drying for aesthetic reasons. Project Laundry List’s founder Alex Lee is an environmental activist who believes in the energy savings of line drying. It makes a lot of sense, since line drying gets the job done in 24 hours using zero fossil fuels.
In talking to Alex about his efforts, I learned about the current “Care to Air” design challenge being sponsored by Levi’s and Myoocreate. The Care to Air contest challenges people to design “the world’s most innovative, covetable, and sustainable air-drying solution for clothing.” Levi’s is offering up a $10,000 prize for the best design, and they are doing this in conjunction with their new product care labels that instruct customers to cold water wash, air dry and donate the jeans to Goodwill when they’re done with them. UncommonGoods was invited to participate in the design challenge and help judge the winning entries next month. Ultimately, we hope to be able to bring one of the designs to market. If you’ve got an idea, please visit Myoocreate to submit. Good luck!
Attention Chicagoans!
Our favorite dumpster diver – Uncommon artist Tammy Roy – tipped us off about a very cool festival happening in your neck of the woods this weekend (May 22-23).
Green Festival is little get-together of about 350 diverse local and national green businesses. There will be how-to workshops, a Fair Trade pavilion, a Green Home pavilion, an Organic Food and Gardening pavilion, a Community Action and Green Careers pavilion…plus fun stuff for kids AND delicious organic beer, wine and cuisine! Makes me wish I could go!
Tammy Roy (shown here digging for metal) will be in the Green Home pavilion exhibiting some of her amazing industrial art pieces that she makes from discarded tools and recycled metals.
Tickets are $10 for one day or $15 for the weekend. Bike riders get in free! Schedules, speakers and more can be found on the Green Festival website.
These days, I spend most of my time at a desk, pecking away at my keyboard, talking on the phone, and sitting in meetings. But twice a day, I get to be free, riding through the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the industrial corridors of Brooklyn. And, to boot, when I commute, I save time – it’s actually quicker than the subway.
When I moved to NYC in the ’80s, I biked quite a bit – my favorite ride was out to Fire Island at the crack of dawn, before the beach traffic kicked in. I also liked riding in the city, especially up to Central Park, though a cab hit me once and snapped my bike frame in two. Fortunately, Frank’s, my local bike shop was able to replace the frame and it’s served me well ever since.
In recent years, there’s been a biking revolution in NYC – thanks to the work of the bicycling advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, and the visionary Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. Bike lanes have cropped up throughout the city, across the Manhattan to Brooklyn bridges and on many streets, making commuting by bike a bit safer.
There’s a lot of debate about “sharing the road.” With a limited amount of public pavement, we need to decide how to allocate this resource between pedestrians, cyclists, cars and buses. The car has been the king for many years, but now people are wondering if we’ve got it right.
So get out this Friday, ride your bike and show your support for cycling – May 21st is National Bike to Work Day!
So this is a little belated…but Happy Bike Week everyone!
For those of you who don’t know, May is national bike month and May 17-21 is Bike-to-Work
Week with Friday, May 21 being the big hurrah – Bike-to-Work Day!
Stay tuned this week for more posts about cycling…until now here are some resources and fun stuff about cycling:
Check out the League of American Bicyclists they have a lot of great news articles and blog posts, as well a tool to help you find bike resources (clubs, leagues, shops, etc.) in your area.
Ride the City is another super useful site that helps you find the best urban biking route, ranging from direct, safe and safer. Available for New York, Chicago, DC Metro, Austin, Louisville, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Toronto.
And now for some fun stuff…
Matt, Al and Meredith battle it on The Today Show in this year’s commuter challenge: bike vs. subway vs. car.
And of course, how to make a smoothie using a human-powered bike blender!
Do you bike to work? Are you going to try biking to work this week? Let us know! And if you have any other cool cycling websites or tips to share, please do so in the comments section. Happy Biking!
In preparation for Compostapalooza, our partnership with Quirky to create the ultimate composting product, we’re running a series of compost education posts. Read up, then put those brainstorming caps on for kick-off on May 17!
I got into composting in 2008. I had never seriously considered doing it until I read the Omnivore’s Dilemma (by Michael Pollan) earlier that year – it helped me understand the food cycle and how throwing organic material into landfill was a lousy solution. Sanitation departments waste a lot of energy, money and land carting away food scraps that could otherwise be enriching the soil.
However, like recycling, composting is more work than just throwing something away, especially if you’re an urban dweller like me. To start with, you have to take the food waste and put it in a separate bin (no big deal). But you also need to cut up the food waste into small pieces to help it break down faster and then put the compostable material into some vessel outdoors. We were lucky to have a few friends and neighbors that were interested in the same thing and were able to convince our building to provide us with an outdoor space to place a compost tumbler.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that our sons knew all about composting from school and were only too happy to tell daddy everything he was doing wrong, which was plenty. There was nothing they enjoyed more than catching me putting compostable material into the trash. I then had to dig through the garbage to find the food scraps and move them to the compost bin. I learned the messy way that tea bags, coffee grounds and egg shells were all fine for composting.
In preparation for Compostapalooza, our partnership with Quirky to create the ultimate composting product, we’re running a series of compost education posts. Read up, then put those brainstorming caps on for kick-off on May 17!
I’ve officially caught the compost bug.
I never thought I’d get much satisfaction from dumping smelly food scraps into a bin of other smelly food scraps. But sometimes I surprise myself.
I now bring my raw food scraps (i.e. fruits, vegetables, egg shells, tea bags) to my neighborhood community garden in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The scraps are then processed into compost that is used to nourish the vegetables and other plants in the garden with essential minerals.
I love the concept of making something useful from something we have no use for. We recycle paper and plastic. Why not food? Food waste accounts for the largest component of our trash each year. Composting also reduces our need for chemically laden fertilizers, most of which are derived from oil. And why pay for something you can get for free?
I store my food scraps in the freezer. That way, you can enjoy the benefits of composting without the stink factor. I then make my weekly trip to the Garden of Union on Saturday morning. I simply look for the marked bin, add my scraps, and cover with sawdust. The sawdust helps keep rodents away and also ensures the proper chemical balance of carbon and nitrogen. And that’s it! I’m doing my part to reduce my footprint, and grow yummy food within my community.
Quirky and UncommonGoods are proud to present… Compostapalooza!
On Monday, May 17th we will be joining forces with Quirky — a social product development company with a great community and fun, innovative products to boot — to create the world’s best composter! We like to think of it as a Compostapalooza!
The mission: to create a useful, interesting, one-of-a-kind composter for indoors, outdoors or both. To enter this crazy earth-lovin’, garbage-hatin’ contest, just complete your submission and post it on Quirky between May 17-26 for a chance to have your design come to life.
Is this mission impossible? Of course not! With composting on the rise across the country, it seems that everybody’s doing it and tons of people have ideas on how to create the ideal composter or at least improve current models.
But, first things first, you gotta get hip to the dirty details of composting. For the skinny on how to compost, what to compost and where to compost, Quirky has you covered. Check out these informative posts on Composting 101.
