[caption id="attachment_1299" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Courtesy of WOR"][/caption] The world of gardening and horticulture lost one of its nicest people this past Saturday. Ralph Snodsmith, who had been in ill health for years but still managed to do his weekly radio show, finally succumbed to the complications of a broken leg this past Saturday. He was 70. His obituary appeared in the New Yor ...

Articles like this tell me we're making progress . . . and with more than 200 comments already, it's clearly a hot issue: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/the-dandelion-king/?emc=eta1. ...

SafeLawns just learned that the New York state senate passed (S. 4983), the so-called Child Safe Playing Fields Act in a 39-22 vote. The bill, which will go to the desk of Governor David Patterson for his signature after its approval by the State Assembly, bans the use of synthetic pesticides (herbicides, insecticides and fungicides) on the athletic fields and playgrounds of public and private schools and d ...

To Roz Lynn Dorf, not much has changed in the past 40 years. When U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson called for an environmental teach-in dubbed Earth Day on April 22, 1970, Roz was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. Her cause célèbre was battling the Dow Chemical Company for its use of toxic products. "Four decades later on Earth Day, I'll still be protesting the Dow Chemical Company," she said durin ...

Many thanks to SafeLawns follower Annie Spiegelman for the dynamic review in Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-spiegelman/a-chemical-reaction-the-s_b_543212.html. ...

[caption id="attachment_1276" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="A warming environment may be making the effects of poison ivy worse than ever."][/caption] Loads of casual observers have noted that poison ivy plants seem to be getting larger and the effects of the toxic oils are seemingly more powerful. An article published yesterday in the World Sentinel confirms those fears: http://www.worldsentinel.c ...

[caption id="attachment_1268" align="alignnone" width="648" caption="St. Augustine grass is notorious for building up a thatch layer that blocks the roots' access to fertilizer and water. "][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1270" align="alignnone" width="576" caption="A mechanical dethatching machine makes quick work of the process."][/caption] Tim Seeber of Charlottetown, PEI, was just one of many people ...

A few weeks ago we posted here about innovation in weed killing tools and products. Yesterday we just heard about the GreenSteam weed killing machine that uses steam coming out of a portable machine to kill grass and weeds: http://www.greensteam.com/. Interestingly, the inventor, Erik Djukastein, is the same guy who invented the Scarecrow device for rodent control, which I swear by. We've been keeping our g ...

[caption id="attachment_1254" align="alignnone" width="648" caption="To some people, this lawn would be a nightmare. To others, it's a season of wine and salads."][/caption] My 3-year-old daughter practically leaps out of the house in the morning these days. Enthralled by the flowers growing by our woods' edge, she can't wait to pick a fist full. I always think of my grandmother, too, in April. Just as her ...

[caption id="attachment_1244" align="alignnone" width="432" caption="Larry Crowley, left, and Dan Merrill, who performed together at a benefit concert in 2009, both contributed songs to the documentary movie, A Chemical Reaction. "][/caption] We receive loads of comments about the quality of the music in our movie, A Chemical Reaction. For a documentary like ours, which was made with passion and grit and ve ...