[caption id="attachment_2018" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Aaron Robbs (from the RISE web site)"][/caption] The lawn and garden pesticide industry will soon have a new front man to claim its products are safe. Aaron Hobbs is slated to replace Allen James as the head of the propaganda organization known as The Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment effective tomorrow, Sept. 1. Announced in a ...

Considered to be one of the "greenest places to live in America" by numerous publications, the city of Boulder appears poised to live up to its reputation with garden to lawn care. "It's exciting out there, it really is," said nationally recognized organic turf expert Chip Osborne of Osborne Organics of Marblehead, Mass., after his recent visit as a consultant to the city of about 90,000. In September, I'll ...

Citing data that shows a 17 percent reduction in phosphorus runoff in a local river, a University of Michigan professor told SafeLawns.org that three years of studies indicate a ban on phosphorus in lawn fertilizers is working as intended. Bans of phosphorus in lawn fertilizer have become hugely controversial across the United States in the past four years. Opponents of the bans say that the major sources o ...

Pardon me for my ignorance and excitement, but today I’m newly enthralled with a word that I’m sure some of you have heard before: agnotology. Not yet recognized by my spell-check, agnotology is defined by Wikipedia as “the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt.” Now, one might ask at first blush: Why on earth would anyone want to study that? In this age of enlightenment, of the Internet, there oug ...

Those of us who preach organic gardening and farming in religious tones almost always buck up against science, which has forever struggled to explain what we accept as innate understanding. In other words, the scientists usually denounce what they can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. That's why the study out of the University of Michigan last week set the Internet abuzz. Titled "Ecological Complexity and ...

An article today from an Indiana newspaper is worthy reading for anyone in any states where lakes and ponds are a factor. The article doesn't deal specifically with fertilizer runoff from lawns, but it does specifically cite phosphorus as the major culprit in the death of a major lake: http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20100829/EDIT10/308299957/1021/EDIT ...

http://www.wcsh6.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=125722&catid=2 ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-spiegelman/the-organic-lawn-care-man_b_691377.html Thanks, Annie! ...

With ambient temperatures on the rise across the U.S. this season, almost everything in the plant world is early. Plants bloomed ahead of schedule, insect infestations ignored the calendar and, now, weed seeds that usually come at the end of the year are beginning to creep into lawns early. That makes it time to trot out the common sense message: IF YOU DON'T WANT MORE OF THE SAME WEEDS NEXT SEASON, GET RID ...

I came across this blog today from a group of landscape designers. It's a rather long read, but well worth it: http://apld.posterous.com/greenwashing-part-2-advent-of-a-new-ecorealis. ...