[caption id="attachment_5374" align="alignleft" width="540"] Yesterday a truck for a local organic lawn care company showed up to apply product to our neighbor's yard.[/caption] As I've noted here before, we moved to a new neighborhood last year. We have since cringed when lawn after lawn is sprayed with toxic pesticides to kill the weeds and sprinkler systems go off daily to keep the sidewalk and roadway s ...

[caption id="attachment_5361" align="alignleft" width="503"] This is the LL Bean store in 1965. [/caption] When you're from Maine, your childhood heroes and icons are generally few and far between. We've had but a few nationally notable athletes, a boxer named Joey, a driver named Ricky and a runner named Joan, among others, who we collectively keep on a first-name basis. There's a statue in Bangor, not far ...

Retail giant LL Bean is throwing itself a 100th birthday bash in Freeport, Maine, this week and our Lawn Games for Life campaign has signed on to join the fun for the day, tomorrow, July 6. Co-author and SafeLawns founder Paul Tukey will sign copies of the book Tag, Toss & Run at the LL Bean flagship store beginning at 10 a.m. and then join Olympic champion Seth Wescott at an outdoor games demonstration for ...

With more than half the United States in a drought and much of the continent in warmer-than-normal conditions, the best advice for your lawn right now might be this: Ignore it. That's right. Ignore it. Don't mow. Don't water and don't fret. Sure, if you don't water the lawn it may turn brown, but that doesn't mean it's dying, it just means it's going dormant. Turning brown is a lawn's natural protection sys ...

[caption id="attachment_5338" align="alignleft" width="540" caption="At a Home Depot in Rhode Island these three insect-killing products were side by side and priced identically yesterday. Only one of them is safe to use around your home, however. "][/caption] It's that time of year here in New England when most lawns have been fertilized and most dandelions have passed and gone to seed, if they weren't kil ...

Last Thursday, with a heat index of 105, I witnessed a sprinkler system spewing water high into the air at noontime near Washington, D.C. This morning, after more than an inch of rain yesterday, I heard my neighbors' sprinkler system go off at 5:45 a.m. in Rhode Island. And after an optimistic drought forecast offered up by the National Weather Service earlier this spring, the map, above, is beginning to lo ...

Quietly, methodically, District of Columbia councilmember Mary Cheh, did her homework and concluded that pesticides used to kill dandelions and other weeds have no place on public spaces where children and pets play. After input from SafeLawns, Beyond Pesticides, the Pesticide Action Network among others, her committee has now unanimously voted to recommend passage of the “Pesticide Education and Control Am ...

The Rhode Show on NBC in Providence teased our appearance this coming Sunday at the Newport Flower Show — including the cutest little hula hooper, my daughter Aimee: http://www.wpri.com/dpp/rhode_show/wpri-rhode-newport-is-birthplace-of-popular-games. We'll be doing a signing of the book, Tag, Toss & Run following the fun, interactive presentation that begins at 11 a.m. ...

Ontario Family Physicians Warn of Pesticide Dangers in Second Landmark Study (SAFELAWNS NOTE: This details the second report from the Ontario College of Family Physicians. The first, issued in 2004, was significantly instrumental in Quebec, Ontario and several other Canadian provinces banning the use of Roundup, weed 'n feed and other common lawn and garden weed and insect killers. Eight years later, the Co ...

With the rest of the world already caught on to the phenomenon known as "blogging," I finally got around to it on June 18, 2009. Why June 18? I have no recollection, really, about why I picked that day to launch what soon became a personal obsession. More than 1,000 SafeLawns posts later, most of them written by yours truly, I remain grateful that enough sponsoring partners and daily readers have conspired ...