With the forsythia blooming in many northern communities, the lawn care season isn't far behind. Concerned about the products their neighbors and lawn care companies are using to keep the grass green and weed free, many folks are banding together and utilizing the film, A Chemical Reaction, as a community action tool. Check our events calendar for details of these screenings scheduled for next week: Wednesd ...

With the price of gasoline and heating oil skyrocketing, we've begun to hear a lot of grumbling about the price of fertilizers for lawns and gardens in the upcoming season. Honestly, that makes me somewhat of a contrarian in that I'm happy about the price increase . . . Really. When the price of fossil fuel goes up, people begin to look for alternatives, many of which are far more environmentally friendly. ...

2,4-D Will Be Herbicide of Choice for Farmers if Bio-Tech Company Gets Its Way While freely admitting the failure of food crops genetically modified to resist the weed killer known as Roundup, Dow AgroSciences announced it now plans to genetically modify crops to resist an even more toxic weed killer by the year 2013. In a statement released last week, the nearly $5 billion company was blunt: "Weeds have ad ...

This item came in while we were on our recent four-day hiatus from all things SafeLawns related: http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110303/NEWS/103030329/-1/rss02. Congratulations to all the community activists and organizers for keeping all this Roundup out of people's drinking water. ...

[caption id="attachment_2951" align="alignleft" width="563" caption="Some of the folks at the party gathered for an impromptu group shot"][/caption] You might have noticed that the blog has gone uncharacteristically quiet in the past few days. To celebrate both my 50th birthday and the fifth anniversary of the SafeLawns Foundation, a few hundred people gathered in Portland, Maine, on Friday, March 4. Some f ...

This is the final installment of Rethinking the Traditional American Lawn, a four-part series by High Country Gardens founder and chief horticulturist, David Salman. Salman also writes The Xeric Gardener. Click here for Part I, Part II and Part III. News Flash: Dandelions Are Flowers, Too Villainized by chemical lawn-care companies for decades, these harmless little plants have a greater place in our pollin ...

NOTE: Last Tuesday advocates for and against the Child Safe Playing Fields Act in New Hampshire made their arguments. What follows is a recap from Ellen Fine, founder of the Leah Collective. Witnesses, like Dr. Alex Lu of Harvard who is on an ad hoc committee overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency, testified in favor of HB #495; he promised the committee that if NH passed this law, he would seek fun ...

With all that we know about genetically modified organisms, homeowners and market gardeners need to vote with their wallets and only purchase seeds for food from companies who have pledged to not sell GMO seeds. Below is an alphabetical list of companies known to sell genetically pure seed. (if you know of others that have made the Safe Seed Pledge, let us know and we'll add them to the list): Baker Creek H ...

Here is a link from Organic Gardening Magazine, forwarded to us from a colleague at Espoma: http://www.organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/dark-side-lawns?cm_mmc=OGNews-_-2010_12_22-_-learnandgrow-_-the_dark_side_of_lawns. The article also includes a sidebar about the "six-step" organic lawn care plan. ...

We're excited to announce that the SafeLawns Foundation will be opening a second base of operation in Newport, R.I., within the next few months. Since founding SafeLawns.org on Feb. 27, 2006, our non-profit organization has been based in either Maine or Washington, D.C. The D.C. office closed last year when a long-time colleague moved away from that area. SafeLawns' expansion to Rhode Island will correspond ...