Many people make end-of-year financial gifts to charities, either in the name of a family member as a holiday gift, or for tax purposes. If this is part of your tradition, consider adding local community-building organizations to your list of gift recipients. Without these civic-minded folks, it would be much harder to connect.
At the Personal Permaculture discussion last Saturday I met a reader who has been following my blog for awhile. She told me how much she appreciated my simple, to-the-point writing style. She liked that I shared both what worked and what didn’t work, what we were doing now and what was going to have to wait. She liked that it was realistic.
What a nice thing to hear! I’m happy if that’s the message that comes across because this journey is about progress, not perfection.
That’s what I love about the monthly discussion groups of Transition Longfellow. I learn new things and I get so many more ideas when I hear what other people are doing. Everyone I meet is an inspiration and that’s what I need to keep up my energy as I continue to look for ways to minimize my family’s carbon footprint.
Learning how to pickle cucumbers and green beans
Transition Longfellow First Saturday Discussion Group
Learning about – and making – a solar cooker with friends from Transition Longfellow.
Spreading the word that Longfellow has a neighborhood sustainability group and everyone is invited!
Neighbors get to know one another while building “Little Free Libraries” together
Some of the effects of global climate instability are increasingly violent storm activity as well as high temps and droughts. Many north Longfellow homes are already challenged by occasional basement flooding during heavy storms and it’s not uncommon for water to collect in the street when the sewer system becomes overburdened from heavy rains. Landscaping can help both of these problems – providing a way for rainwater to stay on the homeowners property and out of the sewer, and minimizing the impact of drought and water needed to maintain plants in the yard.
On Saturday, July 28th, from 11:00 am to noon, the landscape design firm PRAIRIEFORM will lead a workshop on irrigation-free landscaping for residents of the Longfellow neighborhood. Irrigation-free landscaping combines drought-tolerant planting techniques and “drought training” for plants. It creates a landscape that does not require supplemental watering and that minimize rainwater runoff from a property while still providing an animal- and people-friendly yard. The irrigation-free landscape is formal enough to fit in a front-yard setting.
The workshop will be held in a yard on the northeast corner of 28th Street & 42nd Avenue. This is the location of the irrigation-free landscaping pilot project the neighborhood undertook last year, with funding from the homeowner, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization and LCC’s Environment & Transportation Committee.
If you’d like to attend, please RSVP (appreciated but not required) to Spencer: spencer@longfellow.org or call 612-722-4529 ext. 5.
