What IS The Sustainable Gardening Library? Search Our Topics (Part 2 of 5)

How to take your gardening project to the next level

Stormwater Basin, Pequannock Township. Photo courtesy of Joe Golden, Township Engineer. See Sustainable Gardening Library Topics app for Eagle Scout project that led community engagement.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a gardening newbie raising three houseplants on a studio apartment window sill, or a municipal engineer overseeing the installation of a stormwater detention basin; we can all kick our sustainability factor up a notch.

Everything you need, all in one place

If you want to become a better steward of our planet’s resources through how you grow plants, you’ll love The Sustainable Gardening Library Topics app. We collect the latest tips and resources from public gardens, universities, and government agencies nationwide and put everything in one place so you don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what you need.

Search the Library by Sustainable Gardening Topic

This is the heart of SGI’s Sustainable Gardening Library, which presents research, educational, and general information in a variety of formats on more than 25 topics that tackle the best ways to grow flowers and food, create outdoor living spaces, and handle common landscape challenges in more Earth-friendly ways.

Topics are arranged alphabetically and represented by a distinctive image, in order to help you find what you are searching for quickly and easily. Each map has a USDA Hardiness Zone layer, to assist you in finding information from content providers who work under the same growing conditions you do, even though they may be in a different geographic region.

How to use the Sustainable Gardening Library Topics app

1. Just click on an image to go to a map that shows the locations of public gardens, arboreta, colleges and universities, and government agencies that have supplied information to the Library on that topic.


2. Once on the map, click a desired location to open its pop-up, which contains the content provider’s address, contact information, website link, and a brief description.


3. To see what a collaborator has posted about your selected topic, select Click here to link to content and you’ll be taken to a pdf list with live links.


4. Click on the name of the file you’d like to review and you’ll be taken to that document, link, image, video, etc.

Check out the Sustainable Gardening Library Topics app here.

http://sgi-gardenlibrary.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapAndAppGallery/index.html?appid=a8fce6ded2694bcda926b105e8b32b0d


Other Posts You May Also Like:  
Can A Garden Ever Really Be Sustainable?
How to Start a Sustainable Garden Without a Lot of Back-breaking Work

Like The Sustainable Gardening Library’s Page on Facebook
Follow The Sustainable Gardening Library on Twitter


Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have
Keep reading