Lois de Vries' Garden Views

We’ve put everything in one place so when you want to grow flowers and food, or create outdoor living spaces in more Earth-friendly ways, you don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what you need.  Check us out at https://sgi-gardenlibrary.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html  

Check it out https://sgi-gardenlibrary.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html People ask me that all of the time. I like to think of it as the go-to resource for sustainable gardening information. We include farming and landscaping practices, too. We’re putting everything in one place so people who want to grow flowers and food, or create outdoor living spaces in more Earth-friendly ways, don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what they need. But it isn’t what most people think of as a traditional library. How the Sustainable Gardening Library is the same as a specialized public library: It’s free. Anyone can use it. It’s organized by categories. It’s a library devoted to a single specialty: Sustainable gardening and farming. It hosts a variety of materials: Documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, and links to materials on our content providers’ websites.   How the Sustainable Gardening Library is different from a public library: It’s a digi...

One of my favorite quotes is the Dalai Lama’s, “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” I don’t think the Dalai Lama meant that we have to be annoying. After all, the mosquito is just going about its normal everyday activities. But whether or not the mosquito is in the room makes all the difference to us. Similarly, what each of us does on our little patch of the Earth, collectively makes all the difference to our planet’s health. We don’t necessarily need to make sudden wholesale changes in our lifestyles, be less comfortable in our own castles, or add more work to our already-busy schedules. Facing complex choices This came home to me recently at the supermarket. The market chain had recently introduced an organic house brand. I was eager to try it out and I needed six cans of beans. The organic house brand cost 30% more than the regular house brand. I briefly wondered why the organic lemons could sell for the same price as regular le...