Welcome to the Charm City Circulator

There's a new bus in town! And the winning name, by popular vote, is Charm City Circulator.

Starting in late summer 2009, these hybrid buses will travel three new routes downtown, arriving every ten minutes, seven days a week.

Read more about it here: http://www.yournameyourride.com/

Check out the route map: http://www.yournameyourride.com/ROUTEMAP.PDF

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I hate grass

Did I mention that I hate grass? I'm on a mission to eradicate it from my yard. One of the first things I did to my yardscaping when I moved into my house was rip out the tiny patch of grass in the front yard so I wouldn't have to lug my lawnmower halfway around the block, since I live in a middle-of-group rowhouse. I didn't want to use Roundup, so I set about ripping the stuff out - a process during which I decided that a 5ft x 10ft patch of grass is not so tiny after all! About a week, one broken rake, and an aching back later, I thought I was done (and my new neighbors thought I was a nut). Unfortunately, I'd missed a few of the underground runners of what I now know is Bermuda grass, and it has come back to haunt my otherwise pretty patch of vinca (which I now know is an invasive... ack).

Lesson learned: to kill grass once and for all, dig deep and make sure you get all the roots! And then cover it and shade it like this gardener recommends on the University of Maryland's Grow It! Eat It! website. Friends don't let friends use Roundup.

I used the newspaper + mulch idea in my garden this year to make 3ft wide paths, remembering how difficult it had been to get between the tomato plants last year. So far so good, and no weeds!

While I'm on the subject of grass and lawns, did you know that it's better for the local watershed if you let your grass grow a little higher and leave the clippings down? "Mow high and let lie", as they say, is also known as grasscycling, and is a good way to recycle nutrients and conserve water.

The UMd Home & Garden center has lots of free online publications about lawn maintenance (among other gardening topics), including Landscapes that help the Chesapeake Bay.

By the way, have you heard that Google is mowing with goats these days?

Photo credit: CountryLiving.com
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Kale, and other greens I never knew I liked

What a difference freshness makes! Recalling the stinky steaming piles of greenish gloop that passed for "kale" at my school cafeteria, I was prepared to politely taste a tiny bit of the kale that arrived in my first CSA shipment this week. However, to my surprise... fresh kale, cooked gently, is really good! First pass: chopped kale, sauteed in olive oil with onions and garlic, served with orzo. Yum.

Could it be that the lack of pesticides make vegetables taste better too? In Jane Goodall's book Harvest for Hope, she points out that chimpanzees will pick organic fruits and vegetables over the alternative when given a choice.

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National Building Museum honors visionaries in sustainability

Last week I attended an Honor Award Gala at the National Building Museum in DC to recognize visionaries in the field of sustainability for their progressive leadership on environmental issues, as well as their significant accomplishments in improving sustainability within the built environment and local communities.

Honorees included:

Rick Fedrizzi and the US Green Building Council (USGBC) for 15 years of leadership in green building.

Mayor Richard M. Daley and the city of Chicago for historic commitment to green city planning and design.

Majora Carter, community organizer and environmental activist, for her achievements in green collar job training and advocacy in the South Bronx.

Louis Chenevert and United Technologies for their innovative and sustainable products that contribute to sound environmental performance in buildings around the world, and also their commitment to corporate social responsibility.

Read the NBM press release here.

Note: I attended the USGBC annual conference in 2007 in Chicago and saw some of their green building & community efforts (like city bike routes). Congratulations to all!

West Virginia's state rock

In Appalachian news, West Virginia bestows "state rock" status on coal. Does this mean they'll protect it as an endangered state resource, or use this as justification for more mountaintop coal removal?

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/west-virginias-new-state-rock-coal/

I want to ride my bicycle

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H.G. Wells

Since the weather has been warming up and the garden is mostly planted, I've been dusting off my bike and revisiting some links I'd collected over the winter...

Here are some local bike resources:

Joe’s Bike Shop in Mount Washington

http://www.mtwashingtonbikes.com/home.aspx

Light Street Cycles

http://www.lightstcycles.com/

The Bicycle Connection, Cockeysville

http://thebicycleconnection.com/index.cfm

Lutherville Bike Shop

http://www.luthervillebikeshop.com/lbsnew/

The Velocipede bike project

http://www.velocipedebikeproject.org/

REI in Timonium – this national chain is doing good work with renewable energy!

http://www.rei.com/

Good resource for bike maintenance and repair:

http://www.parktool.com/repair/

BG's favorite biking haunts in MD:

NCR Trail, B&A Trail, & BWI Airport loop
- Google these for links.

Loch Raven Reservoir
- there are a bunch of mountain bike trails around the reservoir, and every weekend the county closes Loch Raven Dr. for pedestrian use. A good spot to drop in is at the intersection of E. Seminary Rd. and Providence Rd. Lots of nice single track back there.

Fair Hill Natural Resource Management Area
-http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/central/fairhill.html
-A great place in MD to mountain bike. Something like 80+ miles of single track, plus horse trails, fireroads, open fields. You can spend an entire day there and not see it all. It's way up near Elkton MD, but worth the drive for a weekend ride through the woods. Lots of nice technical trails too!

Thanks to my friend BG, avid mountain biker, for his input on this post.

When engineers garden

"2009: Best Garden Ever" is well underway in my backyard. I fought the urge to map it all out on CAD and bring in a surveyor friend to lay out the rows... after all, it's only 15 x 15. Plotted it on graph paper instead. But I will have as-built plans, after last year's "where did I plant that one thing again?" experience.

Other lessons learned from last year:
-two feet between tomato plants is NOT enough. Especially next to a fence, when it rains a lot, when there are slugs, or all the above.
-leave lots of room for zucchini. And watch them, they're sneaky-fast: today's cute little squash can become a pithy baseball bat overnight. I hear that squash blossoms are yummy when battered and fried, but I have yet to catch one at the right stage.
-exercise caution when making your own soaker hose. Holes too small = dry dead plants, but holes too big = swampy mess.

New garden experiments:
-plant parsley, basil, and cilantro between tomato plants. The first is reputed to be a good companion plant for tomato, the second tastes good with tomato, and the third I just like. Especially in that salsa they make at Baja Fresh, mmm.
-sprinkle marigolds thinly along edge of tomato row, and don't let them take over. Last year's marigolds had Napoleon complex.
-put green beans and eggplant next to each other. After the peas die out, that is. And make sure they have good tall supports to climb on, lest they invade neighbor's fence again.
-speaking of climbing, shoulder-high tomato cages are not tall enough. I don't know what kind of tomato crack is in my otherwise disappointing clay soil, but those puppies grow up the inside of the cage and back down the outside. This year I'm thinking Tomato Trellis... but so far lacking time and construction materials.
-weed-block paths between rows with newspaper and mulch = recycling AND good for the soil.

Lessons already learned this year:
-cover strawberries with netting or prepare to share with the birds.
-you can eat chive flowers, but your breath will be Fierce for hours afterward, so plan your social life accordingly. Altoids won't help.


Happy gardening, y'all!
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Bike to work this Friday!

Join cyclists across the USA in biking to work this Friday. Register for the Baltimore event here.

More biking links:

http://www.bikeleague.org/programs/bikemonth/

http://www.bikeleague.org/programs/bikemonth/pdf/national_bike_month_guide.pdf
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Who needs cars?

News flash: public transportation is good for you. Who knew? As I was telling somebody just the other day, I've lost a good five pounds since I started walking, biking, and taking the bus instead of driving. What's not to like about that? The people-watching is pretty entertaining also.

Transportation is on my mind at work lately, so I dug up a video I'd been meaning to watch for awhile on the National Building Museum's website about going carless (i.e. "without a car", not "CAREless"... although indeed, you may have less to worry about if you try it).

This video reminded me about Walkscore, which is a website that measures your neighborhood's pedestrian-friendliness based on walking distance to basic services. If you live in a neighborhood with a walk score higher than 70, you could get by without a car. My neighborhood scored 49.

Co-founder of Zipcar Robin Chase was one of the panelists in the NBM video, and she shared some thought-provoking numbers:

A mere 20% of our driving is to work. Of the 80% that isn't, many trips are short, as in under three miles. Does this reflect your driving habits? Are there trips that you could make by bike or bus, or consolidate your errands into one big driving loop rather than multiple short excursions?

There are about 1.1 cars per person in the USA right now. If more neighborhoods adopted carsharing networks like Zipcar, we could get down to one car per 20 to 50 people, which is the model they use.

Recommended population density for a Zipcar network is about 14,000 people per square mile, obviously best suited to urban areas. In one model, there are 5500 cars for 300,000 people (which is 0.018 cars per person... much lower than 1.1!).

Zipcars have names like Peter Prius and are parked in neighborhoods to encourage feelings of ownership and accountability. You wouldn't mistreat Peter if you knew you'd be driving him regularly, right?

Other food for thought:

How much do you spend each year to own, register, maintain, and insure your car? Maybe it would make sense to let someone else assume these asset costs, and just rent car time on the occasions you need it, especially if you live in an area with good public transportation access or walk/bike-ability.

I'm very interested in this idea of "pay as you drive" car insurance, particularly because I telecommute most days. In the average week, I move my car so infrequently that I often forget where I last parked it. I'd be paying a lot less if my rates were set proportional to miles driven.

Some more links for you:

MTA Maryland - get your ride on

One Less Car - a local organization for alternative transportation advocacy

GoLoco - Robin Chase's ridesharing site. Also check out her blog.

Adventures in agriculture

My friends can tell you that I tend to dive into things before fully thinking them through. Especially green things: even my best intentions can't create the time required to follow through on all the projects I envision or attempt to start!

So when I read this article in the Urbanite about the rude awakening a local writer experienced with the very CSA I'd just joined, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. No zucchini? Few berries? Just kale and chard?? Eww, what have I gotten myself into? I don't know how to cook those things. But thanks to the positive spin she put on the ending, and my own dogged determination to do the green thing even when it's inconvenient or uncomfortable (I'm stubbornly sitting in my upstairs home office right now with the air conditioning off despite the forecast for high 80s. It's hot.) I'm reconciling myself to a summer of collard greens, if that's what the farmer brings. I'm gonna need a new cookbook.

Even before signing up for CSA and realizing its potential shortcomings, I'd been planning to expand my usual tomato & zucchini patch out back. Reading that article just reinforced my decision: I've already put in a few raspberry canes, a pack of strawberry plants, spinach, lettuce, peas, and beets. I'd like to harvest more than one beet this year... last year was disappointing that way! At Towson Gardens day I picked up some interesting heirloom tomato plants in purple and yellow (did you know they come in green zebra stripes too? There's a tomato seller at the Waverly farmers market on Saturdays that sells tomatoes in every color of the rainbow, it's fascinating). I will also have eggplant, onions, beans, and flowers, because I'm tilling up a 15-foot square chunk of my yard this week, and because I can.

I just hope I'm not getting in over my head...

Speaking of overhead and gardening, there's a program on Vertical Farming at the National Building Museum in DC this week as part of their Greener Good series. If you can't attend, they usually post a recording online afterward.
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