Eco-Active Family

Want to learn how to attract butterflies to your garden? Come learn how at the Washington Area Butterfly Club meeting at Long Branch Nature Center in Arlington. Naturalist Lisa Bierer-Garrett, one of the original members of WABC, will speak on butterfly and wildlife gardening for your backyard. Lisa, a Calvert County, MD resident and longtime [...]

This piece originally appeared in my Green and Simple column on the Old Town Alexandria Patch.   Although Halloween is less than two weeks away, it is not too late to green your Halloween. Here are a few tips and resources for Eco-friendly fall fun. COSTUMES When I was a kid, our family always made Halloween costumes [...]

How ditching our dining room chairs in favor of fitness balls has impacted our dining dynamics. As much as I love living in Old Town Alexandria, some days I find myself feeling especially cramped in our little house. Our dining room is particularly tight, with just enough room for a table that seats six. But [...]

This piece originally appeared in my Green and Simple column on the Old Town Alexandria Patch. When I was a kid growing up in Massachusetts, my parents always planted a garden. Because we lived in a rural area, we had a sizable yard and a generously sized garden with rows and rows of plantings. We grew tomatoes, [...]

Do you Freecycle? I’d first heard of Freecycling (the free exchange of mostly used, but still-usable goods within local communities in an effort to keep stuff out of landfills) a couple of years. Since we live in a small townhouse with limited space and had what we needed for the kids, I didn’t want to be tempted to acquire things we really didn’t need or have space for, so I kept my distance. But …

In follow up to my last post on the subject of an organic garden at the White House, I read with great anticipation the follow-up article in the Washington Post home section, which I hoped would describe some of the logistical and other issues that would present the greatest challenges. While the article provided lots [...]

If you haven’t already done so, take a couple of hours to visit the US Botanic Garden in downtown DC, which is currently featuring One Planet — Ours! Sustainability for the 22nd Century. The exhibit focuses on “sustainability — not only how it applies to gardens and landscapes, but also how each of us can [...]