Maureen Wise

I frequently feel a strong pull to stand among trees in the forest. This pull is both spiritual and physical.
I grew up and still live in Ohio where we have deciduous oaks and maples and some elms and beeches along with evergreen spruce and pines.

With spring upon us in the Northern Hemisphere, many of us are itching to get our hands dirty and plant some flowers or veggie plants. If you do any container gardening or keep indoor plants, you’ve likely made use of potting soil — sometimes called potting mix or growing medium. It beats digging up dirt in your backyard to fill your pots. However, potting soil isn’t quite as innocent as it sounds.

Ticks are parasitic arthropods that feed on the blood of mammals. (What a gross sentence!) They’re kind of like tiny vampires that can give their hosts debilitating diseases. It's fair to say that everyone wants to prevent getting a tick attached to their body, their kids or their pets. We are happy to share some Earth-friendly ways to prevent ticks in your backyard, without chemicals that can be harmful to beneficial insects, pollinators, pets, kids and waterways.

In the Spring, we get excited about caring for our lawns and gardens after a cold, white Winter. Not many flowers are blooming in the gardens in the Midwest in April and May but yellow dandelions and purple violets are blooming in the lawn. Your neighbors may not like these flowers but we want you to reconsider your ideas about Wild Violets.
We encourage you to embrace the Wild Violets in your lawn.

Hairy Bittercress, ​​(Cardamine hirsuta), is a member of the mustard family and is considered a Winter annual weed. Sometimes the weed can act as a Summer annual or biennial, depending on the weather and climate. In the Midwest, it’s a Winter annual, which means the seeds overwinter, germinate sometime in the late Fall, and start growing in the Spring. Hairy Wintercress is one of the first weeds to emerge in gardens after the snows melt.

The clothing industry is a huge energy and water hog that accounts for about 4% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. While the slow fashion movement is starting to disrupt the industry, there is a dire need for ways to reduce textile waste. We identified three companies that are working to keep textiles out of landfills.

Recycling helps us reduce waste and reuse valuable resources. By minimizing the need to extract or mine new materials as well as the waste we send to landfills, recycling helps lower greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Understanding how the recycling process works and how recycling workers do their jobs can help consumers recycle better — and protect the recycling workers you rely on.

Ground Ivy (Glechoma hederacea) is known by many names including Creeping Charlie, Creeping Jenny, field balm, cats-foot, ale-hoof, and inch weed (because it spreads an inch a day). This weed is very hardy and is found in gardens, lawns, sidewalks and driveway cracks, as well as along building foundations. Unfortunately, this creeping weed is a perennial and so remains year after year and usually continues to be green during milder Winters.

Cloth napkins have more wiping power than their paper counterparts, reduce waste, feel nice against your skin, and look pretty. They’re both decorative and functional.
Reusable cloth napkins keep trees from being cut down as most brands use virgin tree pulp to produce paper napkins. Cloth napkins also help keep our finite landfill space a little emptier by reducing waste — even more so if you make them from upcycled fabric.

More communities now offer compost pickup services along with trash and recycling pickup. But most Americans don’t have access to a composting service and avid gardeners have better uses for their food and yard waste. For these folks, a variety of compost bins are available to help you compost their own backyards.

I was featured as a fitness writer on nDash's blog

Our waste and what to do with it is a big part of our world’s climate change solutions. Left over, scrap, and uneaten food is part of this problem. If food waste was a country, it would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gasses in the world, behind China and the United States. Happily, food waste is something we can address at our own homes and don’t need to rely others to do the work for us.

There’s a lot of work going on in higher education surrounding sustainability. If you’re a student who’s interested in working in sustainability-related fields, a growing number of green universities offer courses and degree programs to prepare you for your future career.