Information
from Past Shows

Some friends help clean up
a Forest Preserve

SSmiles and poinsettias
at Shady Hill Garden

Doris Taylor and Mike
at the Flower and Garden Show

Sandhill cranes
in the Chicago wilderness

Shawn Kingzette looks unusually serious at a MELA event at the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool in Lincoln Park.

One tree closer to a green, green world . . .
one very small tree.

November 30, 2008

One of our most precious resources is the Cook County Forest Preserves. Think about it. Somewhere in the boundary between urban and suburban sprawl, the Forest Preserves comprise 68,000 acres, or 11 percent of the Cook County land area. While the preserve district, created in 1913, is a remarkable model of land conservation, the lands themselves are continually under pressure.

The enemies are destructive species, whether buckthorn or homo sapiens, and those vulnerable spaces need an organization like Friends of the Forest Preserves to keep them vital.

I always welcome FOTFP Executive Director Benjamin Cox on my program to talk about what Cook County residents can do to preserve the, um, preserves. If you believe in the future of even modestly open lands in the Chicago area, which might be the most threatened lands of all, please consider supporting Friends of the Forest Preserves.

I’m not a fan of buying stuff...but...gardeners really like their garden stuff. So, for the fourth or fifth time (I can’t really remember the exact number), it’s a pleasure to have Michelle Byrne Walsh on my program to talk about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of holiday gardening gifts.

Just so you know, Michelle, like me, is a contributor to Chicagoland Gardening Magazine ) We’ll post as many of her links to horticultural gifts, fabulous and weird, as we can, as they become available.

It was a holiday weekend, so we’re giving the Green Business of the Week a breather. Look for it on the next show. Meanwhile, check out our previous businesses at the above link.

 

November 23, 2008

Do you say Poin-set-a or Poin-set-i-a? However you pronounce or mispronounce it (and I think that reveals my personal bias), there will be a ton of them sold in the next month or so. So Joe Heidgen from Shady Hill Gardens stopped by, to help out with tips on how to keep them alive through the new year (or longer), along with reports on the latest and greatest varieties. Of course, despite the wide variety of colors now available, you know that when it comes to pulling the trigger, you’re going to choose...(drum roll)...red. Face it, you’re a slave to tradition.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for some quick tips on how to care for the Big Three of holiday plants–poinsettia, amaryllis and Christmas cactus– the University of Illinois Extension service has some tips that might help

Of course, there’s another holiday plant that people seem to like, and it’s called a Christmas Tree. The Morton Arboretum’s Doris Taylor normally answers questions about live plants at the Arboretum Plant Clinic but today her job is to handle queries about how to keep your soon-to-be-dead trees as fresh as possible.

Another person who know a thing or two about conifers is Rich Eyre, who runs Rich’s Foxwillow Pines in Woodstock. In addition to collecting some of the rarest conifers on the planet, Rich and his wife Susan (and let’s not forget Rich’s mom Margaret) contribute thousands of dollars each year to Heifer International.

Now I’m not trying to ruin your holiday, but if you’re interested in the real consequences of purchasing a Christmas Tree for the holidays, consider these issues:

• Beyond Pesticides looks at the risk to Christmas Tree farm workers from pesticides
• Ever wondered what kind of pesticides are used in Christmas Tree production? (of course you haven’t!) Check it out here.
• Have you ever wondered whether a fake tree is better for the environment than a real one? One of my favorite environmental sites, www.grist.org, takes a serious, yet humorous, look at that question.
• Finally, if you want to have a truly sustainable Christmas, try decorating a Norfolk Island Pine.

A Fresh Squeeze is the Green Business of the Week. You can find out more about this eco-friendly company by going to the Green Business of the Week page.

November 16, 2008

When it comes to building local food systems, the name Jim Slama is very close to the top of the list. Among his accomplishments, he was the founder and president of Sustain, the founding publisher and editor of Conscious Choice magazine, and he played a key role in developing and helping to pass the Illinois Food, Farms and Jobs Act, which has been hailed as model legislation to build a local food system.

On top of that, Jim created FamilyFarmed.org to encourage the production, marketing and distribution of locally grown and responsibly produced food and goods. Next week, the FamilyFarmed.org Expo comes to Chicago once again. The three day event is being held at the Historic Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph Street and 78 East Washington Street.

It features seminars, cooking demonstrations, 120 exhibitors offering samples of local food, gifts and information, all in the service of supporting local, family-run businesses. What more could you want from an Expo?

And if you want a sense of why the FamilyFarmed Expo and its message are so important, take a look at this article by Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma . He brilliantly explains why, if we continue down the path that we have accepted as the norm in America, we are headed for a food disaster.

While I’m on the subject of green, do you recognize the name Bob Schildgen? What if I said, “Hey, Mr. Green!” There you go. You hear his environmental wisdom in his one minute tips on WCPT. He’s also the columnist for The Sierra Club’s environmental advice column (. Of course, he was managing editor and book review editor of Sierra magazine for many years. And though he now lives in Berkeley, California, don’t hold that against him, because he’s really a kind of local boy–a native of rural Wisconsin, near Prairie du Chien, where he grew up on a farm. So he can’t be all bad.

Oh, by the way, he’s distilled his green advice into the aptly titled book, Hey, Mr. Green.

Salsedo Press is the Green Business of the Week. You can find out more about this eco-friendly company by going to the Green Business of the Week page.

November 9, 2008

Are you familiar with the Chicago Wilderness? That may sound like an oxymoron, but not to the more than 230 public, private and corporate organizations of this region who are committed to restoring and protecting some 225,000 acres of natural areas in four states, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.

If you’re not familiar with Chicago Wilderness, you need to log onto their website. You can also subscribe to their magazine. Even better, sign up for and attend the Chicago Wilderness 2008 Congress this Thursday, November 13 at The Forum on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus at 725 W. Roosevelt Road.

The entire event, which runs from 8:00 am to 7:30 pm, features the strategic initiatives of Chicago Wilderness--Green Infrastructure, Leave No Child Inside, Restoration & Management, and Climate Change.

If you can’t attend the day sessions, you might want to attend the free evening event on “Climate Change, People and Nature in the Chicago Region” from 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. Hosted by Suzanne Malec-McKenna, Commissioner, City of Chicago, Department of Environment (who has been on this very radio program, thank you very much), the talk features Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, President of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment.

To offer a preview of this event, I welcome a number of the participants to The Mike Nowak Show:

Bob Sullivan, Program Manager, Environmental Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Kerry Leigh, Chicago Wilderness Climate Change Task Force Chair
Bob Moseley, Director of Conservation, The Nature Conservancy
Melinda Pruett-Jones, Executive Director, Chicago Wilderness

The fee is $40. The student rate is $20. Register online. For general information on registration and for Congress 2008 scholarships, please contact Lynn Peemoeller, Congress consultant, at (773) 271-1446.

The theme of today’s show-- Biodiversity. Obviously. And it is an honor to talk to Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens, published by Timber Press.

Tallamy’s book changed the way I think about biodiversity, but not because I didn’t already understand that using native plants is important. It’s just that I didn’t quite get why natives are so important. Tallamy explains in his book that when we use “alien” plants in our landscapes–that is to say, plants that come from other continents–we are failing to provide nourishment for insects on this continent. Why? Because insects have spent tens of millions of years evolving with the plants around them and are either incapable of or not interested in consuming the alien species. As a result, birds, amphibians, lizards, fish and mammals who rely on insect populations to thrive have less food and thereby are in decline themselves.

Look at the landscapes around you and you might get some understanding of what I’m talking about. Plants like Norway Maples, Bradford Pears, privet, oriental bittersweet, burning bush, English ivy, Japanese maple and even daylilies are not native to North America, and are not valuable food sources for insects.

The upshot is that with our millions of acres of lawns and foundation plants, we’re creating landscapes that we might find aesthetically pleasing but that are biological wastelands. At some point, if we don’t start paying attention to the world around us, we are going to discover that we have encouraged tens of thousands of species to become extinct.

The good news is that Tallamy thinks this trend can be reversed. You’ll have to pick up his book–and I urge you to do so–to find out how.

November 2, 2008

It's always a pleasure to answer tree questions with Shawn Kingzette. Well, he's the one who does most of the talking and that's all right with me. Shawn is a knowledgeable and hard working arborist for The Care of Trees , one of my great sponsors. But Shawn and I have another connection–we worked together on the board of MELA, Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association for several years, where I got to appreciate his insight into environmental issues, not to mention his humor. All I can say it, I enjoy having a friend who can answer my tree questions mano a mano. It's almost as good as personally knowing a doctor...maybe better.

And the winner is...Peter Knippel and his staff at Felician Sisters at Peterson and Pulaski in Chicago. He/they were awarded “Gardener of the Year” at Mayor Daley's 2008 Landscape Awards at the Garfield Park Conservatory yesterday. It's hard to drive past that convent without wanting to stop and smell the flowers, so to speak. Peter calls his effort “Conventus in Horto”, or “Convent in a Garden,” which is a play on the City of Chicago's motto, “Urbs in Horto,” or “City in a Garden.”

By the way, the award program is part of the effort of the Chicago Department of the Environment . You might also be interested to know that yet another of my sponsors, WRD Environmental , is also the official sponsor of this event.

My congratulations to all the Chicago gardeners who were honored at the ceremony yesterday. And to all gardeners, period. Give yourselves a pat on the back.

Greener Cleaners is the Green Business of the Week . You can find out more about this eco-friendly company by going to the Green Business of the Week .

 

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