Everything About Gardening

And email from master gardener Donna Sharrett, who runs the Ossining Organic Community Garden:

Dear Cornell Cooperative Extension supporter,

Cornell Cooperative Extension still does not have a contract with Westchester County.  The Board of Legislators approved an appropriation of $990,000 for CCE at the end of 2010, but the County Executives administration has still not released a contract as of today, July 22nd, 2011.  The County Executives office continues to stall, asking CCE to repeatedly fill out forms which they have done, yet no contract has been created.

Without the county funding CCE will not, by law, receive state or federal funding and will be therefore eliminated.

CCE is speaking at the Board of Legislators Environment Committee meeting on Monday, July 25 at 3:00 p.m. t

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Never overlook the power of brain storming. It can bring out ideas you may never have dreamed of. Today we will look at one way of finding a style that is right for your project – use it as a catalyst to get your creative juices working.

1. Take the brief that you have already created and sit somewhere with no distractions and start jotting down ideas, scribbling sketches, flicking through magazines and books, (you will find that after picking out a few examples in magazines and books that you start to get an idea of the style that you are predominately drawn to, the schemes will have a similar theme), looking at color and fabric and flooring samples and swatches, photos of the existing space and items that you are going to keep from your existing room to work with.

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LOS ANGELES — When Gabriel, a 10-year-old rescue cat from Chinatown, tucks into his morning meal, you won’t see any Friskies or Meow Mix in his bowl. Ahi tuna and duck are more the ticket.

“I think there’s more than enough pesticides and chemicals and that kind of stuff in human food,” says Gabriel’s owner, Jason Lanum, on a recent expedition to the Urban Pet, a Los Angeles specialty pet store. “I eat natural food, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t give it to my cat.”

These days, our pets may be eating better than we are. Big-box pet stores and precious pet boutique shelves are increasingly stocked with gourmet edibles that are corn-free, wheat-free, locally sourced, byproduct-free, free-range, minimally processed and raw. Many come with homey, inviting labels, and some look palatable even for humans. A

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All gardeners need reliable garden hose reels. Not all reels however are appropriate for garden use. Obviously, you need to make sure that the reel you get is specifically intended for water hoses. Other reels are meant for air hoses. Once you find a reel for organizing a water hose, you need to evaluate it further for specific ideal qualities.

One top consideration are the wheels. Reels used for gardens should first have appropriate wheels. Some reels have small triple or quadruple wheels. These kinds of reels would work best only for dry, flat surfaces. Gardens however are likely to have uneven soil and gravel surfaces. These are best negotiated by large back wheels. An alternative to back wheels is the tilt cart. You can get a reel with only two large back wheels. You can than tilt it when you need to move it over an uneven surface.

The structure of a reel itself is also important to check.

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Though you may be putting on pounds, at least your refrigerator is using less energy. According to the Department of Energy, today’s models only use about 25 percent of the juice needed to power refrigerators made in 1975, even though refrigerators have gotten 20 percent larger in that time. That’s good for the environment and your wallet, if not your waistline.

In Consumer Reports refrigerator tests, we calculate both energy efficiency and estimate how much it costs to run a particular model for a year. For example, the ample bottom-freezer LG LFC25776[SW] has 18.0 cubic feet of usable capacity yet costs only $50 to run annually. In

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