Birds can be helpful with insect control, but they can also wreak havoc on your fruit. To avoid this, cover each fruit with a net sack after it sets, or toss bird netting over your fruit trees and fasten it tightly at the bottom, so no birds get trapped inside.

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If you live in a warm or rainy climate, plan on making and using a substantial amount of compost each year. Warmer climates mean a longer growing season, and rainy climates cause nutrients to leach away at a faster rate.

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Lou Manfredini from House Smarts TV did a segment on the Today Show about environmentally friendly lawn equipment, and several Clean Air Gardening products were mentioned. Lou contacted us about a month ago and asked us to send some stuff to New York, where they were working on the segment.

Compost is a natural way to fertilize your vegetable or flower garden. You can send less into our landfills and more back into the earth with the use of the Tumbleweed Composting bin. This unit makes it easy to keep the compost well aerated. You can use kitchen scraps, leaves or whatever can be loaded and turned to speed up the process and help you feed your garden naturally. It sells for about $200.

In addition to the Tumbleweed Composter, he also talked about our lawn aerating shoes, and the Scotts Classic reel mower. All three products help you keep your yard and garden looking great while helping the environment at the same time.

Thanks for thinking of us, Lou!

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The smaller you can make the fragments of your compost material, the better. An easy way to break up leaves and grass clippings is by running over them with a lawnmower. Kitchen materials can be reduced with a knife. Other materials can be chopped with a square-pointed shovel. How about a chipper shredder or a chain saw to chop up your lettuce. Or a sledge hammer like that guy Gallagher?, or am I showing my age? Just joking around…

Anyone else know any cool techniques for breaking up compost? How about Karate?

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Many kitchen scraps work very well in your compost heap. All vegetable matter is fine, and so are eggshells and coffee grounds. Avoid putting meat products and fats into your compost, however. Barbecue ash is also a no-no, since it may contain fats from the cooked meat. For more information, see www.compostguide.com

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Clean Air Gardening was mentioned in an Associated Press story about reel lawn mowers picked up by the May 28 issue of the Chicago Tribune, along with plenty of other newspapers around the country.

According to buyers and sellers, the resurgence of these quaint reminders of yesteryear is due most notably to growing environmental concerns and an increasing number of women who do the mowing.

Headlines about global warming, pollution and vanishing natural resources have people — and not just those wearing Birkenstocks — making changes.

“I’m not a tree hugger, but I think we all think about being more environmentally friendly and leaving less of a footprint on the world,” said Ben Kogan, a Chicago architect who started using his new mower this spring.

“It’s an introduction into green gardening and a more green lifestyle,” said Jim Grisius, 45, of Homewood.

And the mowers provide one way to respond to pollution from gas-powered mowers, not to mention the warnings from at least one former vice president.

“I definitely see a bigger selection of people all the time, especially since the Al Gore movie [’An Inconvenient Truth’],” said Lars Hundley, the owner of Clean Air Gardening, a Dallas-based gardening-equipment retailer.

Don’t have one yet, but thinking about it?

Check out our selection of reel mowers at Clean Air Gardening.

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For a gentle way of working compost into the soil, spread it across your garden area in late fall and cover it with a mulch of chopped leaves. By the time spring rolls around, your soil organisms will have worked it into the soil for you.

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While you can use chemicals to promote stump decay, it’s just as easy to use organic methods. All you have to do is drill large holes around the top of the stump, fill them with sugar, molasses, or buttermilk, wet the stump down, and mulch it 6-12 inches deep.

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Be careful before you use any insecticide, natural or otherwise. Any educated organic gardener realizes that most insects are our friends. Less than two percent are harmful, and they’re often eaten by the 98 percent that aren’t. Some of those 98 percent also pollinate your plants.

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ReadyMade magazine’s web site has a fun online project that teaches you how to find a four leaf clover.

4-leaf clovers, or “shamrocks”, are a mutation of the usually 3-leafed White Clover plant, Trifolium repens. One clover is actually one leaf of a larger plant, with 3 leaflets. Mutations can occur due to a low frequency recessive gene or environmental causes. Often the reason for mutation is differentiable from one clover to another. The mutation does not stop at the 4-leafed variety: 5-leafed clovers are not uncommon. However, the more leaflets, the harder they are to find (and the luckier they are): the record is an 18-leaf clover, and the highest I’ve ever seen is 10-leafed.

Click through to the project, and you’ll find that the author has a giant collection of four leaf clovers that he has pressed and mounted in a frame.

He must be one lucky dude.

We love ReadyMade magazine, especially since they mentioned Clean Air Gardening and the Brill Luxus 38 reel mower in their April / May issue!

(Five Star Rating) I never expected to fall in love with the (Brill) Luxus … At a mere 17 pounds, it’s sleek and light, and it practically purred through my lawn. www.cleanairgardening.com.”

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