At DC's Green Festival the big Top Green Celebrity was actor/activist Ed Begley, and he packed the house for his talk about living simply.  I'm happy to report that he included some jokes in with all that Message.  Didja hear that Ed and wife Rachelle have the only pre-nup in Hollywood involving carbon credits?  (Funny but probably true.)  And that for her birthday he bought her a hemp thong?  Badabing!

But I also took notes about these more substantive bits:

• This all started for him back in 1970, when riding a bike wasn't cool, just nerdy.  His bell bottoms got caught in the spokes, and his Afro was blown straight. 
• He's big on "quantifiable good news", like the fact that while LA has four times the cars that it had years ago (what year, he didn't say) with only half the smog.  The Hudson and Cuyahoga Rivers have been cleaned up. The CFC-caused hole in the ozone layer IS smaller.  And the green economy does create jobs.
• He's a big fan of the Boy Scout experience – it  taught him his love of nature.
• He's a fiscal conservative and declares that everything he's done "for the environment" since 1970 (when he was a broke, out-of-work actor) has saved him money.  Like becoming a vegetarian, buying an electric car, installing a solar oven, a rain barrel, a wind turbine, etc.  He did the cheap and easy things first.
• He recommends peer-reviewed web resources written by people with Ph.Ds after their names.  
• He's been carbon NEGATIVE since '85.
• He calls Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu people who "get it!"
• He loves his "green switch" that turns off all the "phantom power" in his house when it isn't needed.
• What's green?  Not needing a lot of money.  It's even better than HAVING a lot of money.  (I love that one.)
• His favorite recycled product is his recycled plastic fence.
• His house is only 1,600 square feet (same as mine). 
• In 2008 he agreed to a "modern energy audit," thinking his house would pass with flying colors, and they found huge energy leaks.
• Asked (by me, of course) about  his lawn, he blamed his on Rachelle – she wanted a patch.  After he asked "Who's going to mow it?" the couple chose artificial turf made of  recycled plastic and tire.  Acknowledging that it has an unfortunate heat island effect, on the plus side it never needs mowing and after pets dump on it he just rinses it off.
• On another gardening note, he blasted the pesticides, herbicides and fungicides that get into our groundwater and pollute it.

I started hearing from Jackie months ago – some comments on GardenRant and the occasional helpful tip ("That link's a dud!"  And for the record, I WANT y'all to tell me these things! )  Then  last summer I asked for eco-dubies to step up and pay my expenses to attend an awesome conference about Urban Gardening, and within an hour of publishing that plea Jackie emailed me on behalf of Olive Barn to offer $100.  Other good people stepped up and the project was a go, with two reports (about Bette Midler's NYC nonprofit and about Greenmapping your city) so far, and more coming.

Then I started seeing Olive Barn adverts in the prime, top spot on on GardenRant.  For a whole month, I think it was.  So when I got my nerve up to contact potential sponsors last month (October is apparently the month for advertising bids), I naturally thought of Olive Barn and that nice Jacqueline in charge of their marketing, and sent her my spiffy proposal.   Boom, I heard a big YES from Jackie right, and we hit the phones to chat about it.  

That's when I found out she's the owner, not just the marketing person.  And look what else she is, (from her blog's About page): 

I’m an Aggie with a BS in Horticulture from Texas A&M. I practice organic gardening techniques and refrain from using any pesticides or synthetic fertilizers in my garden.  My dream garden is uncluttered and balanced with elements of water, wood and stone. Join me as I share my personal experience in converting my urban space into a livable and sustainable garden.

An Olive Barn is Born

So on the phone I asked for more info about how Olive Barn came into being and learned that Jackie had, in her first career, been a software developer, then did IT consulting for large corporations. It was at the age of 43, suddenly "between jobs," that Jackie turned to her first love – gardening – and entered the hort program at Texas A&M.  So why not put her marketing and web experience to use to help pay for that hort degree?  Voila (in 2000) she launched her very own "eco-friendly garden home store, Olive Barn,

Not all alone, though.  She commuted with two good friends to A&M hort-school, and ran Olive Barn out of her home with their part-time help.  That was six years ago and now Olive Barn fills a 3600-sq-ft warehouse in Houston and her green baby saw over a half million in sales last year.

In her off hours she gardens, of course, and writes the gardening newsletter for her 900-home community association.  (Uh oh, HOA rules about landscaping!!)  So Jackie, how's that going, your relationship with the HOA?  Let's just say she'll be encouraging her neighbors to get their  St. Austine grass off of performance-enhancing drugs (synthethic fertilizer), since she's learned in her own yard that it'll look fine (after an initial period of detox, of course).

To round out her professional life, Jackie works as a garden coach and produces two outasight blogs.  The Olive Barn blog is called Growing Green + Living It™ Sustainable Living blog, and her individual gardening blog is Southern Post Journal, where her macro photography is inspiring me to figure out that feature on my point-and-shoot.  (Oh, yeah, I'm pretty basic.)  She recently started blogging for the Houston Chronicle in their gardening section.

Well, let me say this about all that.  I LOVE second career stories (have one myself) especially if they involve gardening. 

So, a new sponsor of Sustainable and Urban Gardening is born, and now you know something about the new company over there in the sidebar.

 My pal Ginny Stibolt accomplished what to me is the Herculean feat of writing Sustinable Gardening for Florida and getting it past all the academics who had to review and approve it it for accuracy. (Writing a book just seems to me like doing a term paper that never ends.)

But back to Ginny.  She sent me the first cover design and I posted it on GardenRant, asking for feedback and getting a ton of it.  And not in a good way.   But a new design was better and it’s in print and damn, the first review – in the Daytona Beach  News-Journal is a winner!  It only stayed online about a week so I can’t link to it but luckily I grabbed what I thought was the most interesting part.  It’s Ginny’s 8 steps to sustainable gardening.  Not "easy" steps, the silly propaganda fed to us by the media.  She calls the steps "complex" – such brutal honesty!  So, what do you think of them?

Sustainable Gardening in 8 Complex Steps

1. Having minimal impact on the environment

2. Making the best of available resources

3. Saving time and money

4. Reducing carbon dioxide and increase oxygen in the air

5. Offsetting some of the heat absorbed and stored by buildings and roads

6. Increasing habitat for wildlife

7. Preventing damage to underground infrastructure

8. Preparing for hurricanes, fires and drought

I love how big-picture it is.  Usually you see sustainability defined as just number 1, sometimes 6, occasionally 2, but never the rest.  Never (okay, rarely) is the resource of human beings considered – like our time and money, those factors that make something feasible in the first place.  The focus of "sustainability" is so often on simply avoiding doing harm, ignoring the pro-active, positive impacts that sustainable gardening has – like Ginny’s 4 and 5.  

And I’d never have thought of 7 or 8 but hey, I’m glad someone’s thinking about them.  Congrats, Ginny, on the book and the great review! 

If you’ve followed the links on my WowOWow.com article - "Coming soon: The Death of the Great American Lawn" – welcome and look around.  For more articles about lawn, check out the categories "Lawn" and "Lawn Substitutes" over in the right.

Then on my website there’s a whole section called Lawn Reduction and Lawn Substitutes, with examples from across the U.S.

Next up from me on WowOWow I’ll be blogging about solutions – better lawn species, better ways to care for lawn, and alternatives to lawn altogether – and where to find them.  And where to find them will be a new website that’’s launching next month.  It’s the combined effort of Paul Tukey, Ginny Stibolt, Susan Morrison, Tom Christopher, Evelyn Hadden, Billy Goodnick, Shirley Bovshow, a movie producer/environmental activist named Tom Engelman, and yours truly.  

Photo and plant credits, clockwise from upper left: Prairie Dropseed at the Scott Arboretum by Susan Harris; Sedum acre and Dutch white clover by Susan Harris; UC Verde Buffalo grass by Tom Hawkins; and Carex pansa by Owen Dell.

Give a listen to Ken Druse’s podcast "Real Dirt", which he describes thusly:

This week’s edition of KDRD, guest Susan Harris and Ken talk about sustainable gardening, vegetable gardening and the new White House vegetable garden — spearheaded by the First Lady. Susan and Ken wonder about the aesthetics of vegetable gardening – can a veg garden be beautiful? Of course, and that’s proven by a photo of the one at Chanticleer, below.

Then he lists a whole bunch of links – coz you know I can’t stop creating new ones.  

I haven’t had the nerve to listen to the podcast myself but I vaguely remember laughing a lot and not being able to remember plant names.   

Sustainable-Gardening.com is about 18 months old now and has evolved in ways that made the old design all wrong.  Like my name and "coach" in the header, when the site’s now a compilation of writing by 20 of us.  All my original gurus – Ann Lovejoy, Lee Reich and Linda Chalker-Scott – plus lots of writers I’ve more recently come to admire – Andrew Bunting, Don Engebretson, Joe Lamp’l and many others.  So here’s what’s new: 

• The tagline in the header is "Practical answers from native-loving garden gurus."   That’s supposed to make the point that the authors are people who know how to grow plants in the challenging world of landscapes.  And because they’re actual gardeners, they level with readers about what really works.
• Better organization, with plants and how-to in the navigation, and Other Resources (videos, garden gurus, coaches) compiled elsewhere.

The parts I’m still dithering over are the header photo and what should be on the home page (which isn’t how most readers approach the site, having reached it by Googling to a specific page).  This boxed lay-out could be switched to a column approach, like the one we’re using for the newsletters.

Just for comparison, here’s the old design.  New design by Lucas Sanders.