Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Earth Day at Anthropologie


I had a great time at the Anthropologies store in the Millennium mall What a beautiful store! Their lively front windows are decorated with flowers made from recycled plastic. Many of their clothes are made from beautiful natural fibers. The for your home things they sell are all nature based, with lots of books on gardening and sustainability. A printed blouse I admired had beets or carrots and comes with beet or carrot seeds!

I collected emails from people who want more information about Simple Living Institute and I gave away many, many brochures. One woman exclaimed “I don’t know anyone who is into this kind of stuff, but me!” Another woman, a teacher at Oak Ridge High School, told me she gardens to relieve stress. She says, “My husband thinks I am crazy! But he eats well!” Have we ever heard that before?

I enjoyed a myriad of discussions! A young girl had just seen the movie Food Inc. and wanted to talk about Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. Others agreed that raising awareness leads to making better choices. Notice the plastic water bottle in our display. I posed it right in front of the time line for decomposition. Several people tried to pick it up and throw it away. I happily objected! This helped them to understand that it takes 450 years to really get rid of a water bottle in the land fill. I read that only 30% of all plastic water bottles go to recycling. Our display opened some eyes that day!

The vegan food from Laina’s Ethos Vegan Kitchen opened some mouths too! I heard several people say they had never eaten humus and that they loved the roll ups that were offered there that day. How nice it was to have free food to celebrate Earth Day!

Raising awareness does lead to making better choices!

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Earth Day Celebration at Anthropologie

The store Anthropologie in the Mall at Millenia is having an Earth Day celebration because they are committed to being green. They have asked SLI to bring educational materials and a visual display on this day. Set up time is 10am-11am and break down time is from 2-3pm. They will be providing us with one 8x3’ table in the center of the store for our display. Display ideas we discussed are a solar panel, plants or produce, worms, and a recycle art demo. Shayla and Karie have volunteered to man the booth at this event. We will also have our canvas bags, brochures, pictures, and a sign-up sheet for emails. The store is also buying local food from the UCF Arboretum and having it prepared by Ethos Vegan Kitchen. The store will be giving SLI a donation from a percent of the sales they do on that day.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Strawberry Season is here!


I have about 100 strawberry plants and they are just now starting to produce big red sweet juicy berries. I'm growing the Camarosa variety. I went to Pappys' Patch U-Pick Strawberry patch in north of Oviedo in the Black Hammock area. They were delicious and only $2.00 a pound there, local but not organic. They say it is too hard to grow the berries organically. Their season runs till May.