Mississauga Environmental Awareness 🇨🇦

One in eight UK households is skipping meals or eating less because they can't afford food. Fruit and vegetables are the first things they cut. In one Yorkshire town, neighbors started growing them on public land and giving them away. Todmorden has about 15,000 people. Nearly 1 in 5 are income deprived, and more than a quarter of kids grow up in poverty. In 2008, Mary Clear dug up her rose garden, planted vegetables and put up a sign that said "help yourself." She and Pam Warhurst started Incredible Edible with one rule: if you eat, you're in. They planted about 70 patches of public land with herbs, fruit and vegetables, free to anyone. At first nobody would take any. They had to keep telling people it was OK. It was never going to feed the whole town, and they never said it would. But 46% of local food businesses said it boosted their sales. A dairy farmer who'd been thinking about making cheese now makes five kinds. The high school started serving lunches from its own garden. More than half of residents now buy local food every week, against 41% nationally. All of it with no paid staff. More than 1,000 groups around the world now run their own version.

If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box. The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year. A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease. Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk." One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks. If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different boxes) is one of the most useful single things you can do for tick exposure at the landscape scale. Match the box to the owl that lives near you. The mouse is the problem, owls are the solution.

Every use of a leaf blower is a massacre. A typical blower pushes air out at 150 to 200 mph. That's faster than a Category 5 hurricane, aimed straight at the layer of leaves where next year's butterflies, moths, and fireflies are hoping to spend the winter. Woolly bear caterpillars curl up under those leaves. Luna moths hide their cocoons in them, disguised as dead leaves. Fireflies lay their eggs in them. Bumblebee queens sleep an inch or two below. Blast the beds down to bare dirt and all of it gets scattered, exposed or bagged for the landfill. Flip it to vacuum mode and it's even worse. It sucks up whatever's in the leaves, insects and spiders included, and chops it up. In 2019, Germany's environment ministry told people not to use leaf blowers unless they're indispensable, because small animals get sucked in or blown around and damaged. Get a rake. Move the leaves off the lawn and driveway, pile them whole in your garden beds and under your trees, and leave them there until spring. Next year's bumblebees and fireflies will thank you.