Set up at the Ingersoll Community Center – 177 Myrtle Avenue (between Prince & Navy), the Farm Stand will also offer games, workshops & educational activities for the whole family.  And, twice a month, Fort Greene’s Community Chefs will serve up easy, healthy, homestyle recipes.

The Farm Stand will be open on Thursdays rain or shine.  EBT/WIC/FMNP are accepted.  And the program is part of the Myrtle Eats Fresh Initiative (funded with support from the Community Experience Partnership).

For more information, contact MARP at 718-230-1689 or visit www.myrtleavenue.org for an up-to-date calendar of events.

1.  Make Your Own Card. Valentine’s Day ranks right up there with Christmas for card giving.  This year, how about trying something new?  Make your own cards using recycled paper!  It’s easy, fun, reduces wasted paper & gives a card an extra special touch!  Visit www.wikihow.com/Make-Paper for directions.

2.  Buy a Plant instead of giving cut flowers. Instead of cut flowers that get thrown away after a week, give the whole plant!  It’s a gift that keep on giving.  For an easier to care for option, ask for plants local to your region.

3.  Massage & Body Oils. A gift to share!  Organic body oils calm the nervous system, improve the circulation and tone the skin with great glide for perfect massages.  Have some fun and enjoy silky, smooth, healthy skin to boot!

4.  Find a restaurant that supports locally grown and/or organics foods. At localharvest.org find a restaurant that supports local, seasonal & organic foods.

5.  Reuse an old picture frame. Turn a great picture of you and your sweetie into an eco-conscience gift.  Use an old frame that’s lying around taking up space.  Clean it up & put some new life into it with a new picture.  Or, make your own frame from recycled materials.  Learn How.

6.  Travel the eco-friendly way.  Going away for a romantic weekend?  Find a hotel that’s eco-friendly at www.environmentallyfriendlyhotels.com/. If you’re traveling somewhere to celebrate the occasion, consider offsetting your carbon emissions at Native Energy.

Implementing small changes where & when you can makes a big difference in moving toward & living a greener lifestyle.  If you decide what your priorities are & think about where it would be easiest for you to begin, starting there can make it easier to work up to bigger & more difficult issues.

With that idea in mind, here are a few more easy steps to living greener…

1) For instance, you can start by replacing your light bulbs as they burn out with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) & replacing your cleaning supplies as they run out with environmentally friendly ones.  CFLs use 75% less energy & last up to seven years.  Simple & significant.

2) Another easy-to-implement strategy is to buy items with less packaging.  Consider what would happen if you bought toilet paper in double rolls, which contain twice as much as a regular size roll.  The number of cardboard tubes inside the rolls is reduced by half as is the amount of plastic used to wrap the packages.  If you recycle the cardboard tube that remains & open the plastic wrap at the top of the package & reuse the wrap as a trash bag, even better.  And, finally, if you buy recycled toilet paper, that’s even more eco-friendly!  And easy, too.

3) And finally, support your local community both socially & economically.  It can be done simply by buying your food, gifts, crafts & home items from local producers & businesses.  It reduces the distance traveled & resources used in the transportation of those products as well as keeps other resources close to where they came from – strengthening the community & making it easier to get what you need close to home.  Convenient & easy & a lot more fun than traveling all over the place to get your stuff done!

First, thank you to Lissa for including us in her blog, To the Nines, and for introducing us to The 3/50 Project! Both are so exciting for us!

The 3/50 Project encourages folks to keep local, independently-owned businesses in business & proposes that we select our three favorite independently owned businesses and spend $50 at them each month, arguing that our participation in the project really stimulates our communities and our local economies. They go into detail in their flyer below & at their website.

This Project is inspiring & exciting. Because I’m a small business owner, of course. But even more so because it was so important for me to open my business in my neighborhood, to support my community & to serve my neighbors… I’m inspired & so pleased to hear about people who feel the same & have taken action to support their beliefs, let alone a movement that does that. Very exciting!