The Dinner Garden is stretching people’s food budgets by enabling them to grow their own food.

Victory gardens are making a comeback. Envisioning a nation where front lawns, empty lots, medians, parks, schools, churches and community centers devote space to fruit and vegetable gardens, Texas resident Holly Hirshberg established The Dinner Garden in 2009 to provide free seeds, supplies and advice to anyone who wants to start a garden.

Hirshberg began The Dinner Garden, a nonprofit, in response to the slow economy, and much like the victory gardens of the World Wars I and II, she wants these gardens to help people stretch their food budgets and enhance their nutritional intake. 

Since its beginning, The Dinner Garden has provided seeds to nearly 12,000 families in 39 states, but The Dinner Garden isn’t stopping with seeds. Hirshberg is seeking to expand the organization’s inventory to include inexpensive greenhouses for extending the growing season. Plus, volunteers are researching new plants and including recipes on the website so growers will have new ways to cook their produce.

Visit The Dinner Garden to assist in the organization’s efforts or learn more.

Photo by Audrey Pavia

I helped a colleague rescue a white Araucana rooster, Drumstick, and my neighbors adopted him.

When one of my colleagues at work told me he had a friend with a rooster he didn’t know what to do with, I knew I was in trouble. This friend kept reptiles, not birds, and somehow ended up with this chicken. He had no clue how to take care of him, my colleague said. So, of course, I had to get involved.

So a couple of nights ago after work, I drove to the reptile guy’s place to take a look at this rooster. I was secretly hoping it was a hen that I could just rescue and add to my flock. It didn’t take long to realize that even though the guy kept snakes and lizards, he knew the difference between a rooster and a hen.

A white Araucana, the rooster was huddled in a Have-A-Heart humane trap when I saw him, with no food or water. All rational thought left me at that moment. All I knew was that I had to help the rooster. I had no idea what I was going to do with him since, my two roosters barely got along with each other, never mind an outside rooster.

When I got home, I put the rooster in an empty poultry hutch I had in my yard just for such occasions. It was dark out, so he didn’t eat the food I left for him, but I knew he’d devour it in the morning.

The next day, I racked my brain trying to figure out what I was going to do with this guy. He was a rare Araucana. Perhaps someone on my local chicken message board would want him? I posted something, but all I got was wishes for good luck. I would need it since roosters are so hard to place.

Then it dawned on me. Maybe our next-door neighbors would take him. A wonderful animal-loving couple, they had a pair of free-ranging Chinese ducks they kept as pets. Maybe they’d like a rooster to hang out with them.

Sure enough, my neighbors quickly said yes to my offer. The husband told me he would come over that evening to get the rooster and would follow my strict orders to keep him confined to a coop for a few days to get him to settle in.

I assumed I would be home to help the new rooster owner retrieve his bird from my hutch, but seems he was too eager to wait. Instead, he enlisted the services of my husband, Randy. Born and raised in Manhattan, Randy’s chicken-handling skills aren’t the greatest. My neighbor was born and raised in downtown L.A., and also had absolutely no chicken-handling skills. So I wasn’t surprised when I learned that the rooster got past them pretty quickly once they opened the hutch door.

“He flew at us and then ran off,” my husband later explained.

The rooster spent that night roosting in a bush. The next morning, Randy and I cornered him. He was delivered to our neighbors, who promptly named him Drumstick.

Every morning, Drumstick is crowing like crazy when I go outside to let my flock out of their coop to roam the yard for bugs. I get a warm feeling whenever I hear him, knowing he’s in a good home because I just couldn’t help myself.

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Photo by Rick Gush

My garden in Liguria, Italy, rises 70 steep feet from street level.

Liguria, Italy, is a steep place. The province is the thin slice of coastal mountains that fall into the Mediterranean waters—never more than 40 miles wide—that wraps around the northwest area known as the Italian Riviera. There are 189 steps from the street up to the apartment I use as my office and art studio. When the funicular is broken, I know very well how steep Liguria is.

Except for the huge river valley of Albenga, all 40 square miles of it, there is not much flat land here in Liguria. The mountains themselves were home to the Liguri and Etruscans in the centuries before Roman times, and these are the small farmers that started making rock walls and terraces and planting olives and grapes. When one walks in the forests on the mountains, old crumbled rock walls hundreds or thousands of years old are evident everywhere. Small farmers have built up pockets of cultivatable soil for thousands of years here, and that work continues. In addition to my own garden work, I also help a local farmer friend repair the rock walls on his land.

Photo by Rick Gush

My wife and I live in an apartment on the third floor of an old stable next to a creek. The building was converted to homes a few centuries ago. Next to our building is a sunny cliff that rises far above the four-story, 10-foot ceiling building. The cliff is so steep that rockslides are common in the rainy season. (Rockslides are a common occurrence in all of Liguria, actually.)

When I moved there, the cliff was covered with berry vines and scrub trees, but the strong sunshine inspired me to try to make a garden up there. After the initial clearing, I started making birds’ nests of branches and weeds in some of the angles where I could make a flat place and fill it with screened dirt. I next piled up rocks to make a few planting areas. In the third year, annoyed with the small size of the planting areas, I started making much larger terrace walls, and I developed the system of using glass bottles as the principal building blocks.

I’ve been building on the site for five years now, and I must admit, it’s nicely impressive. The whole garden rises more than 70 feet from the street level. Seventy feet is easy to say, but much harder to climb. A whole series of steps and handholds are required so than one can pull oneself up and down the garden. Very Ligurian.

As it turns out, my garden has ended up being a good release for all my castle-building urges. I’d love to build a new castle, but one could never get a building permit for a new castle in Italy. All the cool, old, rock castles here in Italy make me jealous. There’s something about the heroic stone architecture that really attracts me, and I’d like to work in that medium. Within the structures of my garden’s terrace walls, I’ve included a number of bas-relief turrets, battlements and bastions. When viewed from the road, the garden resembles the ruins of a medieval fortress, and the neighbors all joke that when the pirates attack again, we can all take refuge in the neighborhood castle.

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The EPA updated the guidelines for Energy Star-certified homes. The guidelines, which will take effect in 2012, include new guidelines for thermal home-enclosure systems.

We’ve all seen that blue-scribbled star beacon of sustainability. Shopping around for a new air conditioner or refrigerator is always met with an “Oh, think of the electric bill savings!” when you come across an Energy Star product. You often leave the store feeling you can’t afford not to upgrade.

Now that blue-star label of eco-conscious, cost-conscious splendor is not only available for your microwave but for your front door, too.

You might have already heard of EPA-certified Energy Star homes, but now the organization is putting new regulations in place to reach even greater heights of energy efficiency (20 percent greater) that will have your checking account and planet Earth saying, “It’s about time!”

The new guidelines are broken down into versions. The current guideline version developed in 2006 is referred to as 2.0, meaning if your house is currently certified, you meet all the standards outlined by that version. However, the EPA has set new goals for their version 3.0 Energy Star-certified homes to take effect in 2012.

The new guidelines for the 3.0 Energy Star certification have taken into consideration the criticisms of homeowners and contractors responsible for the more than 1 million homes in the U.S. that meet the EPA’s 2.0 regulations.

“The concept is the same,” says Joseph Nespoli, chief of Energy Star-certified construction for state-based contracting company Campo Brothers. “Now, the plan is to tighten up the house even more.”

EPA-rated modifications are broken down within these outlined categories:

• a complete thermal home-enclosure system (super-efficient insulation, windows and doors)
• quality-installed, complete heating and cooling systems (AC oasis, cozy dens and hot showers)
• a water-management system (moisture control for temperature stability and health risks that come with having a climate-controlled home)
• efficient lighting and appliances (the aforementioned Energy Star-labeled refrigerator and those compact florescent/curlicue light bulbs).

Lastly, homeowners or contractors wanting to build according to the EPA’s new guidelines will need a third-party verifier to sign off on all improvements.

Reading about the new requirements of the 3.0 Energy Star home is not for the amateur recycling, bicycle riding, composting, energy-efficient-light-bulb-using environmentalist. For those well-versed in construction jargon, this project might be a cinch. Revisions like, “whole-building mechanical ventilation design requirements have been updated to prohibit the use of an intake duct on the return side of the HVAC system,” might sound perfectly natural to some, but for the rest of us, there is an extensive list of more than 8,500 Energy Star/EPA-certified contractors, easily searchable by location and expertise on the Energy Star website.

Along with the warm, fuzzy feeling of doing something good for the world, a newly improved Energy Star home will bring homeowners an estimated energy savings of $200 to $400 per month according to the EPA. Also, through December 2016, the U.S. government is offering tax breaks of up to 30 percent of the total cost of renovations and upgrades.

In order to reap savings on your roof, water heater, insulation, air conditioning, windows, and doors, apply for your tax break before the end of 2010.