I love Christa Carignan's gardening blog. When I look at the ten-day forecast at weather.com and see that I'll be freezing into the foreseeable future, it's nice to go and read about someone actively gardening even in January, thinking about gardening, planning for spring, talking about gardening, living to garden!

Today I see that Christa has published a wonderfully detailed Beginner's Guide to Growing Food in DC, made even better by the fact that it's a blog and people have added helpful comments of their own. Time to start thinking about lettuce and spinach and collecting some seeds to grow in the spring, which I have renewed inspiration to do after watching this video on how to grow basil from seed. I will also try to plant a few more things from Sara Tangren's Chesapeake Native Nursery collection. Last year, I planted spotted mint and foxglove that I bought during Mike Tidwell's Clean Energy Open House, and they both seem to have done well (of course -- they're natives).

Of course, before the planting starts, you can also be working on making the stuff your plants will grow in, as you dream about what you'll be planting in it.

Today the black cartridge in our Samsung color printer finally died (after months of trying to), so we got around to trying out a place we've driven by many times on the Pike called "Refill Tech". The woman who runs it, Alice Wu, took over the business from her father, and was very helpful in looking up our printer type over the phone, quoting the price to refill it ($89, as opposed to $129 for a new one), telling me the guarantee (7,000 pages, same as a new one) and answering my questions. I was most concerned that the cartridge not leak after refilling, and Alice explained that that is a possibility if the cartridge has been refilled numerous times before but would not be a problem otherwise. We took the cartridge in and got a call in an hour that it was ready to pick up (you can also just wait there). I printed a two-sided document on it this evening and it looks great (and we're glad to finally be rid of the "refill black toner" message on the printer). Final score: Dickerson incinerator -1 cartridge, bank account +40 dollars.

The Rockville City Council voted in July to end the highly successful once-a-week trash pilot program that was carried out over several months in the Hungerford and Monument Park neighborhoods, and provide city-wide twice-a-week trash collection instead, a disappointing outcome to those of us who support a less costly, more environmentally friendly once-a-week solution. But we have not given up hope. I was gratified to see at the end of this article in the Gazette that Susan Hoffman considers the choice of this "expensive, least efficient, most polluting system" still open for debate.

Art Stigile, one of the participants in the pilot program, has been very active in rallying people to support the extension of the successful pilot program to the whole city (though it appears most residents in the pilot neighborhoods don't need much rallying -- they're already in agreement), and has created a petition to be collected and sent to the Council in September. I put up a modified version of the petition for residents of any part of Rockville which you can fill out and send if you feel so moved. And here's a list of some local resources that provide alternatives to throwing things away.

The Clean Energy Open House at Mike Tidwell's in Takoma Park today was excellent. The best part for us was finding a compact fluorescent light bulb that makes nice light and doesn't hum (and uses 1/3 the energy of its incandescent equivalent and lasts for 10,000 hours and cost $5).

We swapped out two incandescents today for the two n:vision bulbs we got at the open house (and took some before and after pictures), and plan to get to Home Depot in the near future to stock up on more. I'll post in the Greenpages if we find anyone else who carries them in this area.

Happy Earth Day! It's a gorgeous one. I've added a blurb to the Gardening section in the Greenpages about our new compost tumbler. We've switched from the open wire-mesh compost pile we've been using for the past 15 years to an enclosed tumbler and are looking forward to seeing how well it works. I'll be turning it regularly and post pictures of how the contents change over the next few weeks (supposedly we'll have our first batch ready by mid-May). If you have any composting tips, suggestions, horror stories, or great successes to offer, I'd be glad to hear and post them.

This past weekend I stayed in Boston, in a lovely 1894 Victorian B & B on Beacon Street. The owner, Katherine Swanner, was a wonderful hostess and also a font of information about Boston, past and present. She mentioned that one of the primary ways people get around in Boston, besides the T (part of which conveniently runs right down the middle of Beacon Street), is by Zipcar, in which cars can be picked up for hourly or daily use at T stops and other convenient locations. Rockville has Zipcar too; I've written a blurb about how Zipcar works at Rockville Metro stations in the Greenpages.

I finally posted the beginnings of the greenpages, which was one of my main motivators for starting this site nine years ago -- to show some appreciation for and promote local businesses and organizations that follow green practices or sell environmentally-friendly products (well, that, and to show off what a person can do with a database and an Internet connection). If you have any information to add to the greenpages, I'd love to hear from you.

Susanne Brunhart-Wiggins is my heroine in this department, for her energetic and thoughtful promotion of an environmentally-conscious way of life. She runs the County's Behind the Scenes class on recycling and waste management (highly recommended, especially the trip to the waste-to-energy incinerator at Dickerson) and has collected reams of information that is enthusiastically imparted in the class and at her Talkin' Trash blog.