Rutgers Master Gardeners, Camden County, and Office of Sustainability present the 2019 Green Garden Fair on Saturday, April 27th from 10:00-2:00 p.m. at the Camden County Environmental Center. The featured speaker is Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens. Enjoy cooking demonstrations and tastings, shop annual and perennial plants grown by Master Gardeners, have fun with free kids’ garden projects and tour the Educational Garden. For more information, visit mastergardenerscamdencounty.org.

Launching Summer 2019 is LowTides Ocean Products and they are celebrating Earth Month with the world's most eco-friendly chair. Built with 2.5 pounds of up-cycled ocean plastic, you too can be the solution to cleaner tides. Look good with a purpose. New styles for a new generation. 95% of Plastics are Used Once; LowTides stylish & durable design is built to make a difference. Each beach chair is made with over 2lb of upcycled plastic. LowTides is the brainchild of a true Jersey boy. Growing up along the water's edge with his cousins on 80th Street in Sea Isle City, New Jersey to now taking his family there, Brent Hutchinson realized that if nothing was done, future generations will not be able to do the same.

Until now, scientists thought water moved through trees by osmosis, in a somewhat continuous manner. Now they’ve discovered the trunks and branches of trees are actually contracting and expanding to “pump” water up from the roots to the leaves, similar to the way our heart pumps blood through our bodies. The only difference between our pulse and a tree’s is a tree’s is much slower, “beating” once every two hours or so, and instead of regulating blood pressure, the heartbeat of a tree, regulates water pressure. “We’ve discovered that most trees have regular periodic changes in shape, synchronized across the whole plant … which imply periodic changes in water pressure,” András Zlinszky of Aarhus University in the Netherlands told New Scientist.

Recycling Bench Update: Our bins should arrive in a week. In the meantime, please start collection of the following items: Grocery bags, Bread bags, Dry cleaning bags, Newspaper sleeves, Ziploc and other reclosable bags, Bubble wrap, Cereal bags, Produce bags, Ice bags, Wood pellet bags, Case overwrap and Salt bags. Simply bag them up in a trash bag or a large grocery bag, and once the collection bins are placed in town, you can begin the drop-off. Our goal is 500 lbs. of materials between EARTH DAY (4/22) and October 22nd. Putting a collection bin beside your trash can at home can help your family make good decisions about waste disposal. BUSINESS OWNERS: We are in need of locations in town willing to host a collection bin for the 6 month period. Besides hosting the bin you will have no responsibilities, as volunteers will collect the materials on a regular basis. Please reach out to me on facebook or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to offer your space.

TREX, a company that makes recycled plastic wood substitutes, offers the opportunity to win a FREE recycled park bench to communities that participate in a recycling program. I'm reaching out to gauge public interest and see if any businesses in our town would be interested in hosting a drop-off bin. To win a bench, we would need to collect 500 pounds of plastic refuse in a six-month span (about 40,500 plastic bags), which sounds crazy, but that's only about 11 bags per resident (based on ~3,700 population). Please reach out to me This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by message if you have interest as I am happy to head up this effort. 

Gardeners are a pretty thrifty bunch and it’s in the garden where repurposing old items into new really comes into its own. From transforming tins into planters to repurposing old furniture for storing produce, there are countless ways to put worn out or unwanted items to good use in the garden. In this short video we’ll share some of our favorite garden up-cycling ideas. If you love growing your own food, why not try some of these clever recycling ideas.