Brummet's Conscious Blog

 -- Chatter --  Whew! Well the landscaping is in now, and in fact I was able to glean from a couple more neighbors. One is taking out a bed she has under her narrow deck because it is too difficult to maintain... and I was able to take one of her dark almost black-purple iris from there for the landscaping project. Another house has been available for sale for a long time and is kinda abandoned - a lot of their flowers had expired but I took a small division of their dwarf iris for this project. another neighbor has a back yard they don't use or maintain and the grass is chest high - but beyond that you can see remnants of an amazing gardener's handy work some years ago... there's a huge berm of various peony, rose and other plants there. She suggested I take some peony for the landscape beds and so I chipped a couple roots off... and hope they take. They look a little wimpy and wilted right now. Anyway all the mulch is spread on the beds and the last bit of finished co...

-- Garden --  I wanted to thank everyone for your patience while I physically exhaust myself on our landscaping projects. You read about our projects on the 22nd and also just the other day (see post below)... We have all 7 trees in now and 3 shrubs so far. Interestingly not only are we going to reduce the wind, dust and heat issues for our neighborhood... we are increasing the value of our property, while supporting beneficial life (birds, butterflies, bats, butterflies and insects that will both pollinate our plants and eat up the potential garden pests). But most important to us is the fact that we know that these plants will help mitigate global warming - annually, when mature the 7 trees and 11 shrubs will absorb 1875 kg of pollution and release enough clean oxygen for 25 people every single year. They'll also provide leaves for our garden soil production. Besides all of this we've made the neighborhood a little more beautiful with the diverse leaf color and berry and...

-- Garden --   You may recall back on the 22nd of this month I gave a little chat about some of the amazing benefits of landscaping and greening balconies, roof tops, window sills, front steps, etc. This is our 4th year on this property and we are finally able to do some landscaping... I started with a 30' mulched landscape bed leading to and underneath a huge pine tree - filled with daylilies, iris, marigolds, clematis, sweet peas, rhubarb, amethyst,  blue hyacinth, 4 o'clocks, nasturtium, flower bulbs and so on. It has taken quite nicely and things are blooming well despite being the first year. This weekend we will start on "gorilla gardening" techniques... planting on the city property - a grassy area between our fence line and the street curb. *We did check with the city to make sure it was alright and also followed through with the "call before you dig" service which connected us with the gas, water, sewer, city and other tech folks out there to...

-- Guest Blogging Tips --  * By George Russel Joseph Many people have been wondering whether guest blogging has an effect on SEO in current times. The truth is that the practice increases SEO. This is because it aids in increasing overall long tail traffic. While guest blogging still has the ability of increasing the ranking of your site, you need to observe a number of tips. The tips that you need to put into consideration include: Ensure that you post on relevant blogs Google recently rolled out measures to punish websites that had links in irrelevant blogs. For example, if you have a health blog, you will be punished if a link is found in a commerce blog. To prevent your blog from being punished, you should ensure that you post on relevant blogs. This means that if you have a finance blog, you should post on finance related blogs only. For you to brand yourself and drive traffic to your site, you should not only post on related blogs, but you sh...

-- The Power of Kindness -- * by Bruce Star Sometimes you learn the simplest, most powerful lessons of kindness under the most ritual and mundane circumstances. For instance, five days a week, I get up, or I am awakened by my daughter Kenia, to get her ready to go off to school. This morning I asked her as usual what she wanted for breakfast. I would ask if she wanted cereal or oatmeal? She would say... either... oatmeal... or cereal. Her response left me cold. It took a few days for me to realize that the correct and kind response was to say, "I will have cereal dad, thanks!" Or, "I will have oatmeal dad, thanks!" When I asked her to please respond that way, she said she would and did so from that point forward. It wasn't that I was being mean or overly demanding of her. I just knew it made me feel better that if I had to get up earlier than I would like, if she showed a form of appreciation by responding in a way that would lift my spiri...

-- Quote of the Day --  "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,  so as to have the life that is waiting for us. " ~ Joseph Campbell  -- Positive News --  In keeping with yesterday's post about greening cities - I learned recently that upgrades and improvements have been made to an already good recycling system in BC , which earned top honors in Canada for the extended producer Responsibility programs. – find out more at: http://recyclinginbc.ca / … recycling in BC has expanded the # of items they will accept to include things like aerosol containers, milk containers and plant pots. Recycling doesn’t just save energy and resources, and keep our air clean, it also preserves natural spaces through less resource mining, but also create jobs locally through businesses that use the recycled materials to make new products, as well as the recycling and shipping industries. People are getting really ...

 -- Quote of the Day --  "The journey is not about helping ourselves, but about helping others. We do best when we use our own skills to make a positive difference in the lives of others. When we do this, we bring enjoyment, hope and fulfillment to others, but we also find that we enjoy the journey more than we ever could have imagined.”  ~ Dave Lieber  -- Positive News --  In Bejing, subway services now offer passengers the option of paying for their travel through recycling plastic bottles via onsite kiosks.  This is a fantastic way to encourage recycling to go mainstream, to help individuals who struggle financially and to keep the streets clean. Imagine a group of youth who's pockets are empty but they want to go to an event that is too far away to walk to. So they look around them, pick up some litter and take it to the nearest subway station to deposit the bottles in a kiosk and get ...