Author Archives: RemonaNecaise

9 Easy Garden Plants for Hardworking People

by RemonaNecaise Posted on June 30, 2016

It’s a common dilemma you love the looks of a flourishing garden, but don’t have a lot of time or energy to put into keeping it up. You’re too busy with the demands of job, caretaking, and just plain living. The good news is that gardening can be a lot simpler than you think. It’s mainly a question of choosing the right type of plants. Here are 9 shrubs, flowers, and vegetables that will require minimal care.

Green Plants

Image credit: katerha via Flickr

Shrubs

Busy peopletend to be impatient people, so you may wonder why we mention shrubs. Truth be told, you can find some very fast-growing varieties. Buy small potted shrubs from your local nursery or online to transplant at home. Then the bulk of your work is already done. These plants need little watering once they’re established in their new location, and they deliver so much! In addition to good looks, they double as a green privacy fence. A hedge will also shelter your house from the elements, reducing your need for heating and cooling.

Vines

Vines are another choice which will provide you with both privacyandbeauty. Species such as ivy or clematis grow rapidly and need very little upkeep. They do need something to climb on, but that can actually be one of their virtues, especially if you’re looking to disguise an unattractive chain link fence or brick wall.

Succulents

Succulents are beloved of busy indoor gardeners, due to their appealing appearance, low maintenance, and limited need for water. Now try them outside as well. If you live inHardiness Zone8 or warmer, you can overwinter succulents in your garden. Otherwise, plant them in containers which you can easily bring into the house before the first frost comes along.

Flowers

Image credit: botheredbybees via Flickr

Bulbs

Plant bulbs in the fall and fugeddabout ‘em. Then get ready to enjoy the sweet surprise of blooms early next spring. Daffodils, tulips, iris, or my personal fave, delightfully scented hyacinth (pictured above), are generous plants which take very little care, yet put on a great colorful show. One note: Bulbs used to be replantable but newer varieties should be treated as annuals. Even if they do sprout for another year, they are likely to produce frail and scraggly results.

Perennials(Day Lilies)

If you’re looking for a hardy perennial, the day lily is for you. Unlike true lilies, day lilies grow from roots rather than bulbs. Available in a wide range of charming colors as well as the traditional orange — they thrive almost anywhere in the US (Zones 3-11). Wet soil, dry soil, even the salty soil in your beach house garden not much fazes the vibrant day lily. Another plus: Many varieties are a favorite perch forhummingbirdsand butterflies.

Annuals (Marigolds)

Growing marigolds is child’s play literally. These bright and cheerful quick-growing annuals are a perfect choice for your kids’ early experiments in gardening. Marigolds offer bright yellow, copper, and russet blossoms, and can reach a height of anywhere from 6 inches to an impressive 5 feet tall in a single season.

Edibles

Image credit: blurdom via Flickr

Herbs

Whether you have substantial yard space or 2 or 3 little pots perched on your balcony rail, herbs are simple to grow, yet very rewarding. Snip a few leaves to add zest to that super speedy 15-minute dinner recipe. You’ll save time (and money) on shopping for seasonings, and your homegrown herbs are guaranteedorganic.

Garlic

Garlic is a snap to grow. You don’t even need to shop for seeds. Just break off a few healthy, good-sized cloves and pop them in the ground. Cut the scapes (garlic shoots) in the spring to steam as a delicately flavored vegetable, and leave the garlic bulbs to pick in July and August.

Related: How to Grow and Harvest Garlic

Zucchini

Zucchini has a well-deserved rep as the easiest vegetable ever. In fact, your main problem will be figuring out what to do with your bumper harvest. Maybe send out invites for a zucchini-picking block party?

By Laura Firszt,Networx.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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9 Easy Garden Plants for Hardworking People

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Watch a US Senator Cite the Bible to Prove That Humans Aren’t Causing Global Warming

by RemonaNecaise Posted on January 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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To understand the craziness that just went down on the floor of the US Senate, you first have to understand the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. It’s pretty simple, actually: The planet is getting warmer, largely because humans are releasing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. Or, as the world’s leading climate scientists put it in a recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and it’s “extremely likely”—that is, at least 95 percent certain—”that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

These are well established scientific facts, but congressional Republicans have had a hard time accepting them. So on Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), sought to put his colleagues on record by having them vote on a simple measure declaring it the sense of the Senate that “climate change is real and not a hoax.”

When Whitehouse first introduced this amendment a couple days ago, he made clear that by “climate change,” he was referring to “what our carbon pollution…is doing to our atmosphere and what it is doing to our oceans.” But the amendment didn’t literally say that, and the Senate’s most outspoken climate science denier saw this as an opportunity. James Inhofe—an Oklahoma Republican who has previously pointed to the Bible as evidence that human-caused global warming is a hoax—urged his fellow senators to support the amendment.

Addressing his Senate colleagues before the vote, Inhofe once again cited the Bible to argue that the climate does indeed change but that humans aren’t the cause. “Climate is changing, and climate has always changed,” said Inhofe, who chairs the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. “There’s archeological evidence of that. There’s biblical evidence of that. There’s historic evidence of that.” He continued: “The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful, they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.” You can watch the back-and-forth above.

And with that, every Republican except Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), voted “aye.” The amendment passed 98-1, and the Senate was on record agreeing to the obvious fact that climate change sometimes occurs.

But they weren’t done. Next, Republicans brought up their own climate amendment, which stated that climate change is indeed “real” and that human activity “contributes” to it. This amendment got 59 votes (one short of the 60-vote threshold for passage), but just 15 of the chamber’s 54 Republicans supported it.

And of course, the scientific consensus isn’t merely that human activity “contributes” to climate change. Rather, scientists say that humans are the “dominant cause” of the recent warming. That was the subject of a third amendment, from Democrat Brian Schatz (Hawaii), which stated that human activity “significantly contributes” to climate change. That was too much for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who objected specifically to the word “significantly.” Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, urged her colleagues to vote no. In the end, Schatz’s amendment received just 50 votes, and only five of those came from Republicans.

On Thursday morning, the Senate began discussing yet another amendment, from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). This one declares that climate change is real, that it is caused by human activity, that it’s already causing significant problems, and that it is “imperative” that we actually do something about it—specifically, that we transition our economy away from fossil fuels. We’ll see how many GOP votes that one gets.

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Watch a US Senator Cite the Bible to Prove That Humans Aren’t Causing Global Warming

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

by RemonaNecaise Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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We’re hearing more and more about our pending global El Niño. NOAA now says the odds are 70 percent that we’ll have an El Niño event develop by this summer, and even higher after that. Other experts put the odds higher still. What’s more, the ocean and atmosphere have recently been behaving in a rather El Niño-like manner: Record-breaking Hurricane Amanda recently formed in the northeastern Pacific basin, which tends to be a very active hurricane region in El Niño years.

El Niño, if it develops, will upend everybody’s weather—but it may also have another impact: Driving up global temperatures. El Niño, after all, is a global weather phenomenon whose most notable characteristic is the presence of extra-warm surface water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ocean. This tends to unlock greater average global temperatures, notes Joseph Romm of Climate Progress.

Or as climate expert Michael Mann of Penn State helpfully explained by email: “Global temperature variations can be thought of as waves on a rising tide. The rising tide is global warming, which has raised global temperatures nearly a degree C (1.5 F) over the past century. The waves are the shorter-term natural fluctuations related to phenomena like El Niño (or its flip-side, La Niña), which warm (or cool) the globe, respectively, by 0.1-0.2C.”

Here’s a figure, from the World Meteorological Organization, showing global temperature anomalies since 1950, with years that began with an El Niño event already active highlighted in red. As you can see, these are some of the warmest years:

Global temperature anomalies from 1950-2013, with years beginning with El Niño conditions in red, and years beginning with La Niña conditions in blue. Note: some years may have had El Niño conditions develop mid-year, and so would not be colored. World Meteorological Organization.

What’s more, even before the recent news about the likely development of El Niño conditions, climate experts saw a chance for 2014 to be a record temperature year, simply because temperatures continue to tick upwards. “I would have said likely top 5 if asked at the beginning of this year,” says Gavin Schmidt, the newly named director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the leading scientific agencies that tracks global temperatures and ranks them by year. “And the incipient/potential El Niño strengthens that.”

“We saw record global temperatures in 1998, 2005, and again in 2010 when ongoing global warming was positively reinforced by El Niño events,” adds Mann. “There is a good chance we will see a global temperature record this year or next if a substantial El Niño event takes hold.”

That’s bad news for climate skeptics. After all, by now we’ve all heard the claim that global warming has “stopped” or is “slowing down.”

As we’ve explained before, this misleading assertion relies heavily on the fact that the year 1998 was a very, very warm year, due to a strong El Niño event. If you cherry-pick the beginning of your time series, and start with a very hot year, you can make it look as though global temperatures aren’t rising so fast. But the reality is that, as the World Meteorological Organization notes, “each of the last three decades has been warmer than the previous one, culminating with 2001-2010 as the warmest decade on record.”

But as soon as the globe sets another temperature record, the global warming “slowdown” talking point becomes a lot less compelling. At that point, climate skeptics will have a few options: Either they can finally accept the overwhelming body of evidence that global warming is real, or they can come up with a new cherry-picked counter argument. Want to guess which one they’ll choose?

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

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