Citywide Earth Day Celebration April 1

April 1, 2006
Great American Clean Up
9 – 11:30 a.m.
We invite you to help Greensboro Beautiful give the City a spring cleaning as part of the Great American Cleanup. Please volunteer to join your friends and neighbors, cleaning up our neighborhoods, roadsides, parks, and other littered areas. Contact Lynne Leonard at 373-2957, or Lynne.Leonard@greensboro-nc.gov to participate.

April 1, 2006
Greensboro City Celebration of Earth Day
Kathleen Clay Edwards Library
12 – 5:00 p.m.
Bring your litter-free picnic lunch, and enjoy a fun-filled day learning about our environment at Kathleen Clay Edwards Library, on Price Park Drive, behind Jefferson Elementary School. To exhibit, or for more information, contact Yvonne Foust at 373-2053 or fousty@greensboro-nc.gov, or Melanie Buckingham at 373-2923 or Melanie.buckingham@greensboro-nc.gov.

Prizes will be awarded for the first one-hundred displayed litter-free picnic lunches…Get Creative, you can Eat it All!

From Noon to 1pm, Have your litter-free picnic lunch while you enjoy music with local bands, gospel music and Radio Disney.

From 1p.m. – 5 p.m., Enjoy and learn from interactive exhibits, art, guided hikes and garden tours. Visit the Master Gardener Learning Station. Kids can enjoy nature crafts, live animals and face painting. Explore hybrid and alternative vehicles, teen challenge events, solar exhibits, food samples, Geocaching, hayrides, orienteering and much more.

Slow Food will have a information table. Slow Food members, please contact Laurie by email if you would like to volunteer to staff the table for an hour or so.

Shiitake Inoculation at Handance Farm

Saturday I drove out to Handance Farm in Rockingham County for their Mushroom Inoculation and Work Day. By the time I got there, much of the work had been done. The major task at hand was to help Pat and Brian Bush inoculate freshly cut logs with shiitake mushroom spawn. The first step is to drill holes all over the log. That’s Brian in the middle.

The log is passed to the next team of two, who fill specially made plungers with shiitake spawn and press the spawn into the holes.

Then the holes and all other cut surfaces are painted with cheese wax to prevent them from being contaminated with other fungi (and critters). An identifying tag is nailed to the end, and it is stacked in a pile.

Here’s how they stacked last year’s logs. The mushroom farm (Dark Hollow, who moved) that Sandy and I went to last year made a mushroom house out of the logs -it seemed like a perfect place for a hobbit.