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Lawn Care Education continued...
Newspaper Articles
A series of ten articles was published in the Guardian Newspaper with the following topics: "Introduction to healthy lawn and garden care", "Compost and compost tea", "Ground covers", "Dealing with pests", "Using native plants", "Starting from scratch", "Dealing with weeds", "De-thatching and aeration", "Top-dressing and over-seeding", "Preparing for winter".
This project was sponsored by the PEI Department of the Environment.
Lawn Sign Campaign
The Charlottetown Katimavik group offered to volunteer for the Co-op in August 2010 for one week. Part of their work included offering free lawn signs to residents in the Brighton area. At the same time, they distributed information on pesticide-free lawn care. Reception of the volunteers was very positive, and 90 people were interested in acquiring and displaying the signs and made a suggested donation. Notably, some people who did not use pesticides and were supportive of our work gave a donation but did not wish to display a sign because they did not want to offend their pesticide-using neighbours. This illustrates the power of the "perfect lawn" myth, which condones the use of pesticides to create a perfect lawn and pressures people to use pesticides or pretend to accept pesticide use rather than offending their neighbours.
Community Questions
As a result of the series of articles, and the recent changes to pesticide regulations on PEI, the Co-op has been providing answers to questions from PEI residents about pesticide-free lawn care. Queries have been received since June 2010 and you are encouraged to go to the Ask Us page for any questions you may have regarding lawn and garden care or other topics related to environmental health.