My GREEN Life & Real Estate

4 days ago (on Sunday) we decided it was time to look into replacing our old but very trusted Toyota Corolla.  We'd surpassed the 200,000 mile mark on the odometer, and that dear car had been nothing but good to us, but it was time.  Instead of putting more money into repairs it was going to need, we decided to go shopping. It was at our 4th dealership that hubby came practically running back to the car where I sat with the children who were tired of car shopping in the freezing cold, and gasped something along the lines of, "You have to come in the showroom.  I've just found our new car!" There it was.  A 2011 previously-owned but hardly used, fully-loaded and looking brand-new Nissan Leaf .  (You know, the fully electric car.  I wrote about it back in 2010.  Funny that this one was the same shade of blue as the one I pictured here on the blog!)  It even had solar panels on the spoiler.  We were instantly smitten.  Seriously, we were making goo-goo eyes at th

Although I don't plan to put in a big garden this year since I won't be home to maintain it for a while, I can't help but do the same thing my fellow gardeners are all doing right now.... reading seed catalogs and gardening books!  (I'm aware that there's a big question mark out there as to whether or not I'll return to the garden after finding snakes in my garden last summer.  I know they're not a bad thing to have, but my irrational fear of them led me to abandon the garden for a while.) It used to be that I didn't give all that much thought to the seeds I choose, but I knew they had to be either: organic or not genetically-modified, and that they be appropriate for my microclimate.  Unless I'm growing from seed, I can't always know for sure that the plants I buy from my local nurseries meet these criteria... especially the GMO part.  Actually, unless I know where those seeds are coming from, I still don't know if they're GMOs.  (A