Dallas is My Home

27
Aug

Group plans to cool down Dallas by planting trees

Author: Raine Devries, Category: "Green" Dallas, Call to Action, Garden, Outdoors

Blazing heat, choking pollution and skyrocketing electric bills. What’s one way to combat all these problems at once? Plant trees.

Trouble is, compared to other large cities, the Dallas area doesn’t have nearly enough.

But a dedicated corps of volunteers stands ready to fulfill a mission that could make life better for us all: plant more trees and cool down our urban oceans of concrete.

They’re training to be “citizen foresters.”

To fully understand the benefits of trees in the city, you have to go where there are no trees in the city. When the outside temperature hits 100 degrees, the temperature on the pavement can hit 120 degrees. But where city streets are lined with trees, the temperature on the pavement can check in at 90 degrees. That’s almost 30 degrees cooler.

But how many trees should be planted? And where?

Other cities around the country have counted trees by hand. But that takes 10 years or more.

Eventually, a high-tech camera will fly over the city and identify the variety, quantity, and location of the city’s trees.

Armed with this information, the army of volunteers will be sent to places like Harry Hines Boulevard, where trees are few and far between.

And the planting can begin.

18
Apr

Ennis Bluebonnet Trails

Author: Raine Devries, Category: Arts, Garden, Kids, Motorcycles, Outdoors, Texas, Travel

It’s going to be a truly spectacular spring weekend in the Dallas area.

Jump on your bike - or for you poor souls that only have a car you can get into that - and head towards Ennis for the annual Ennis Bluebonnet Trails Festival.

You’ll see first hand why this is state flower of Texas!

26
Oct

The Amazing Chocolate Tree at the Dallas Arboretum

Author: Raine Devries, Category: Education, Food, Garden, Kids, Outdoors

In it’s only stop in the Southwest, “The Amazing Chocolate Tree” is on display now through 6 January 2007 at the Dallas Arboretum.

This traveling exhibit follows chocolate from it’s roots as a cacao plant to the final process of candy making. Some of the exhibit highlights include:

There is a fee sample at the end!

17
Aug

Afraid of the Garden

Author: Aron, Category: Garden, Health and Human Services, Outdoors

I’m afraid of my garden.

A more accurate description, I guess, would be that I am afraid of the mosquitoes in my garden. All the rain that we’ve had over the last three months has provided me with a healthy, robust garden in full bloom here in the heat of mid-August, but has enabled tiny blood suckers to create thriving vampiric colonies beneath the wide, shady leaves of my caladiums. I can’t venture out there for even a moment without being set upon by throngs of the vile creatures — my legs and arms riddled with swelling welts.

Earlier this week, Dallas County Health and Human Services announced four new cases of West Nile Virus in four different city zips. You remember West Nile, right? Don’t confuse it with that twenty-four hour East Nile bug.

No, no.

That West Nile will mess you up.

Now, I’m not what you’d call an organic gardener, but I do try to be mindful of the chemicals I put into the world. As such, I don’t normally hit the garden with toxic agents. I’m all about the earthworms and the butterflies. I’ve got lots of birds out there, too. Don’t want to poison them, y’know?

I like birds.

Got no beef with them.

But the ’skeeters?

Them’s gotta die.

I’ve bombed the garden three times this summer.

And they keep coming back.

I’ve got the garden of the living dead out there!

You think holy water might work?