Rube had such a lot of fun at the Earth Day Fair in Forest Hills last Saturday. It was a

Rubie at the PS 101 Earth Day Fair in Forest Hills

lovely day, bright and sunny but not too hot. The Earth Day Fair was in the schoolyard of PS 101 and the crowds started rolling up around noon. There were lots of people interested in recycling who took Rubie’s recycling quiz and everyone had fun learning about where they could recycle things that the city doesn’t take back. Rubie met such nice students and parents who liked recycling and doing other cool green stuff. And Rubie says a big Hi to everyone, especially the girls who share Rubie’s opinion of the importance of math homework!

There were a lot of great activities at the fair, including a performance of Earth Day

Rubie with her friend Tonia from ItsMyB.com

songs from the school choir, which was lovely.  And Rubie made some new friends! Here’s a picture of Rubie with her new friend Tonia from ItsMyB.com — you can read more about the green products she’s come up with, like the garment bag/laundry hamper in the picture, at https://itsmyb.com/AboutUs.html  Rubie also was pleased to her her friends from the  Queens Botanical Garden Compost Project were at the Fair. They brought some worms with the, who were a big hit with the fair attendees! After all, who doesn’t love a nice wiggly worm? And if you want to make compost, worms are really helpful.

Rubie stopped by to say Hi to the folks at Friends of The QueensWay, some people  who want to mkae a beautiful 3.5 mile path  through Rego Park, Forest Hills, Woodhaven, Richmond Hill and Ozone Park out of the  Long Island Railroad Rockaway Beach Branch right-of-way, which no one is using now. You can read more about their plan at http://about.me/QueensWay

And Rubie also made some new friends at the Department of Environmental Protection, who do really great work teaching New Yorkers about important things like how to save water. You can read more about what they do at http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/home/home.shtml

Rubie with her friends from DEP

Tomorrow Rubie is off to one more Earth Day fair–she’ll report back next week. She’ll be tweeting from the event, though, so if you’re on Twitter, you can follow her there, she is @RubieRecycles

Have a nice green Sunday, everybody. Be happy!

So here are  15 tips from Rubie for simple things you can do to help the earth:

1. Put food scraps in the freezer. If you live near a Greenmarket, you can probably bring food there to compost it. But to stop it getting smelly, keep the scraps in the freezer until you’re ready.
2. When you’re buying food, look for the food that has the least amount of packaging, so you won’t have to throw so much out. If the squash comes in a styrofoam tray, go to another store that sells squash with packaging.
3.  Bring a cloth bag to the supermarket with you. You can recycle plastic bags in New York City now, which Rubie thinks is great. But it’s better not to make so many plastic bags in the first place! If everyone brought a reusable bag to the supermarket, we wouldn’t need so many plastic ones.
4. Make your own holiday cards instead of buying them from the store. Rubie’s Twitter friend @redmudnessa makes Halloween cards from brown paper bags, makes the envelopes too and decorates them with stamps and ribbon. Doesn’t that sound cool?
5. Plant a tree! Trees give us oxygen and shade and really help the earth every day. If you have a yard, you can plant your own tree. If there isn’t a tree outside your building, you can ask the city to plant one. Contact Million Trees NYC for more information.
6. And water a tree! Trees often don’t get enough water in the summer when it’s hot, so it’s a very helpful thing to water them. If it’s too far from your house or building to run a hose, you may have to get creative. Rubie’s friend Christie fills a shopping cart with old milk jugs filled with water when she goes out to water trees on the block.
7. Get on your bike-or take a bus or the subway. If people drive cars a little bit less, that saves fossil fuels and helps the earth.
8. Take stuff home with you. If you see something being thrown out when you know it could be recycled, take it home and put it in your own recycling bin. Another friend of Rubie’s takes home paper from the place she works in to make sure it gets recycled properly.
9. Turn off the lights whenever you are not in the room. This sounds like a really simple thing but it helps a lot. When it comes to appliances, Rubie’s friend @redmudnessa recommends unplugging things when you are not using them, or plugging them into a power strip with an on-off switch.
10. If you’re going out for the day, make sure you bring a water bottle with you that you can fill with tap water. New York City tap water is great and as long as you can drink it, you don’t need to buy bottles of water.
11. Plan a swap meet. If you have things you don’t need any more, get together with friends and exchange clothes, books, CD’s and anything else you like.
12. If you have a garden, you can help butterflies by planting flowers and plants that they like and feed from. Lilacs, coneflower and butterfly bushes are just a few of lots of plants that you can use. Even if you only have a balcony, you can still have plants in pots out there.
13. Collect pennies that you find and put them in a jar. You can take them to the bank, exchange them for dollar, and buy supplies to do green stuff.
14. Another  tip from @redmudnessa: if tubes of things like toothpaste have stuff left in the end of the tube, cut it open and get the most of things before you throw them.
15. Start a Green Club with your friends! You can do activities together–that’s always more fun. And exchange ideas and green tips.

Do you have favorite green things that you like to do? Tell Rubie about them and she will be put them on the list.

Have a great Earth Day everyone. Be happy!

The first picture below, is of a tree in our backgarden. You cannot really tell from this picture but the tree has died. But it doesn’t mean it is useless because as you can see life still goes on because of it – leaves grow around it and it provides a home for many other forms of life.

The second picture is of the woodlice who feed off our waste – showing just because we no longer want it does not mean it has no use any more. This is the inside of our compost bin – a very exciting place and it will be much easier to find woodlice when we come to chamber experiments.

You may remember that whilst teaching my son the alphabet we planted some carrots – this is how they are getting on.

Then we decided to reuse some old plastic food pots that we had washed up to collect some painting instruments (my 4 year old giggled every time I called them this). I told them which leaves were okay to pick from our backgarden (“weeds”) and which weren’t. Dandelions proved the most popular as the heads made nice circles and the stems enable good straight lines. We used red, blue, green and yellow paint and had fun mixing the colours to see what happened. Even my 8 year old joined in and painted a traffic light.

You can pledge your act of Green here.

Ideas may include:

Ladies why not cut down on waste and save yourself some money and less hassle by buying a Mooncup – read about my experiences here.

Why not try and recycle more by having recycling bins around your house and reduce the size of your landfill bin so you don’t use it as much.

Start composting.