Dreamco Crafts, November 29

Are empty jars cluttering your cupboard or recycle bin? Stop by the Green Tent this Sunday for some creative ideas for making your own one-of-a-kind containers for family and friends! 

Learn how to decorate the jars with items you have around the house - magazine pages, colorful papers, book pages and handmade papers. Add ribbons, buttons and more to personalize them. Fill with food, recipes, love notes and anything you can think of. It's a great way to recycle and keep packaging waste out of landfills!

Husband and wife team Richard Hecht and Amy Bauer are Dreameco Crafts - an eco friendly company born out of artistic sensibilities and household discards. They are artists and educators who are teaching the public how to use what they have in their homes to create household items and extend the life of their items to produce less waste. Classes include crafts, sewing and visual arts. Through classes, workshops and free events they turn strangers into neighbors. 

Master Gardeners, November 22

This month the Master Gardeners have planted these veggies for you to take home - along with seed packets - for FREE:

Snap Peas, big juicy pea pods offer melt-in-your-mouth flavor.

Broccoli Raab (Rapini), Italian favorite whose tasty and vitamin-rich shoots, buds and leaves, pack a flavor punch. Try this recipe.

Russian Kale (Wild Garden Frills), especially tender & mild, blue-green crinkly leaves with green or purple ribs.

Italian Kale (Tuscan Baby Leaf), utterly delicious, vitamin rich, fast growing for scrumptious salads & stir fries.

Swiss Rainbow Chard, eye-catching vivid color combo, delicious and also ornamental.

Italian Arugula, easy & fast-growing fresh peppery leaves that shine in salads and sandwiches.

Spinach (Bloomsdale Longstanding), slow to bolt, long harvest, thick crinkled leaves, tender & flavorful, high in vitamins A & C, rich in iron & fiber.

Baby Leaf Lettuce Mix, quick growing, delicious, gourmet flavors, colors & textures.

Cutting Lettuce (Sea of Red), sword-shaped leaves of intense mahogany-red to cut for beautiful salads.

Italian Parsley

Malabar Spinach, a vining leaf with a red stem that originated in the tropics.

Your friendly UCCE/LA County Master Gardeners wants to see what you are growing! If you’ve ever picked up a plant or a packet of seeds from them at the Green Tent, post a picture of them in your garden on social media with the hashtag #mglaseeds so they can follow your progress.

Don’t forget to share your gardening events here and sign up for the email newsletter from Yvonne Savio, retired director of the LA County Master Gardeners. You’ll get great monthly garden tips and interesting articles, too.

And if you’re bugged by pests, check out this invaluable resource for home, farm and garden: UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program.

Remember: drop off your plastic six packs to provide a home for next month’s plants!

LA County Bicycle Coalition, November 15

The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition is this week's Green Tent guest. Stop by to pick up safety guides, bike swag, information on membership and other goodies!

LACBC is a county wide advocacy organization that focuses on three things:

1. Advocacy for better biking infrastructure all throughout LA County

2. Building a grassroots base through organizing community events and rides 

3. Education through their biking skills classes, bike counts and bike safety lights. 

Pulp Pantry and LA Compost, November 8

This Sunday, stop by The Green Tent to learn more about food waste in your home and what you can do to lessen your carbon footprint with a few simple steps. 

Consumer losses are the largest source of food waste in the United States! In Los Angeles alone, we throw out 18 million pounds of food every single day. Each of us can collectively improve our practices to ensure that our Earth's resources don't go to waste. 

Our guests, Pulp Pantry and LA Compost, will shed some light on the basic facts of food waste in our country, share best practices for becoming a local zero food waste rebel, and help you create individual goals that will help us move towards collective action and impact. 

Bring your home compost questions and concerns! LA Compost can help.

If you have a juicer, come prepared to learn! Pulp Pantry specializes in turning juiced vegetables and nuts into delicious vegan and gluten-free snacks, and they'd love to show you some of the awesome creations you can come up with at home. 

Pulp Pantry is rethinking what it means to produce good food with sustainability, local sourcing, and social responsibility as top priorities. They devise safe and efficient collection systems to repurpose excess produce from commercial juiceries into delicious, healthy, gluten-free and vegan products with a mission to challenge food system inequity. They’re creating food that’s good for you and good for our collective environment.

LA Compost's hubs serve as platforms from which to educate and advocate – teaching the importance of composting for soil quality, recognizing the practicality of composting, and serving as a distribution center from which they send compost made on-site into the local community.