In the absence of a Great Big Thing to Write About this month, I offer the following items:

• Marsha Low, our devoted Eco Tip correspondent, did my heart good when she promoted the value of natural (a/k/a “lazy”) gardening. Let your herbs go to seed and they’ll come back the following year, she wrote. Leave your dead flowers and seed heads for food for the birds over winter. So while my neighbors line up their yard waste bags every weekend, I’ll fill a bag every now and then and feel less guilty — until spring approaches and I’m scrambling to make room so I can plant. Thanks, Marsha — honest.
• Be sure to allot some of your Shuttle reading time to Beth Starrantino’s page one story on Reading Terminal Market General Manager Anuj Gupta, who’s in partnership with our farms to use some of their greens and cucumbers in the salads available at his other venture, Jyoti Indian Bistro in Mt. Airy. Gupta’s parents started Jyoti Natural Foods, a line of shelf-stable vegan and vegetarian Indian foods, when he was a boy, and the Co-op was one of the first outlets that wasn’t a South Asian market to carry them. It’s a wonderful piece on interconnectedness across generations. As Farm Manager Nina Berryman puts it, “It’s such a neat full circle…we have this little microeconomic circle of really keeping our dollars local.”
• Lastly, this skittered across my screen from New Hope Network: the Pledge Against Plastic shared among attendees at the Influencer Summit at Natural Products Expo East that took place in Baltimore in mid September. It lists such items as requesting drinks without straws, refraining from buying takeout coffee unless it’s in a refillable mug, and getting takeout without single-use condiments or cutlery. Some I do, others I need to work on. The link include this warning: By the year 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Yipe. Take the pledge here.

Catch you in the pages next month.