For all of you who do not know, Project Appleseed is a project that we at Greener Thinking started as a test to see how well we could do on our own to help the environment. Many people would say we failed… but we are not ones who quit!

First we ordered some pines through the Arbor Day foundation but found that even though our site says we are green we found our thumbs were not. These pines took an ugly turn for the worse and soon were naked and without needle.

Next we tried to expand and start from the beginning while also keeping in touch with our original name for the project (Project Appleseed). So I planted two apple trees one was a Fuji and the other was a Gala. Everything seemed to go well. Until, one day I noticed that the Fuji did not approve of the love it was given and decided to lose all of its leaves. Luckily the Gala held strong and grew like a champ. Its now about eight inches tall and looking a little funny with its leaf placement.

Along the way I also started to grow a Pineapple… still has the word apple in it right? To do this I took off the top of a pineapple and planted it. This is growing pretty well too but, I don’t think it will ever make the transfer to the great outdoors. They aren’t really fans of Michigan winters.

This just proves that no matter how bad you are you can grow at least a couple of things. Below I have some pictures so you can see our progress.

As stated plenty of times before, Greener Thinking has been designed to help people save the environment while also making money. It finally looks as though a city is putting the pieces together to make a concept that will change how people think. Boston is taking on two challenges, waste management and energy production, and it is hoping to come out on top financially. 

Many people know that compost can create heat through the decomposition of the organic materials. Many people also know that this same process gives off methane. Few people have ever tried to harness these unique characteristics and also make money with it. Boston is developing the idea to use this energy to their advantage, creating electricity and heating buildings. They will also be able to sell the resulting fertilizer for a profit. Another great advantage to this plan is the new job market it will create. Boston says that this will create new jobs that include microbiologists and soil chemists. 

This new business of turning garbage into green gold will bring jobs, produce electricity, and make money. Once Boston embarks on this new adventure and others cities start to see the results I am sure they will find that its actually very easy being green. 

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National Public Radio

As I’m sitting here watching an interesting show on The History Channel called Journey to 10,000 B.C., I notice there is a new show that they keep showing commercials for. You can tell they are really trying to push it since there is an ad for it every few minutes. Heck, they even have a little countdown in the upper-left corner of the screen letting you know how long is left until the premiere of this new series. So, what is this amazing new series so groundbreaking they don’t want anyone to miss? Ax-Men… Yes, you read that right, and no, it’s not a typo… Ax-Men. And no, it’s not about a group of super-hero mutants with a bald guy in a wheel chair and another guy with retractable-blades in his hands. It’s actually a show about everyday, average guys that go around cutting down trees. I mean, I haven’t heard about a show that sounds this exciting since “Ice Road Truckers” first aired (c’mon, what’s not exciting about guys that drive around in trucks all day?!?). I can’t really imagine what could make this Ax-Men show worth watching, so I hope The History Channel doesn’t have too much riding on its success. However, it isn’t the ridiculousness of the show that really bothers me, but how the commercials presented these “Ax-Men”. The impression I got from the ads was that they want to portray these men as heroes that we should all respect or something. I mean, if they wanted to do a show about men in the U.S. military and their daily struggles, I can understand and appreciate that (not to mention it would seem a lot more watchable), but I can’t see how they expect, with everything that is currently going on in the world, people to see these loggers as heroes. I’m sure we all do still use products made from paper on a daily basis, but that doesn’t make it ok or entertaining to see the trees cut down. I’ll admit, I have not yet seen the show, but I am very surprised that The History Channel is even putting a show like this on the air. 

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The History Channel 
Ax-Men 
Ice Road Truckers

It has been quite a while since I told you about our “Project Appleseed.” Well we ran into a little trouble. We ordered the pines on September 15th as promised, but our trees did not like us. We tried to plant them in a pot so that we could plant them in the ground later. Well they did not take to well to the pot… and I am afraid that they are no more. 

We tried our hardest to keep them from death, but they did not take to well to CPR. I mean I do not even know where to breathe. On top of that every time you try to do chest compressions you just get pine needles in your hand. Not all that fun. 

But as a side project I had been trying to create the actual namesake for “Project Appleseed.” I was working in secret to create some apple trees from scratch. Yep, I planted some seeds and now they are getting along pretty well. I started them out in the classic black plastic nine hole pot type thing that you get when you buy your flowers for your garden and now I transplanted them into real pots. Soon they will be able to hold their own and I will plant them outside. “Project Appleseed” will live on. 

The two different apple trees that I have growing were planted from one Fuji seed and one Breburn. They were stubborn little seeds though. It took about 6 seeds to get two trees. I have been also trying to get some Concord Grape seeds to grow also with no luck. 

So to clarify, we are still working on “Project Appleseed” but we had a minor setback and we will be continuing the project soon. I need to get the apple trees to a state that they will be all right on their own and also wait for the weather to get a little warmer. Michigan is pretty cold as of late, currently 23 degrees fahrenheit. 

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Hope you had a fantastic and relaxing Thanksgiving Day. While enjoying my turkey day something crazy happened! I saw a commercial! Yeah, that’s not the crazy part. The content of the commercial was what made me look at the T.V. with my head cocked to the side with a confused look the same way your dog does when it hears something odd. 

This commercial went completely against my logic. It claimed that the 50% of power plants in the USA are powered by coal. But still this did not surprise me. I knew this is a problem that we were trying to solve by moving away from coal. After all coal is one of the dirtiest forms of power and the destruction that mining coal causes nature can be extreme. extreme. But here is the kicker, this commercial said that coal is the clean alternative. 

It is true that there has been much advancement in coal power, decreasing emissions. There is still a tremendous amount of power plants that do not use these efficiencies. Another thing they are saying is that they “contain” carbon dioxide emissions and store them. We can only sweep our problems under the rug for so long, but one day we will need to shake the rug some day and will find a mountain of problems that we cannot control. 

What should be done cannot easily be defined as picking one fossil fuel over the other. We need to find clean renewable energy such as solar or wind or the combination of both if we want to save the planet. The new efficiencies should be applied to current coal power plants, but we should not keep investing more and more money into non-renewable resources. The individual has to become self-reliant. We need to find a source of power that does not require us to burn something! 

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Clean Coal Commercial 
Coal Strip Mining 
America’s Power 
Business Week

Have you ever seen those videos of tornadoes destroying everything in their path on The Weather Channel? You know, the ones where you’re wondering how it is that the person is actually able to stand there and continue videotaping it when all logic says they should be ducking for cover in their basement… Well, have you ever thought of how much energy could be generated by these massive forces of nature if we only had a way of harnessing it? One man did, and he has set his sights on doing just that. Louis Michaud of Canada has come up with an idea to generate a man-made tornado in a controlled environment. This tornado would be then used to generate massive amounts of energy that could power nearby homes. This idea is still in early conceptual stages, but Michaud is a long way from where he began with experiments in his garage. He has received interest from many scientists all over the country with his idea and plans to demo a much larger version soon. Who knows, maybe someday in the future, we’ll all be getting our power from these feared towers of destruction. 

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The Weather Channel