OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it sure feels like it, especially after all the rain we got last night. We even have our first flowers! We are experimenting this year with growing the plants upright by containing each in a large tomato cage instead of using a “fence” to keep them from sprawling all over the raised bed. It seems like only a week ago they were still pretty tiny. Now the leaves have topped the second of four rings. I try to push the leaves back into the cage before they get too big. So far it’s working.

Virtually everything you find on store shelves uses these materials in some form, and yet many of them are unrecyclable either because of their design or because the combination of materials used in their manufacturing makes them difficult to break down. But one company is steadily proving that it’s possible to recycle virtually everything we discard on a daily basis.

Look at the plants closely. If there are discolored leaves, maybe a purple tint, that’s a clue they are not getting what they need, so hit them with some organic fertilizer. There are a couple ways to do that. One is to use a liquid fertilizer like fish emulsion, but I also love a granular type from TerraCycle.

At the Rutgers EcoComplex, a business incubator and sustainability research center in New Jersey, Princeton University students who wanted to be “eco-capitalists” started TerraCycle. They figured out a way to turn college dorm food waste into liquid organic fertilizer by feeding the food scraps to specialty selected worms. The product was such a success it got picked up by Home Depot and Wal-Mart.