Feed the trees

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Is it an editor’s note? Is it a blog entry? Where does the computer and paper end and the internet world begin? Is there really any difference? Well, if it doesn’t appear at the Sacred Cow Meatpacking Company, it’s not my blog.

Anyway, I’m interested in this concept of carbon offsetting. I want to live as guilt-free as the next guy, so I’ve been looking for places in my yard to plant fruit trees. I figure I’ll get double bonuses for fruit trees because they also decrease the amount of gasoline I use to get food. Eat locally, all that. So I went to Carbonify.com (www.carbonify.com/carbon-calculator.htm) to figure out exactly how many trees I’d need to plant to feel less guilt about messing up the planet. The calculator suggests I emit 19.72 tons of carbon dioxide a year, and that means I need to plant 98.6 trees a year just to stay even. Maybe I can drive less to the tree store.

I guess I’ll have to rethink my plan. Maybe my huge expanse of green-grass lawn will offset that a little. I ended up planting a cherry tree and an apple tree. I’m probably going to add in a peach tree, if I can find the variety I want, and then there’s room for one and maybe two more. The problem with my yard is the new trees have to go on the perimeter, and I don’t want to dump a bunch of fruit on my neighbors, who may not share my passion for feeding the birds, the compost pile, the family and the planet’s atmosphere.

Along other lines, what are they doing selling bare-root Weeping Willows at Wal-Mart? I guess I could be mistaken, but I thought those trees were illegal in city limits. Wouldn’t be like Wal-Mart to actually care about local issues like water conservation, would it?