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7th Gen Blog

The latest news, food for thought, recipes you’ll love, great advice on everything from raising kids to nurturing bees, plus videos designed to entertain, educate and enlighten. If you’d like to find out what’s on our mind – or let us know what’s on yours -- this is place to be.

Greening Your Cleaning Crew

Author: RealMomofNJ
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I have a confession. I have a weekly cleaning crew clean my house. I have another confession. They're not green.
 

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Foods We Love: Strawberries

Author: LisaFerber
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Strawberries seem to light up any table. They were heralded as a symbol of wealth and well-being during the medieval ages, making them extremely popular. French nobility were known to bathe in strawberries, and the fruit is still used today to soothe certain skin ailments. The Seneca Indians associated the sweet red treat with spring and rebirth as it was the first fruit of the season.

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Foods We Love: Blueberries

Author: LisaFerber
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Here we are in the heat of summer, the perfect time to pick a batch of fresh blueberries! Blueberries have the distinction of being one of the only fruits that originated in North America. The Native Americans ate it mashed into meat as a form of jerky, and also used it for medicinal purposes and as a fabric dye.

Maine, the state famous for its blueberries, is also the place where the blueberry rake was invented in 1822 by Abijuh Tabbutt, which freed blueberry pickers from plucking each berry by hand.

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Get the Scoop on TSCA

Author: greenwrite
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Last week, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works stood up for protecting public health and making chemicals kid-safe by passing the Safe Chemicals Act out of committee -- an important first step in fixing our nation's broken chemical policy.

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Close Quarters With Honey Bees

Author: SarahT
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“By the way, we have about 8,000 honey bees in our living room.”

As conversation-starters go, this is one of our better ones. And it’s true – we do have about 8,000 honey bees in our living room – give or take 1,000. Thankfully they are all very safely contained, with a clear path directly to the out-of-doors.

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Foods We Love: Watermelon

Author: LisaFerber
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Watermelon is a fruit that absolutely defines the summer. Every picnic, barbecue, or garden party seems to offer up the brightly colored juicy melon. And while it always feels so new and fresh, this member of the cucurbitaceae family has been with us a long time. It is reputed to have been cultivated more than 4,000 years ago by the ancient Egyptians, and there are even reports of its seeds being found in the tomb of King Tut. From Africa, it made its way to the Mediterranean, then on to India and China, leading to China’s now being the world’s greatest producer of watermelon.

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Diapering Confession

Author: RealMomofNJ
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Even before having children, I loved the idea of cloth diapering. Particularly the whole not-adding-more-trash-and-chemicals-to-landfills idea. I vowed to use cloth diapers for my future children to help the planet by not generating unnecessary garbage. When the time eventually came and I was expecting, I boned up on my cloth diaper knowledge, stocked up on the materials, and waited for the baby.

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Can Women Have it All?

Author: sheila hollender
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In a recent article, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman Director of Policy Planning at the State Department in the Obama administration, argues that it's time we stopped fooling ourselves that women who have managed to be both mothers and top professional are superhuman, rich or self-employed. 

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Toxic Gardening Tools Are a Growing Problem

Author: the Inkslinger
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For most of us, the household garden is an epicenter of our attempt to live a greener life and one of the few places where the only invited guest is nature itself. The things we grow there are the purest and safest possible. The trouble is, the things we use to grow them often are not.

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Founding Father Feted

Author: the Inkslinger
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Just before the Fourth of July, while the country steeped in memories of its birth and recalled the rebels who midwifed not just a new nation but a new way of thinking about such things, one of Seventh Generation's founding fathers was singled out for his own historic efforts. And it's an honor our former longtime leader has more than earned.

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