The latest eat in magazine is now on the shelf and worth laying your hands on to drool over the winning foods that include Earthshine's range of Kale Chips (innovation award), Croft Chickens (best organic or free-range producer), Oude Bank Bakkery (best small producer: Bakery) and Boon Hill Salad Leaves (best small producer: Earth).

This edition is labelled the ultimate green shopping guide and lists farmers' markets, organic vegetables, sustainable seafood and free-range beef etc.

It also has a section on shopping ethically in SA, where urban sprout makes it to the list of websites to visit to stay in the green! (good to know we're still well regarded out there)

Get your copy at a stockist near you.

Dear Friends,

Across the planet now we see ever more flood, ever more drought, ever more storms. People are dying, communities are being wrecked — the impacts we’re already witnessing from climate change are unlike anything we have seen before.

But because the globe is so big, it’s hard for most people to see that it’s all connected. That’s why, on May 5, we will Connect the Dots.

Travelling up to the Harmonic Resonance party to help promote my mums event The Little Green Gathering , we discovered many hidden treasures amongst the otherwise isolatingly spacious and overgrown landscapes of the Garden Route.

Wild Sprit lodge& backpackers (photograph by Julan Briant)

Friday Night:

After a long-winded and rather dramatic 6-hour ride in the dark and rain, we arrive at our friend's off-the-grid home, greeted mercifully by a cup of Organic hot cocoa. This is the kind of house where you take a flashlight to the loo and have to stand in a certain place in the lounge to receive any morsel of cellular phone reception. I slept like a baby.

Saturday:

Probably the most important reason for lowering our impact on ecological systems is to try and reduce the rate of extinctions of species. We rely entirely on the eco-system services which our planet provides us for survival – water, energy, food.

A planet with reduced diversity is an unhealthy and unstable one. If our range of foods becomes too small, there is more risk of disease. We need wild diversity to survive.

What is sustainable living? It is reducing human impact on the ecologicalsystems of the planet, starting with one human in particular – you. As consumers we need to slow down, stop shopping and start living...

Last year we planted 1324 trees at the Greenpop Reforest Fest and this year, we're hoping for more. Come and be part of this awesome event!

The Platbos forest is an ancient South African forest jewel and we need to protect it. Over the past decades it has been deforested for agriculture and now is under threat of fire as alien vegetation has taken over substantially. Platbos reforestation project aims to ultimately grow the forest back to its original size and splendor.

GROW AND SUSTAIN THE SOIL. 2012. Mixed media on paper. 900mm x 640mm.

GIFT A TREE and stand the chance to win this artwork!

Buy a tree or two for Greenpop's TREES FOR ZAMBIA project and you stand the chance to win this original artwork of a tree.

Yes, we can have clear, gorgeous swimming pools without it costing nature!

Natural systems can keep pool water clear!

Jenny Louw’s beautiful, bio-diverse swimming pool is a wonder to look at. Like a natural lake it lies transparent amongst the rushes and reeds, home to many garden creatures.

Unlike chlorine pools, natural swimming pools work with the nature around them. They require no chemicals whatsoever and a quarter of the amount of electricity needed for normal swimming pools.

Two years ago, the Dutch government donated a unique toilet unit to the small community of Pook se Bos. We go to check it out...

After following a technology breadcrumb trail, (getting lost along the way) we found ourselves in the middle of a baking hot Athlone. My contact was nowhere to be seen, and I foolishly had not jotted down his number. After several seconds of unsuccessful phone web searches, I jumped from the car and strode up to one of the locals sitting outside their rickety home, surpassing an aggravated dog as I did so.

'Hi there. Can you please tell me where the toilets are? The blues ones?,' I gestured.

Bolo'Bolo , the new vegan restaurant open on Palmer Road, is more than your average eatery...

Bolo Bolo interior contains an air of effortless style

Palmer Road’s vegan restaurant has just changed hands and its new name, Bolo’Bolo, makes reference to a anthropological joke - the fictional name given to societies that don’t follow normal cultural patterns. Proud new owner Aragorn has experience in this type of business before, having opened and ran South Africa’s first vegan restaurant ‘Earth2’ while he was still living in Johannesburg some years ago.