Fueled by earl grey tea (but don’t worry – NO TEA NEAR THE BOARD!), we had a very busy, very green diva show this week. Somehow, between having our wonderful Green Diva Jamie back in the studio, and Green Diva Gina sitting on mic, GD correspondent Nomi’s awesome report, guest Green Dude Seth Leitman’s report from the NY Auto Show, our fun special segment on earl grey tea, and our wonderful feature guest, Betsy Escandon (aka Betsy Eco-Novice), GD Mizar managed to pull apart some wire from something and fashion it into a sweet little flower, which she handed me during the show. That girl never stops up cycling and creating!

Green Diva Correspondent: Nomi Lyonns reporting on early spring gardening and creating local currency

Nomi calls in from Salt Spring Island, Canada (near Vancouver). She’s very busy greening up the island and aside from getting her own seedlings going, she offered some advice for GD Meg about putting out some of her seedlings that are ready before the frost warning is over.

Nomi’s been involved in Transition US, which is all about transitioning towns into more sustainable communities. Obviously they have a Canadian branch. She heard Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition US talk recently, and her community on Salt Spring Island is now creating their own currency to help stimulate local economy. We LOVED this idea and mentioned that this was done in the Berkshires a few years back by creating BerkShares.

When Nomi isn’t busy being a green diva, or gardening, or transitioning her community, or teaching yoga in her studio Paradise Found, she is an Eco Diva and does some fabulous cabaret shows. 

Green Dude Segment: Guest GDude Seth Leitman on Green Cars

Seth is a very busy green dude, who is known as the Green Living Guy. He blogs (and tweets a LOT), does a radio show, and has written 8 books with more on the way! He squeezed us in after the NY Auto Show to talk about one his favorite topics – green cars. One of his latest books is, Build Your Own Electric Vehicle.

Listen to this fun Green Dude Segment featuring Seth Leitman

Special Green Diva Foodie Segment: Where does that early grey tea come from?

Tea is one of those commodities that should be subject to Fair Trade standards and in my humble opinion should be organic and non-GMO as well — for the enjoyment and health of the tea drinker as well as those who work on the farms, which are often in faraway places where the potential for unsafe and unfair practices has been common.

It was in my afternoon early grey haze that I pondered the journey this tea made to my pantry and while I knew the brand I was drinking was all of the above (fair trade, organic, non-GMO), I wondered about how some of the other popular earl grey brands would compare . . . ooooo! An idea?

GD Mizar, Gina and I decided to each do some research on one popular brand and see what we could come up with. Because there are literally THOUSANDS of types of tea, from white to green to black to red and too many herbal and flavor combinations to try to categorize, we decided to just focus on one type of tea. As I was writing this, one additional company, which is worthy of a mention got my attention with a timely press release, so there will be 4 brands featured.

• A lot more to this article! Please read the rest of this GD post on earl grey tea . . . 
• Listen to the Green Divas talk about this during the full Green Divas Radio Show podcast 4.4.13
• Listen to the Green Divas 5-minute Sleeping Naked is Green segment on Fair Trade Tea

Feature Interview: Betsy Escandon – aka Betsy Eco-Novice

Betsy Escandon is not really an eco-novice, but she doesn’t think so. Like us Green Divas, she is always learning new ways of living more sustainably. She publishes a great blog called of course, Eco-Novice, and chronicles her journey as a mom going green and offers some great information that is practical and easy to absorb. We talked to her about how she stumbled into this green-mommy-blogging thing and heard some great tips during our interview.

Please listen to the podcast and this wonderful interview with Betsy Escandon, eco-novice