Monday Essentials: A More Sustainable New England

1. Weather this Week: Things will be mostly sunny until Wednesday brings showers and isolated thunderstorms. That will continue into Thursday before a cloudy weekend comes along. Expect temperatures in the 80s.

2. Coming up: The Wadleigh Memorial Library presents The Real Dirt: Toward Food Sufficiency and Farm Sustainability in New England on Wednesday, August 21 at 7 p.m. in the Keyes Meeting Room. The recently released book The Real Dirt: Toward Food Sufficiency and Farm Sustainability in New England by John E. Carroll, Professor of Environmental Conservation at the University of New Hampshire argues that a whole new smaller scale agriculture is evolving to replace New England’s commodity agriculture based on selling to wholesale markets. He contends that a new agriculture, smaller in scale, directly marketed, sometimes organic, increasingly grass-based, bio-diverse, governed by biological and ecological principles and sustainable in theory and practice is fast rising across all of New England.

3. ICYMI: Patch Editor Robert Michaelson visited the Good Mojo Dog Center in Milford to bond with some of the canines. Watch as he learns how to give a dog a bath, and perform some tricks with an old dog. Spoiler: things get very wet. See the full video.

4. All Politics is Local: This week will see several big-name political figures visiting New Hampshire. Today, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a possible presidential candidate in 2016, is in the Granite State. And tomorrow, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will attend an NHGOP fundraiser in Wolfeboro, where he owns a summer home. On Friday, former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is scheduled to attend an event in Salem. Brown, of course, has been talked about as a possible Senate candidate in New Hampshire, given that he owns a summer home on the Seacoast.

5. Patch Fact: The brain requires more than 25 percent of the oxygen used by the human body.