Thursday, April 23, 2009

Project Plant a Bulb

GE is doing this great project - during the month of april, they will plant one bulb for each unique visitor to their website - click HERE to help!

I didn't manage to get any pictures today (got pulled in too many other directions) so I'll have to post them later, but here are some of the things we do in the garden to help save money and decrease our plastic use.

My mom likes to start plants from seeds, and she uses the Jiffy pellets to start them out. Once they are big enough, she replants them into yogurt containers until they get big enough to go outside. (One additional tip - if you keep a fan running on them, the seedlings will be a lot stronger than if you don't.) My mom also saves other plastic or foam containers (from sour cream, cottage cheese, meat, mushrooms, etc) to use for seed beds. Works great, we don't have to pay anything extra for them, and they are reusable year after year.

We also save wide mouth glass and plastic jars from various sources to use as storage for the herbs we grow. Nothing better than making sauce with homegrown basil and oregano (My favorites are Spicy Globe Basil and greek oregano)

Paper can be shredded and used in the garden for mulch, as long as it isn't the shiny colored papers. We also lay out broken down cardboard boxes to help prevent weeds. Makes it a lot easier to keep the garden weed free.

On the scrappy end of things, I like to keep the flat part of plastic packaging to use on my pages - I can punch it or stamp it or layer it... the possibilities are endless. I also keep ribbons from things (I swiped the ribbons of a couple of the candy things the kids got for easter). Bread bag tags make a cute addition to pages too - I like to put rubons on mine to add a mini tag.

One other thing I like that we do... there is never any wasted food at my house. Even if the kids don't finish their dinners, it doesn't go to waste. We have chickens, who are MORE than happy to clean up any leftovers we may have. And we have the yummiest eggs around. There is no comparison between a home grown egg and a storebought egg. (Plus the amusement factor is amazing.. and the kids love having easter egg hunts every day! We have a variety of brown egg layers, plus Aracaunas and Marins, so our eggs come in brown, pink, green, blue, and chocolate.)

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