☼ Grow your own damn Food! ☼

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These weekly posts are to share the progress of our garden; sharing photos and our gardening experiments and will hopefully inspire you to grow your own garden too! :) 

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We started our starts (heehee) inside this week in our little indoor greenhouse. Since we have the huge sunroom at our new place it means they also get a ton of natural light--much better than our place last year! We started our tomatoes, peppers, and some collards. Instead of planting them in those wasteful breakable little plastic containers people usually use, we got our hands on these awesome biodegradable ones (again from my dad's DIG garden centre), so when we transplant them to the garden we don't disturb the roots either. Neat, huh?

Cory also planted some radishes directly outside in the first garden bed this week, and a few greens since we've had a pretty warm March this year, and since we have a greenhouse outside to get an early start. That's what else we did today actually; build the outdoor greenhouse. We have a layer of frost cover as well. For the greenhouse, we found some PVC piping and Cory got the plastic cover from his Uncle, so everything is recycled too! :) It should do the trick, there's so much sun exposure and the weather is warming up quickly. 

We did get the one surprise snow dump this week though too. I was actually snowed in, and then slushed in, since it snowed as much as it did and then melted right away! Crazy week. And now it's beautiful and warm and sunny again today… and they say Global Warming doesn't exist. ;p It was definitely a "wtf winter?!" moment. I mean… I loooove winter… 

Anyways… greenhouse up! We still have the second one to do and we still have to make the last bed and fix up the front ones. Always exciting! I can't wait to have fresh food to pick again! Gardening is so rewarding!

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☆ "The Secret Life of Garbage" ☆

Another info graph I felt worth sharing, because this information is valuable and may encourage greater action. 

I am personally very proud to say that we go through a single almost full black garbage bag a year--that's between two people (and two cats). Even so we're working to reduce that to next to nothing. I'm aware it will take some practice but for now I'm still pretty proud that we have reduced our waste by this much. It is absolutely possible for anyone to do so with a little effort and conscious thinking. We make this possible by…

• Paying attention to packaging and buying things with less or no packaging. 
• Buying in Bulk and reusing our bulk bags. 
• Recycling anything and everything that we can. 
• Composting all our food remains (which, proudly, is usually just veggie and fruit cores and peels). 
• And not over-consuming in general. 

Created by: Business Degree

How much garbage do you go through? Do you recycle? Have a compost? Please consider making some changes, they are really not much work and can make such a huge difference for the world. 

If you found this article to be helpful, please consider a small donation or visit the shop. Thank you for your love and support.

☆ Green Tip: Lessen your need to Recycle! ☆

Obviously, recycling is fantastic! But recycling is only half the battle and sometimes comes as an excuse to still buy over-packaged items, etc. We think to ourselves, well I can still Recycle this, so what's the harm? While, yes, the benefits of recycling are grand, it does still take a lot of energy to recycle items into new ones. Don't let the ability to recycle items be your excuse to not reduce your impact. Choose to reuse more than you buy new. For instance, you can sometimes recycle plastic grocery store bags but you should still bring your own canvas or tote bags instead as this is far more earth-friendly. You can often recycle cardboard food boxes but that doesn't mean you shouldn't bring your own reusable bags and buy in bulk--and you can still find another use for that cardboard box before recycling it as well. 

Get creative and get savvy. Pay attention instead of just throwing something into the recycling. Pay attention to just how much you recycle and what you can do to reduce the number of things that need to be recycled.

Here are some tips to get started:

Use tote or canvas grocery bags instead of plastic. 

Reuse cardboard boxes for packaging or for art projects. 

Reuse paper to write notes on--or, again, for packaging or art projects. 

Think before you print. Reduce how much paper you use. 

Buy in Bulk! And bring your own reusable bags. 

Buy products that are minimally packaged (when not buying in bulk). 

Use your own stainless steel water bottle and never buy super wasteful plastic bottled water. 

Just because we CAN recycle, doesn't mean we shouldn't still pay attention to our global footprint. Reduce and reuse before you automatically opt for recycling. :)

If you found this article to be helpful, please consider a small donation or visit the shop. Thank you for your love and support.