October 27th, 2008 -- Posted in Reduce, recycle, reuse |
Nick and I have been having this discussion lately at home. You see, we only throw out probably one small kitchen-bin full of rubbish once a week. However, we seem to end up with a huge cardboard-box full of recycling multiple times per fortnight.
I don’t know how any household could fill one of those things with rubbish per week!! We recycle all we can, compost our food scraps (and not a few teabags…) so as to do our bit for recycling and reducing landfill. Not to mention sweet, sweet compost!
Now, our normal wheelie bin is collected once a week, but our recycling bin is collected only once a fortnight. Does anyone else wish these two things were reversed?
October 5th, 2008 -- Posted in home |
Well, it’s finally home. We’ve just come back from a week-long holiday in Fiji, and it was so lovely to open the door and step back into our own home.
We managed to get the house totally sorted out before we left, and packed those pesky unpacked boxes off into the garage to be worried about in future. The saga of unpacking was helped along enourmously by the completion of the two bookshelves - you should have seen the pile of empty boxes once I unpacked this lot!
Bookshelf No. 2 is currently in our spare room/cello room:
This morning started as all Sunday mornings should - with a cup of tea in bed. Fast forward a few hours, and we have Nick making awesome bacon, mushroom and onion omelettes for breakfast:
The garden is looking great, too. Did I mention that it took us three trips with the 4WD and trailer to get all our (okay, my) stuff from The Rental to here? And that one of those trips consisted solely of plants? Ahem…
The strawberries are going great-guns, and the little mulberry tree has fruit all over it! I can’t wait to tuck into these..
Oh yes, and we finally got ourselves a proper compost bin - it was on sale at K-Mart for $25! We saw it at Bunnings a few days later for about $45. Bargin!
Our backyard is huge, and mostly empty, so I’m hoping to ask the landlords soon if we can make a bit of a vegie garden along the fence - I would be estatic if I could actually finally garden in the ground properly!
Now I’m off to buy myself a pair of knitting needles and some yarn. Yes, I have decided to re-learn how to knit, and join the legion of make-it-yourself knitters. The last time I tried knitting I bought some fluffy, silky yarn which was a nightmare to work with, and started by trying to make a scarf. Needless to say I got fed up - so this time, easy yarn and a small project to begin!
June 9th, 2008 -- Posted in garden |
Since I started this blog I’ve been thinking about the things I do - and the things I should do - to live a more sustainable life. There are so many things - but I narrowed the list down to ten straightforward, simple steps that we can all take towards this type of life.
Have a read here. And please leave me a comment if you can think of something simple that I have neglected!
May 14th, 2008 -- Posted in The Rental |
So, to continue…
Today - the compost heap. Well, not so much heap as column. When I first moved into the house, there was no composting going on. However, when I suggested the idea, everyone was up for it. So, we pulled out an old ice-cream container, which has successfully functioned as our bench-top compost bin ever since.
However, we were lacking the main ingredient - a compost bin. I ventured underneath our house, which, being a high-set old Queenslander that has been rented since the dawn of time, had accumulated the detritus of generations of housemates. Amongst the mess were a stack of old tyres and an old metal rubbish bin. Voila - the compost monster was born!
We had to shove a few old pieces of thin plywood inside to stop the food scraps falling into the inside of the tyres. However, as you can see, with the food scraps of four people going into it over the last few months, it has almost reached capacity!
I’m really looking forward to somehow pulling it apart and seeing what we have sitting at the bottom. I’m hoping to find some really dense, nutrient-rich compost to give to my plants. I’ll keep ya posted.
