Month 3

2 for 1 special tonight, so I don't feel so bad about being blog lazy.

This month is a continuation of last month.  A little penitence for not doing as well last month.  I want to take the no wasting thing a bit further.  Each month Nicki and I go through around 4 bags of garbage a month.  We are already doing a lot of recycling, but we still throw away a lot of garbage, mostly food.  My goal for this month is to throw away as little as possible, and have a half a can of garbage or less at the end of the month.

Our first step was to start our compost bin.  I had asked for worms this past christmas, but must not have been a good boy last year.  Apparently I'm a better husband, because I got some for Valentines day, along with an indoor composting kit from my lovely wife.  (also the DVD of the Phish show I was at this summer at Alpine Valley...pretty killer)  At this point we have pretty much filled up that first bin, I will update some pictures as we keep building it up.  The worms are pretty active now and we can see them squirming around.  I did some reading and found that our worms should double in population in three months, pretty crazy.  The worms came in a bag of 1000...that's 3000 worms, 1 baby, and 1 dog by June.

I'm not too sure how its going to go over with the Mrs. but I would like to try to cook everything with homemade ingredients.  It will help to cut down on the amount of stuff we have to throw away.  We are still good buying things in glass or paper because they can be recycled.  There is a lot at the grocery store we can buy in bulk like rice, beans, pasta, nuts, certain types of sugar, other food mixes...all in all a pretty good selection of food.  We can also refill our bottled cooking liquids like shoyu, olive oil, honey, tamari, and peanut butter.  Now it is just a matter of remembering to bring all the empty bottles.  

I'm still going to buy things that come in boxes.  I'm going to try to buy only items packaged in post-consumer materials, or at the least something we can recycle or compost.  If we can get really motivated, I'd like to try to make things out of any trash that we happen to accumulated to reuse...but I'm generally great at being lazy, so I doubt that will actually happen.

I'm going to go empty the garbage right now, and then start keeping track for the rest of the month.  Wish us luck.