Bits and Pieces

Every year Terry and I try to do a little more to conserve and limit our impact on the Earth.

We do the typical easy stuff.  Cloth bags at the grocery store.  Recycle all those other plastic bags that some how creep into our home.  Tote all of the inevitable by-products from life to the local recycling center.  

We’ve done an excellent job of eliminating paper napkins.  

Same with paper plates and plastic water bottles.  Almost entirely gone.   

And then there’s those ideas that sounded really great at the time.

For instance, the compost bin that I JUST HAD TO HAVE back when I started gardening. It’s a very cool idea.  Just put some shredded leaves and grass and all of our vegetable scraps and egg shells in this bin that I just spin every few days.  The hot hot hot sun is supposed to turn this into compost that I can spread on the garden.  No more purchasing fertilizer or garden soil!

In reality, it takes me a few months to get it full.  Then several more months to compost. And the egg shells never do dissolve.  And I end up with a couple buckets of lumpy compost.

But I continue to use it.  Hey, I bought it.  What else am I going to do with it?

And then there’s my four rain barrels.  Something else I really needed.  Terry installed the first one on one of the garage’s downspout. My idea was to put a soaker hose on it and water the roses.  Didn’t work.  Not enough pressure to push the water through the soaker hose. Some brilliant person advised me to put it higher and there would be water pressure.

Okay, so then I had Terry put a rain barrel on the shed. Well, first he had to put gutters on the shed and a downspout.  I already had a deck on the side of the shed with a potting bench so that’s where we put the rain barrel–about two feet above ground level.  Still didn’t work with a soaker hose.

But I don’t give up.  Terry built a four foot high platform for the next two rain barrels that I wanted installed on the detached garage.   And the downspouts were the wrong size for the rain barrels so I had a handyman that was working on something else change out the downspouts. (Ka-ching) And it STILL didn’t run a soaker hose!  

So I did some research and bought a solar water pump. 

And it still doesn’t run the soaker hose! 

But I do use the solar water pump on a hose that I use to hand water the flowers plus I use all of the other rain barrels to fill the watering cans. 

And I just keep trying.  

Here’s some flamingos….

(Which has nothing to do with Earth Day but I like the idea)

Happy Earth Day!