My New Green Life

     Growing up my father taught me how to live a green life, and I was never aware of how much he taught me until I became a father.  This is my daughter's second summer, and she is just now getting to an age where she can appreciate nature.  Paige and I decided this spring that we were going to make some lifestyle changes to teach our daughter those values.
     We first started with saving our aluminum cans to sell as scrap metal and make a few bucks.  Paige then suggested we keep a bag of our plastic recyclables outside as well.

 

     Soon after that we started keeping a box of our old newspapers seeing as we got a daily subscription.  Our old magazines and office paper also go in here.

      Our old carboard boxes were next to go into a recyclable box.

     We don't use much glass in our house, but it is easily stored alongside our metal cans.

 
     Growing up my dad always had a compost pile. We would through our kitchen scraps and yard clippings.  It was often a chore to take the compost outside and dump it.  I wanted Paige and I to start doing this so that Lucy would always know these green practices as I had.  Our goal with the compost pile is not necessarily to produce compost for our garden, but it is more to keep as much trash out of the landfill.  All we were doing was feeding the birds at the dump.  Here is a picture of our set up.

 

     Our latest project was starting a garden.  Now we live in the city on the side of a busy highway so we can have any extravagant.  My dad grew some tomato plants from seeds this Spring, and he had given me his last two plants.  We love hot things at our house so jalapeno plants are a must in our garden.  That's all the room we have in our backyard, but we have two container plants, a strawberry plant and gebera daisies.  Even though we have limited space were are trying to do our best to live a green life for our daughter.  Here are some pictures of our garden in progress.

     Paige and I are doing our best to live a greener life and instill in her some of the values my father instilled in me.  Our trash output has significantly dwindled.  We used to average 4-5 bags of trash a week, and now we are down to 1-2 bags of trash each week.  The steps we took to make our life greener are very easily implementable.  You can check out my wife's blog where she has a similar entry about this topic.