Earth Week...

So, what have you done to celebrate Earth Day?  My husband and I try to give back by recycling plastic, paper, cardboard, glass and aluminum.  We have a huge three bin composter so all of our coffee grounds and vegetable kitchen scraps go there.  Did you know you can put dryer lint in the composter?  I keep all of our lightweight cardboard such as cereal boxes for cardmaking.  I even use our local nature center's newsletter to make cards.  My next 'nature related' cards will be shaker cards filled with seeds from our garden this year.  My husband is off right now trying to find a system for covering our garden with netting to keep the deer from eating everything that germinates.  We have been unable to grow sunflowers because the deer eat them right down to the ground as soon as they emerge and the goldfinches and chickadees have been waiting for those beautiful natural birdfeeders.  We also grow lots of native plants like cone flowers and black-eyed susans.  The birds harvest those seeds in the fall so we leave our garden clean-up until spring.  That's on our agenda today - cleaning the remaining flower beds, transplanting extra plants from one bed to another.  If you have patience, you can have huge flower beds by dividing and moving plants as they get too big for their current home.  Trading with friends is also a wonderful idea.  We plan to plant a tree this week as we try to do every Earth Week.  Just a little 'thank you' to Mother Nature; she has been so kind to us.

So, pick up some trash, do some recycling, plant a tree, start a composter, reuse something you would have thrown away, walk outside and really really look at the buds on the trees.  Spring is a new start, and a great time to get involved in saving our planet.