Just Start Somewhere

One great way to live a zero waste life is to garden. Everything you get from it is usable somewhere. You can save seeds from year to year so you don't have to buy any. No searching for non gmo or organic because you know where they came from. Your own garden!

You get the benefit of living healthier by being outside in the fresh air and sunlight, vitamin D you know. Then there is the exercise. All that bending, stooping, digging, hauling and harvesting. It's good for your brain too. The planning it involves. Where to plant and what. How much. Where to put your beds to start with and any new ones, or plant guilds if you practice permaculture as we do. If you need more information on that please visit http://permaculture.com

Then there is the produce. You can feed your family fresh fruit and vegetables right out of the soil and if you home-school which I highly recommend, it is a wonderful teaching experience! Yes I taught our children at home.

Once your plants start producing a lot, you need to think about ways to preserve the bounty for later use. Personally I like to can and do put up quite a lot every year. Hopefully enough to get hubby and I through until the following season. I also dehydrate and freeze quite a bit of stuff.

In the picture below you can see some of the cherry tomatoes that I have frozen and made little tomato marbles to use in soups and such in the winter. Yes you can also see the plastic bag but for now I'm using up what we already have. That's my point about this. I'm not the plastic, zero waste police.

Start somewhere. Do what you can to build up your supplies as you go. Until I can find more jars at the junk sales, I have to use what we have on hand. Jars cost money and we are retired not rich. Bruce and I have only recently started this journey in earnest. We didn't even realize how much plastic and waste we had. We always thought we were doing a good job but we weren't doing nearly enough. This is the only planet and bodies we have so we decided to do much better at taking care of them both in our small way.

Get your families involved. Make a game of it for the kids. You can give them incentives for different things, like finding a plastic item that can be replaced with something more sustainable or whoever has the best idea for the day of ways to recycle something. Go on, you can do it. Just start! What ideas have you come up with?