Voluntarily choosing the simple (and sometimes harder) path, while getting back to basics
We ran out of dry erase markers and made a discovery. You don’t need to buy more of those plastic markers! Large crayons work just fine on dry erase boards. Simply use a soft cloth to wipe it off, with a little extra elbow grease.
Crayon going onto a whiteboard…..And crayon coming off the same whiteboard with an old sock eraser. This really does work, and it does wipe clean! Just sayin’.
There may be items in your trash that could help you with your gardening. Check out this list and see if any of these great ideas resonate with you, helping you pull a couple things out of your trash and, well, into your garden to green up your world. If you don’t have these items in your trash, ask for them on your local Buy Nothing group. I’ve categorized the ideas by item, and each one links to a unique reuse. Enjoy!
Plastic Bottles:
1) Plastic Bottle Mosquito Trap: This one is a trick using yeast and a cut bottle glued together. Read on and try it.
2) Plastic Bottle Cloche: It’s as easy as cutting a plastic bottle in half and sticking it upside down over your seedling or plant.
3) Plastic Bottle Self-Watering Seed Starters: These plastic bottles, cut in half and one inverted inside the other have a wicking system worth checking out.
4) Plastic Bottle Drip Irrigation System: 4 small holes in your 2-liter bottle that’s buried in the ground provide excellent watering for your plants.
5) Plastic Bottle Greenhouse: A greenhouse like this is a true inspiration.
Milk Jugs:
6) Milk Jug Scoop: Milk or OJ jugs make easy scoops.
7) Milk Jug Cloches: Use Milk Jugs to protect your larger plants. Just cut the bottom out of the milk jug, turn it upside down and it’ll protect your plants.
8) Milk Jug Mini Greenhouses: These mini greenhouses in gallon jugs can prove useful.
Clear Plastic Containers:
9) Plastic Container Mini Greenhouse: Just turn it upside down and you have a mini cloche/greenhouse.
Cereal Boxes & Cracker Boxes:
10) Cardboard Weed Block: Take your cereal boxes and cracker boxes to the garden and use them as weed blocking.
Bike Wheels:
11) Bike Wheel Trellis: Bike wheel trellises are beautiful.
DVDs/CDs:
12) DVD/CD Bird Scaring Trick: Birds don’t like reflective stuff. It scares them off. Put a few around your berries and you’ll keep those peckers away.
Mailboxes:
13) Mailbox Garden Tool Cache: Post an old mailbox up in your garden, and you have a water-proof place to store hand tools, planter markers, and your notes.
Drawers:
14) Drawer Seedling Starter: This one’s easy. Just use an old drawer as a seedling planter box.
OJ Cans:
15) OJ Can Plant Labels: The can tops make pretty labels for marking your rows.
Rain Boots:
16) Rain Boot Planters: Save a few pairs of the kids cute rain boots for whimsical planters.
Plastic Plant Pots:
17) Plastic Plant Pot Flowers: Add a little flair to your outdoor space with these plant pot flowers.
Trash Cans:
18) Trash Can Root Cellar: I’m interested in trying this for storing our potatoes, carrots, daikon radish, turnips and cabbages next year. It simply requires digging a deep hole.
Tupperware Tubs:
19) Tupperware Worm Farm: Make a few holes in your old Tupperware bins, order a few hundred red worms, follow the instructions here and you’ll have a worm farm.
Plastic Bottle Caps:
20) Plastic Bottle Cap Lawn Flowers: Michele Stitzlein creates beautiful blooms from plastic caps. She’s published a couple of books on plastic cap art, too.
Glassware:
21) Glassware Flowers: These bowls and dishes are all the rage.
Garden Hoses:
22) Garden Hose Flowers: If you have space on a wall, you could create flowery art from your old hoses.
Twist Ties:
23) Twist Tie Plant Trainers: Save your twist ties to use for training plants to fences and stakes.
Soda Cans:
24) Soda Can Planters: In a pinch, soda cans can be used as planters and seed starters.
25) Pop Can Plant Markers: With a little effort, you can make some pretty markers for your garden.
Styrofoam:
26) Styrofoam Planter Filler: Fill the bottom of your large plant pots with styrofoam so they don’t get too heavy.
PVC
27) PVC Garden Tower: Drill holes in a PVC tube and you have a strawberry planter
Coaxial Cables:
28) Coaxial Cable Fence: Who knew that a coaxial cable could look so pretty with bamboo?
Wine Bottles:
29) Wine Bottle Waterer: Turn your empties upside down (with H2O in them) in your plant pots and go on vacation!
30) Wine Bottle Garden Edging: Wine bottles can make colorful garden edging.
31) Wine Bottle Hose Guard: A wine bottle and a stick are all that’s needed to keep your hose out of your garden beds.
Clementine Boxes:
32) Clementine Box Planters: Clementine boxes make excellent seedling starter boxes or planters for forced bulbs.
Blue Jeans:
33) Blue Jeans Garden Apron: Sew yourself a simple garden apron from an old pair of jeans that can hold your garden tools.
Plastic Mesh Produce Basket:
34) Plastic Mesh Seedling Saver: We use these baskets to prevent slugs and birds from destroying our seedlings.
Windows:
35) Windows Greenhouse: This is a simple design for a small greenhouse made from windows.
36) Window Frame Trellis: An old window frame with mullions makes a pretty trellis.
Broken Ceramics:
37) Broken Ceramics Pot Drainage: Put your broken ceramic pieces in the bottom of plant pots for added drainage.
38) Plant Your Broken Dishes: Plant your favorite broken dishes in the garden and enjoy them throughout the growing season.
Broken Pot Planter: When our ceramic pots break, I plant them in our garden along with something planted to look as if it’s spilling out of the pot, having grown there over time.
Paint Cans:
39) Paint Can Planters: I love these paint cans turned planters at my friend Maya’s house in Tsarang, Upper Mustang, Nepal.
Laundry Hampers:
40) Laundry Hamper Potato Planter: I planted potatoes inside an old laundry hamper and the harvest was easy.
Skis:
41) Ski Fence: If anyone lives in the Seattle area and wants to make one of these, please contact us as we have several hundred skis at the end of our Rotary Auction.
Window Blinds:
42) Mini Blind Plant Markers: These look really easy to make.
Panty Hose:
43) Panty Hose Deer Repellant: If you place a bar of soap inside the foot of old panty hose and hang it from your apple tree, it should deter the deer from nibbling on your tree. You can also use a single child’s mitten for this, as it looks cute and either put the perfumed soap inside or human hair (they don’t like the smell of humans.)
Headboards:
44) Headboard Trellis: A headboard makes a beautiful pea trellis.
Newspaper:
45) Newspaper Garden Uses: There are many reuses for newspaper in the garden.
Cassette Tapes:
46) Cassette Tape Bird Deterrent: Pull the tape out of your cassette and string it over your garden. Birds hate the reflective quality of the tape.
Pet Food Bags:
47) Feed Bag Tarp: Sew your plastic woven pet food bags together into a tarp for garden needs.
Toilet Paper Tubes:
48) TP Tube Seedling Starters: Start your seeds in a tube filled with soil.
Sponges:
49) Sponges in Plant Pots: Cut up your old sponges and place them in the bottom of plant pots. They’ll hold moisture for a long time.
Kiddie Pools:
50) Kiddie Pool Raised Bed Garden: Hard plastic kiddie pools make excellent raised bed gardens.
What do you reuse in your garden? Help me add to the list.
In Upper Mustang, Nepal, there is an ethic of reuse that has changed my ways. Few things are consumed and then simply thrown away, except for candy wrappers, plastic packaging like biscuit wrappers, ramen noodle packets, and plastic bags holding washing powder. These, sadly, are found underfoot in nearly every village.
Plastic Packaging Used for Irrigation:
But most plastics in Mustang are put to use in innovative ways. Take the plastic lining for water diversion in irrigation ditches. Rather than using jute sacks filled with sand, a readily available material is plastic packaging and bags layered with mud, unwanted clothing and textiles to create an impermeable dam for irrigation ditches. The plastics, unfortunately, often break free and are carried downstream into the Kali Gandaki River where all water flows.
Potato Sack Turned Horse Feed-Bucket:
One of the most innovative Mustang-style trash hacks is the method by which local horses are fed their grain. Potato sacks made of woven plastic are sewn into a configuration that fits easily around a horse’s muzzle, with long string handles that hang over the horses’ ears. Corn is measured out and put in the potato-sack-turned-feed-bag, the chaff blown by hand from the corn to prevent the horse from inhaling it in the bag, and the bag is hung from the horse’s ears: a muzzle feeder that’s a brilliant light-weight way to feed one’s horses while traveling. No need for heavy buckets. Whether on-the-go or at home, these muzzle feed bags are the preferred feeding bucket for Mustang equines.
When one becomes worn out and a hole develops, they’re quickly patched up, as this one was mended by a talented tailor friend in the village of Samdzong, utilizing his son’s worn out sweat pants.
I grew up with horses and we went through plenty of buckets, some made of PVC and plastic which when broken became yet another hefty item in the landfill. The potato/rice sacks turned into horse feed bags are one of the best reuses I’ve ever seen in a remote part of the world that could easily be adopted world-wide!
Planted Pots in Buckets, Paint Cans and Tins:
Anything that is a receptacle is used in Mustang until it can no longer hold anything, disintegrated by sun and wind to the point of uselessness. In the topmost photo of planters, below, you’ll see a plastic bucket that developed a crack and was then sewn back together with plastic twine. Potted flowering succulents are such a valuable addition of organic color to a household, taking the time to repair that heavy-duty plastic pot is clearly worth the effort. If we treated our own plastic pots and buckets the same way, there’d be a significant reduction in the production of these plastics in the first place, and a renewed ethic which the Lobas, the people of Upper Mustang, haven’t lost, of repairing everything again and again until its useful life is truly over. Now that’s reuse!
What are we to do about the plastic berry basket? You know which berry containers I’m talking about: The plastic mesh variety, pint-size and usually green in color that our cherry tomatoes and strawberries come in. They come under the following names: Berry baskets, berry boxes, strawberry baskets, pint berry containers, plastic strawberry baskets, plastic cherry tomato boxes…the list goes on.
Why do we need to surround our beautiful fruits and veggies in plastic? It’s not the grocery stores that are packaging your lovely berries. Farmers choose the packaging, but many grocery stores will give feedback to farmers if their customers just don’t want their fresh produce packaged in plastic berry baskets.
If you want to avoid accumulating these baskets, simply buy your strawberries and cherry tomatoes only when they’re available in cardboard baskets and if your grocery store only carries plastic ones, give them your instant feedback by not purchasing them and get proactive in letting the store know you’ll start buying berries again when they can provide waste-free packaging. It’s grocery store strawberry season here and I cannot find a single one that’s plastic-free. Ours are packaged in clear clamshell packaging, aka styrofoam, and that stuff is a known carcinogen. No strawberries for us until they ripen in our garden or are offered at the Farmer’s Market or our local garden produce-share group.
What to do with your plastic berry baskets if you have to buy produce in them? Check to see if your local farmers can reuse berry baskets, if they’re clean. Save them and then pass them along, or collect enough of them to post them on your Buy Nothing group, and you might find a craft group or teacher who could use them.
Otherwise, here are 9 ideas to get you reusing the pint berry baskets you might have.
1) Turn them into candy boxes or gift boxes by weaving pretty ribbons through them.
2) Use them as a doll playpen.
3) Let your child’s teddy bear wear one as a space helmet for galactic journeys.
4) Start your cucumber, melon, and other starts in them by lining them with newspaper, adding potting soil and keeping in a sunny warm space. Then transplant the whole thing, basket and all, into the garden. Roots will grow through the plastic mesh and there will be no transplant shock for your seedlings. Remember to retrieve the plastic basket from your garden at the end of the season for reuse.
5) Place them upside down over your seedlings in your garden to protect them from birds.
6) Make an Easter Basket.
7) Line them with paper and use as a container for little things in your everything drawer or child’s playroom.
8) Use one as an earring holder/display.
9) Reuse them for your own berry picking.
I’m just going to refuse them from now on, and maybe you will, too. If we just stop buying them, maybe the farmers will find better baskets for their berries.
OK, I have thirteen twist tie reuses, but it sounded better with the number twelve.
I have a lot of twist ties. Organic farmers tend to package some of their lettuces and produce in twist ties. I’ve vowed today to avoid those items because the twist tie waste is getting overwhelming in our house. Also, when we get bulk items at our supermarket we accumulate quite a few twisties. Over the course of a year, they add up, and my everything drawer is looking like a twist tie nightmare. But before getting rid of ’em, I thought I’d write down some obvious reuses for the little twisters to see if I might want to save a few:
1) Take them back to the store for your bulk needs and reuse them. I try to remember to bring a stash of twist ties inside my reusable bags for my grocery shopping. If you’re really organized you’ll even have the bulk bin numbers figured out so you can simply reuse the same one over and over again. I discovered an ingenious way to decode the bulk bin numbers by….writing the name of the bulk item on the twist ties too! Duh!
2) Tie up plants and vines in the garden with your twist ties.
3) Corral your extra electrical cordage with a twist tie to avoid tripping over them and causing a domestic electronic disaster.
4) Make twist tie stick people. Ok, that was pretty bad. If you want to check out a true master at the craft of twist tying, check out the Twist Tie Guy.
5) Use them to secure ornaments to your Christmas tree.
6) Hold your ear buds together with a twist tie so they don’t get all discombobulated in your backpack or briefcase.
7) Make an obvious key ring heart to identify your favorite house key.
8) Reuse twist ties to cinch together plastic bags storing produce, etc. (That was an obvious one.)
9) Make a 4th of July Centerpiece.
10) Give them away on your Buy Nothing group. I was able to BuyNothing a few of my long pink ones for a local textile recycling project. They’re used to tie up trash bags filled with clothing for Goodwill. Yeehaw!
11) Use one to hold all your, um, twist ties together.
12) Make a set of “Garbage Gods.” They’re more rad than Legos.
13) Recycle them! If you’ve saved up enough of them, I guess you could strip the paper from the paper ones, put the paper in your paper recycling and put the metal in your scrap metal bin.
But wait, twist ties may be toxic!? According to some reports the metals used in twist ties are often unknown and could have lead in them. But…many store-bought vegetables like kale and Romaine lettuce are held together by metal and paper twist ties. My local supermarket even uses twist ties to indicate something is organic!
What reuses do you practice with your twist ties?
Did she say bean water? Yes, bean water is how I refer to the leftover liquid after I’ve cooked beans in my slow cooker or pressure cooker. Every week, we do at least one pot of beans, to provide the staple ingredient (beans) for many meals for the family.
Dried beans, bought in bulk, are among the cheapest and most nutritious foods we can buy. Now, that weekly practice of ours has yielded several more meals that I had never thought of before — using the bean water to make wonderfully delicious dishes!
Here’s our black bean water, leftover after I removed the beans to make refried beans.
This week, our beans of choice were black beans, and thanks to this article, I saved the bean water and used it as the basis for a huge pot of Tarascan Bean and Tomato Soup. It’s a recipe I first started making in my 20s, because I wanted to find something to use up the bacon grease that I save.
We save our bacon grease for recipes and bird suet
The soup takes on the flavors of the bacon and it’s absolutely delicious and Whole30 compliant.
Bean water can also be saved for use as a base in vegetable stock and in soups like minestrone. Seems there’s a bit of a craze out there for bean water, especially chick pea water, which has the official name of “aquafaba.” Chick peas, or garbanzo beans, can yield a liquid that is a great replacement for egg whites and even meringues can be made from them. So, get creative, learn about aquafaba, don’t pour your bean water down the sink. Use it up to flavor your favorite meals.
Behold, our bean water.
I’m feeling so very proud that the Tarascan soup which I love has 3 ingredients in it that many people would normally toss: bacon fat, vegetable scrap broth, and bean water.
Here’s the recipe for it, which is based on one found in my favorite Mexican cookbook, The Cuisines of Mexico, by Diane Kennedy.
Sopa Tarasca
4 Cups Bean Water (pinto beans or black beans)
2 Tomatoes or 8 oz Canned Tomatoes
2 Cloves Garlic
Half an Onion
4 Tablespoons Bacon Grease
1 Cup Vegetable Broth (or Chicken or Pork Broth)
Cilantro for garnish
Salt and Pepper
Blend the tomatoes, garlic and onion in a blender or Vitamix until a soupy puree. Set Aside.
Place the bacon grease in a soup pot and put the heat on high to melt it. Add the tomato mixture and mix by hand as it cooks for about 5 minutes. Gradually add the bean water and bring the soup to a boil, turn the heat down to medium and cook for another 8 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add the broth and allow the soup to cook for another 10 minutes on low, until your soup reaches the thickness you’d like. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serve the soup and garnish with cilantro, paprika, shredded cheese or sour cream to taste.
Enjoy!
We never buy freezer bags and I’m on a mission to help people see that they’re entirely unnecessary. In the category of plastic bags in general, please don’t ever buy them!
Most of our freezing is done in glass jars. Roasted pumpkin, for example, goes into a large mouth glass jar with a few inches left at the top to account for expanding liquid when it freezes.
But what about things that really don’t need to be put in jars, like berries and bananas and pre-made burritos? Enter the DIY freezer bag. I’m feeling sheepish even writing about this, because I know most of my friends already do this. If you’re going to freeze your goodies for more than a month, be sure to use a very sturdy bag. Simply reuse another thick bag!
We get frozen cassava tortillas, for example, and frozen berries when we run out of our own, and simply save those self-sealing bags to reuse as freezer bags for our own food.
A DIY Freezer bag, Ahem, is Just a Reused Freezer Bag.
And, if you run out of those, double up on regular self-sealing bags that you’ve saved. By using two, you’ll extend the freeze-life of your perishables. Simple! If you don’t have ziploc-style bags, just ask for them in your local Buy Nothing group. People will gladly share the ones they typically throw away and you’ll never have to buy those bags again.
Don’t Buy Freezer Bags. Just Double Up on Your Reusable Self-Sealing Bags.
It’s been a long winter, and since the deer ate all our kale, we’ve been sans greens for too long. This week, the dandelions are in full force, and I’m eradicating them from my vegetable garden while weeding the lovelies more selectively from the lawn. Honey bees need their pollen, too, so I aim to leave plenty to flower for the bees, as dandelion flowers are among the first pollen sources for bees in the spring.
Today, I collected a bucketful of dandelions, making sure to get as much of the roots and greens as I could. This is my second harvest, and we’re hungry for more. After washing the greens thoroughly, I’ve made a few dishes with them and they’re delicious!
Sausage on a Bed of Dandelion Greens (serves 2)
Sauté 4 sausages to your liking.
Add some olive oil to the pan and sauté 4 cloves of chopped garlic in olive oil. Add a teaspoon of red pepper flakes to sauté along with the garlic. Add two pinches of salt. After 2 minutes, add a couple of handfuls of dandelion greens and another pinch of salt. Pour 1/4 to 1/2 cup of vegetable or chicken broth into the pan and let simmer for a few more minutes. Place sausage on top of the greens on a plate and enjoy!
Poached Eggs on a Bed of Dandelion Greens (serves 2)
Follow the same instructions above for cooking your greens and in the last 4 minutes, add 4 eggs sunny side up to your skillet or pan, right on top of the greens. Put a cover over your pan to let the eggs poach. Let them cook for 3-4 minutes until the eggs have cooked to your liking.
Roasted Dandelion Root Tea
I love dandelion root tea as a substitute for coffee. It’s dark and bitter like coffee and tastes great with cream or your favorite creamer. Simply clean your dandelion roots as best you can.
Dice them and throw them into a Vitamix or blender to chop them into small nugget size pieces. Don’t puree them into a powder.
Place them in a 250 degree oven and roast for 2 hours. Let them cool completely and store in an airtight jar.
You can grind them down to a powder after this if you like. I just put them in a tea strainer like other loose leaf tea and brew up!
I love making things from what I already have in my house, without buying anything new, things that are secondary uses for what might eventually become waste. When we fry up some bacon, there’s always some leftover grease. What do we do with that bacon fat? We turn it into suet for our wild birds.
Our bacon comes from grass-fed natural sources with no added sugars or chemicals. It’s about as healthy as bacon can get. So, I’m happy to share the grease with our little feathered friends who in winter do need an added boost of calories.
First, save the plastic holder for bird suet that commercial suets come in. If you don’t have any, ask in your local Buy Nothing group for the square plastic packaging for suet. This way, you’ll be able to use that plastic container as your future mold to fit into the suet feeder.
Here’s our recipe:
We sometimes add peanut butter, old flour, nuts, berries, anything that birds would like. 
Your little tweeties will love their suet and you won’t have to buy any more plastic-packaged suet again!
This is my favorite hardy green as it’s the first to pop up in the spring here in the Pacific Northwest. If you don’t know what corn mache (Valerianella locusta) is, Google it and you’ll find some people call it corn mache choux, mouse ears, or corn salad. It’s a super fancy French green, used in top restaurants, and yet it grows like crazy in my garden, self-seeding every year.
I just love the stuff: as a substitute for baby spinach, in salads, in stir-fry, and as a bed of greens beneath any kind of organic meat we have for dinner. It has a creamy, nutty, slightly floral taste, but is very mild, so putting something flavorful on it works well as it compliments strong flavorings.
Balsamic chicken thighs and asparagus on a bed of corn mache © Liesl Clark
We throw it in smoothies every morning this time of year. And I give it away to happy neighbors in the spring, who are hungry for anything green and fresh. Plant yourself a bed of corn mache, let a few go to seed, and next year you’ll thank yourself for the effort as this lovely little veggie, like arugula and jerusalem artichokes, will be come a perennial springtime friend.
It takes a little extra effort to wash as grit can get down inside. I just soak the little florets in a big bowl of water and submerge them before pulling them out. Seems to work just fine!
Pioneering The Simple Life 