Some Thoughts on Recycling, Herb Gardening and Water Conservation

I was a pretty big recycling nut when I lived by myself.  I thought I did pretty well for myself at keeping down the waste that I sent off to the landfill each year.  Trash got picked up in the neighborhood twice a week but I only needed to put a bag out once.  Hey in Texas that was apparently considered environmentally friendly!

Then I went off to live in a tent for three months.   The experience was awesome, but it made me miss having my own garden.  Since I was camping in rented space, gardening wasn't an option.  Camping was, however, an excellent way to cut down on garbage.  Recycling was a little more difficult as there weren't bins available.  All of the paper waste got used up for fires each night.  I reused the occasional two liter bottle for use in brewing sun tea - just made a slit around the top of the bottle to add the tea bags.  And bam!  Fresh green tea every day until the bottle wore out and I had to get another one.

After camping out for three months in Oregon, I made my way down to Georgia to stay with an aunt and uncle for a while.  Now Atlanta had previously had a somewhat serious drought.  I am really impressed and humbled at the measures that my aunt takes to conserve water.  Now that the drought is over, she still continues these habits every single day.  She keeps a little herb garden out back that benefits greatly from her efforts.  Her herbs aren't much, but they are the ones she uses the most.  She grows some parsley mostly for the caterpillars and butterflies they attract.  Then there are chives for spicing up potatoes, lemon balm which my chihuahua loves to chew on, and a couple of other all purpose spices that I can't think of right now.  Her little spice garden just loves all the attention it gets.

One of the things she doesn't do despite all the recycling and water conservation going on is compost any of the food waste.  Most of that goes down the garbage disposal.  I have tried to talk to her about the benefits of keeping a small compost tumbler or even a worm farm, but apparently that isn't really something they are willing to consider at this point.  Its too bad, though, because if they did it would make those herbs and tomatoes that she grows that much bigger!