Save Travel Time and Money with a Zero Waste Road Trip

Husband, Blitzkrieg, and I took off for an 8-hour road trip from Ohio to a tiny mountain town in Northern Georgia. When we travel with our dog, we bring a picnic lunch because we don’t want to leave the dog alone in a hot car for health and safety reasons. I wondered if we could do it as a Zero Waste or Low Waste road trip beause depending up whom you read on the Web or watch on TV (hello Planet Green!), doing something the Green Way is always:

· More expensive
· More time consuming
· More difficult
· but better for the environment

Long story short – we did it! And guess what?

Six Strange Things You Can and Cannot Compost

We have a new kooky little game we play here now that we know that the covert  composter works. We call it Will It Compost?

Six Weird Things That Will Compost

1. Dog fur tumbleweeds from Blitzkrieg’s hairbrush.

2. Dryer lint.


3. Dirt from the Roomba.


4. A 100% white cotton sock.


5. Corn-based plastic coffee lid from a paper take out cup of coffee. Husband and I threw it into the compost bin just to see if it would compost - it did!

6. Wine Corks. Obviously, I'm talking about composting wine corks made from real cork instead of the fake corks that are made from plastic.

Six Weird Things I Will Not Compost

How to Grow Upside Down Tomato Plants

I wasn’t a big gardener. In my rental, I tried growing tomato plants in pots. I was too cheap and  lazy. I
didn’t buy tomato cages and tried using a wooden dowel rod and yarn as a plant stake.

 That experiment in cheapatoode didn’t work out as well as I planned because the plant grew taller than the dowel rod. Then big heavy tomato vine overloaded the stake and constantly flopped fruits of my labor over the side of the pot and onto the ground where it became bug lunch. I relied on Mother in Law for homegrown tomatoes after that fiasco.

At 4’11”, I’m still not a big gardener, but I’m coming around to the whole stick-a-plant-in-dirt-and-hope-it-lives thing. For now, I figure that any plant that I grow better do something more than just look pretty, like be food or insect-deterrent.

Given my limited food-growing space on my teeny tiny patio, and the fact that the former tomato plant pot now is chock full of basil plants, I thought that I’d give an upside down tomato planter a try. I got my planter as a gift.  

How to Plant an Upside Down Tomatoes

Materials

Power Drill (if you need to install a plant hanger)
Potting Soil
Fertilizer/compost
Tomato plant (duh)
Dirt (double duh)
Epsom salt
Water
Small shovel/trowel

Gardening gloves (if you don’t want to get your hands dirty)

Do It

1. If needed, use the power drill to drill a pilot hole in a stud in your porch, overhang, etc. and install a hook/plant hanger so you can hang up your planter.

2. Dump a healthy dose of fertilizer/compost (do not use Quickie Compost for this project. Tomatoes don’t like nitrogen-based fertilizers.) into the bag of potting soil and mix it up with the small shovel/trowel. You can skip this step if you cheat like I did and buy potting soil that has a natural fertilizer already mixed into the potting soil.

3. Add a dash of Epsom salt into the potting soil and mix it up with the small shovel/trowel.* For some reason, tomatoes love, love, love Epsom salts in their soil and will grow like gangbusters. Maybe they like to soak their roots in a soothing Epsom salt bath after a tough day just like us humans. Come to think of it, how tough a day can a tomato have leisurely basking the sun and slowly growing?! I digress, on to Step 4.

4. Remove the tomato plant from the nursery’s plant pot and break up the root ball of the plant a bit with your fingers.

5. Put the tomato plant in the planter with the roots inside the planter.

6. Fill the planter with dirt using the small shovel/trowel/your hands.

7. Hang the planter up. Be careful, the planter will be heavy.

8. Water the planter daily because the upsides down planters tend to dry out more quickly than traditionally potted tomato plants.

9. Watch it grow!

*If you’ve already planted tomatoes and forgotten to add some Epsom salt to the soil, not to worry. Dissolve a dash of Epsom salt in the water and water your tomato plants with the Epsom salt water. Do not use table salt for this step of the project. However, feel free to sprinkle table salt on a slice of a fully-grown tomato if you wish. Hmmmm…good eating!

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How to Make Quickie Compost

I wanted to add the natural green goodness of compost to my potted herb plants. I already spread the all of the winter batch of compost from the covert composter in my flowerbeds. The next batch of compost won’t be ready until the end of the summer. I didn’t want to use chemical fertilizers on plants I planned to eat. What to do? What to do?

Easy. I whipped up a batch of quickie compost for my potted plants. Quickie compost takes only a few minutes to make, unlike traditional compost that can take up to six months to break down.

You can make quickie compost by mixing coffee grounds and shredded paper together (shredded junk mail works well for this project.) Then add the quickie compost mixture to the soil. That’s it. As the coffee grounds and paper mixture naturally break downs in the soil, it adds beneficial nitrogen and composty goodness to the soil for your plants.

Do not try to make quickie compost by working raw fruit and vegetable scraps into planted soil. If you do, the raw material will remove nutrients from the soil around your plants as it breaks down and may attract nasty critters like rats or raccoons to your garden bed. The quickie compost method works well for apartment dwellers or anyone else who wants to use compost in their potted plants or small flower gardens but doesn’t have a large area available for a traditional compost bin.

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Grub Resistant Gardening

I am allergic to anything green. Spending a lot of time digging in a garden guarantees me a welt-covered body. So when we found out that The Condo came with “low maintenance landscaping” I was all for condo living!

Unfortunately, within two years of owning The Condo three of the seven low maintenance bushes that came new with The Condo were dead.

How to Make a Compost Bin from a Trash Can

Any plant unlucky enough to be stuck in my yard with it’s nothing but clay and zippo topsoil is destined for a slow painful death. I needed do something to enrich my so-called soil. Compost was the answer. However Condo Association mows our lawn. They won’t allow us to have freestanding doo-dads like sheds, playhouses, or compost bins that the lawn people have to circumnavigate with their mowers. So what to do about my desire to make compost? Easy. I decided make a Covert Composting Bin out of a COA-allowable garbage can.


How to Make a Compost Bin Out of a Garbage Can