We have been working hard over the past few months to reduce both our costs and our carbon footprint. Here’s some of the stuff we’ve been doing

Growing Vegetables

Since we don’t have a nice raised bed to plant our vegetables in, we’ve resorted to using old pots, buckets, tomato sauce containers from a local pizza shop, an old tire lined with cardboard (to keep the toxins from getting into the vegetables), and even old gallon milk jugs. We’re growing tomatoes, basil, spinach, mixed greens, onions, peppers, eggplants, and herbs. We’ve gotten a few salads out of it so far, but will hopefully be cutting out most of our vegetable costs in the not so distant future!

Compost

We recently purchased our Earth Machine Composter. Its pretty awesome – you put compostable materials (vegetable scraps, paper, yard clippings, leaves), turn it every few days, and when its ready take rich earth out of the door on the bottom. We’ve already used some of our compost in our vegetable garden! If you live in the City of Boston, it only costs $45 – Check out the website: http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/recycling/composting.asp

We’ve also been expermenting with making our own cleaning supplies, which we will talk about in a future post…