Mondays are a bit mad in our house.  Not only do they always seem to arrive well before I'm ready to start the next working week, but I also have a regular commitment on Monday evenings that means the end of the day is a rush as well.  Never the less, we managed to achieve a bit of "greening" around the house last night.

On the way home I stopped in at the garden centre and bought some vege seedlings.  Our vege garden is currently an overgrown and neglected jungle, but I am determined that this challenge will be the start of growing at least some of our own food.  I realised we probably didn't have enough time to prepare the ground and get the plants in last night, but at least having them at home meant when we did have time, we also had plants!

We did have enough time to start a compost bin.  I am ashamed to say that despite growing up in suburban NZ I have never had my own compost bin.  When I was young I think Dad had one, but it seemed to me like more of a place to dump lawn clippings and dog poo than a valuable resource.  I also tried Bokashi once, but having no garden to speak of and a dog that was trained to find fruit (he's a retired Biosecurity Detector Dog) it never really came to anything.  So we bought a bin, read the instructions and got started.  The first layers were some well rotted leaf litter from under the trees in the front yard, some shredded paper from my office and our food scraps and tea bags from yesterday.  Mr 2 really enjoyed helping and I'm looking forward to refining my method and reaping the rewards for the vege garden in months to come.

Yes, that's the overgrown vege garden in the background.

That's not all he enjoyed helping with - keeping with the waste reduction theme, we also decided it was time we stopped the amazing amount of junk mail that arrives in our letter box on a daily (or more frequent) basis.

While we were on our sign-making kick we decided to try and save more water too, so Mr 2 helped me make and put up a notice for the toilet.  Yup, it says what you think it does:

This got me thinking about other ways to save water, and as I was about to put a load of washing on I decided to put a bucket under the outlet to collect the water.  I'm going to use it to water my potplants this afternoon.  Since I was getting buckets out I popped on in the bottom of the shower too - this can collect water while we're waiting for it to warm up and I'll use it to flush the toilet.