I can see holding the toilet paper rolls in fast food drink trays as well. Also, using local or adapted plants is always a good idea.

Composting is a wonderful practice/habit.

As long as you have the space, you can use anything that was once alive:

kitchen scraps
stale or flat drinks, including sodas, milk, beer, wine, juices.
bones & meat (if you have enough space & can make a "hot pile", rich in nitrogen for fast decomposition)
paper products including newspaper, junk mail, shredded office paper, cardboard, cereal boxes...
grass clippings (your own or someone else's)
autumn leaves (your own or someone else's)
straw & hay

& you can use lots of other things that other people discard, such as holiday decorations:

you can find pumpkins on the days after Halloween & Thanksgiving,
straw bales after various holidays,
wrapping paper,
boxes.

Composting *can* be rocket science, but it doesn't have to be:

Mother Nature doesn't take the temperature of the pile & fret about the relative nitrogen content of each ingredient;
Whatever she has available rests on the earth until it rots & becomes part of the cycle of life once again.

You can do the same...
as long as you make allowances for the fact that some things, like bones, are more suited to Mother Nature's timetable.

She's been around a lot longer than you or I, & she'll be here after we're gone, so if we want compost on a more rapid timetable than hers, we *do* need to add more nitrogen!

Use what we have carefully. Check the refrigerator and pantry often and use ALL that wonderful garden produce before it spoils. It is expensive compost material otherwise. I'm improving on this but had a moldy squash to compost today :(

Plan ahead for purchases so no extra trips need to be made. Using my car is is one thing I do that has a huge impact on the earth. I can recycle and compost for weeks before I make up the impact of 100 miles of driving. So I try to keep a good supply of needed garden supplies and basic foods on hand to avoid extra trips. I try hard to do all my shopping while going to or from work thus avoiding extra miles. I sat down with a map and figured the shortest routes to the places I drive to most often (ie work, garden center :), grocery store). I was surprised to find a way to work that is significantly shorter...not main roads so it has lower speed limits, but timewise it is about the same. It has saved me a bit of gas on this oft traveled route. And the garden center is along the way :) Okay, maybe that is NOT frugal :)

I use organic gardening practices most of the time. I feel that is a define help to the earth. But I'll take nonorganic grass clipping, etc. for my compost pile from neighbors who are throwing it out. By time it is well broken down I'm okay with using it. And a rare insect problem on a valued plant that fails to respond to organic treatment may get a small dose of something else.

I avoid using invasive plants and destroy ones that come into my yard. There are so many wonderful natives to use instead and the wild areas are not put at risk.

I leave a buffer strip between my yard and the nearby creek. Although I am not putting dangerous chemicals on the lawn or garden, I think the added natural area works to clean and filter any runoff and is helpful.

Mostly, we need to think about and evaluate what we do right and what we do wrong. Think about how our actions affect the world around us. And then decide if we like what they are doing. Also, talk with others kindly and gently to spread the word on earth friendly gardening.

One word: REDUCE.
There is this guy Alex Steffen who says that we cannot shop our way into sustainability. When I first started gardening I was going to the garden center a lot and buying so many things I now realize were not necessary. Now my only purchase is the mulch I spread around in July every couple years, and even that I buy in bulk with the neighbors (my garden is very small) so they drop it off in front of my house without the need for plastic bags or three trips to the store. But even that, I am tempted to put away any branches I find instead of composting them and do my own mulch :D
Ah, the compost. I still have some greensand in the garage, but my garden is so fertile now that I forget to use anything in the soil.
Oh, and the lawn. We have been gradually getting rid of it. I have watered about 5 times a year for the past two years. Now that grass is almost gone and the soil is so great, nice and mulched, we finally realized we just don't have to water in our area. Duh.
Rather than the title of this thread, gardening helped us realize that waste was not part of the system. We don't miss going to the garden store, pushing the lawn mower, or setting up the sprinkler. Now we just care for the plants and talk to the neighbors.

So what is the scientist giving up to help reduce by 80%? I'd actually like to see the science behind it.

That said, we are to be stewards of the earth and to be careful in our usage. Plant and seed swapping...along with being frugal and careful - it's fun. I wanted to clear out the monkey grass from around our front bed...so I did a bit of loosening of the soil around it and put a sign by my mailbox...free monkey grass.I made a number of people very happy...and they excited me by doing the work for me!

The easiest and quickest way to protect the environment is simply to save WATER. Current issue of Garden Ideas magazine (spring 08) explains how to reduce water usage for lawns, landscaping etc, by 30-60%. I found a copy in my local library.

Whenever I can I raid jobsite dumpsters. My husband is in construction, so it is not a problem. We built more than half our out buildings out of job site "scraps". I wouldn't call 2x12x20 scrap by any means, but when the concrete forms come down, they go straight into the dumpster. We got lumber, sheeting, tin and rebar off jobsites. All we had to do was collect and pull the nails. I put the nails in a bucket and take them to the scrap yard on a normal run when it is full.
Then there is always the local lumber yard. When I was working there, we always had damaged sheet goods, and a cull lumber pile. Not to mention the abandoned special orders that the customer would have paid at least half for (company policy) and never picked up.
My latest find is the local cedar fence company. When they take down and replace a fence, they are responsible to clean the site. That means to haul off the old fence. The one I used to work with when I was a the lumber yard, hauls the old fence back to their yard and stacks it outside for people to take, FREE. I have fenced in my entire garden (approx 6000 sq ft) for FREE. Oh did I say it was FREE and not going into a land fill. I just have to paint it, shich I also got the paint for FREE, from my old work.
I recycle pretty much everything I can. When I go to town, about once a week, part of my run is to take all the plastic, steel and aluminum in to the Recycling Center in town. Not the Walmart one, but the one that is actually owned by the trash company and you can see them sorting as you drop orr. Pretty cool.
I use the same plastic pots to plant my seeds in every year. If I think I am getting low, I put an ad up on Craigslist that I would be happy to pick up garden center pots. People always call me to pick them up especially in the spring when they are all planting. I will be doing that again in about soon. It's a great source.
Oh, FYI with all the "reconstruction" going on, sonmetimes you can get free plants just by asking crews if you can take the plants before they destroy them. Usually they will let you come back after the crews are gone to take what you want. Sometimes they will even let you scavange materials too. It saves them the work of ripping it down plus the landfill costs.

Happy Hunting
Billie

One thing you can do is to help out birds and bats by providing them with homes.
So much of our environment is dependent on a balance of nature. Birds and bats are part of that balance. Givng them what some have taken away in the form of a house and perhaps food may be one of the best and cheapest ways of helping keep things in balance.

great idea with the fence company - man, i have friends who own fence companies - i am gonna ask about it!!!!!!

We do a lot of produce rescue, we have an arrangement with a local weekend market vendor to take what they have left at the end. We give a lot of it away, and can a lot of it. We also make a lot of compost with the old produce and other peopleÂs leaves and horse manure, so we donÂt buy anything to improve our garden soil. We got 180 gallons of compost out of various compost piles in the past week or two. I haven't bought a flower pot in about 20 years. I only bought peat once when I was young and foolish.

We donÂt have jobs so we save lots of energy by not driving to work. LOL If you try, there is so much you can do to limit your impact on the planet. I scavenge a lot, don't really have to look for stuff hardly, have trained friends and relatives to pass things like lumber and clothing on to us. We use freecycle. We have used cloth shopping bags for almost 20 years, have oodles of CFLs, etc. Heating our house with wood is one of the more recent things we have been doing. I wear old clothes almost all the time, I amuse teenagers by pointing out to them that my clothes are older than they are.

Marcia

I use newspaper,shredded paper, pizza boxes, leftover straw bales from fall decorating, paper dog food bags, paper grocery bags, and grass clippings in between the rows, and sometimes IN the rows of my garden for weed control.

Shallow boxes are great for collecting weeds or for kneeling on. When they start to fall apart just toss them in the compost.

When I clean out our fireplace, I dump the ashes into a box or paper bag to toss into the compost, I also use a box, newspaper or the kids old school papers to collect the kitchen scraps, and again I'll send one of the kids out to toss that into the compost.

Keep bird houses near the garden and plant sunflowers and such to encourage birds to visit your garden. They will help in pest control.

I wish everyone were as active as y'all are to protect our Earth. I'm not as good as many of you, but I try.

I recycle as much as I can, try to run the water as little as possible and avoid using paper towels. I also keep a worm bin, not so much for the compost as for a place to put kitchen scraps so I don't have to run the garbage disposal as much (saves water and elec.). Old things go to Sal. Army. I use fabric grocery and shopping bags. If I've forgotten them, I refuse a plastic bag if I can possibly carry the purchased items.

I put the lawn clippings in my roses. I spray aphids with water or ignore them. I ignore mildew, don't spray for it. I don't use systemic rose food any more.

I use Sluggo for slugs, but occasionally I get out the more powerful stuff. When that box of that is gone, I won't buy more.

I collect dead batteries at my work place and take them and other hazardous waste (meds, electronics, paint, etc.) to our monthly roundups.

I just tonight planted some melons and zucchini, and I used the first batch of compost that I made myself to mix into the soil. It will be interesting to see how much difference it makes when the seeds sprout.

Eat yogurt. It's good for you, and you get free plant pots.

Get kitty litter in the big pails. You save money, and get free plant containers.

I'm far from wholly organic, but I take steps in that direction. I keep a compost crock on my kitchen counter. If produce bits aren't good for soup (like broccoli stems), then they go into the compost crock.

Working with the previous owners' ideas of what's right for a lawn is difficult sometimes. When I turned the earth by the fence for my melons, I found black plastic several inches below the surface, covered with bark pieces, covered with what looked like dirty grey beach sand. Is it supposed to be a weed barrier? It doesn't work. The place had been on the market for over a year when I bought it, and was choked with weeds, thigh high in some places.

I only run the dishwasher and clothes washer on full loads, or I adjust the water level to fit the load.

I have 14 trees on my property and I save the leaves, and the grass clippings, for my compost bin. It's kind of fun to watch the compost bin grow, and then decrease as it decomposes.

I think being frugal with earth's resources is something we try to do in many areas of our lives, not only the garden.

-we compost (of course) whatever we can altho we try not to waste food
-we buy many plants at yard sales and charity sales - not only are they much cheaper but they are proven in our cold zone 3 climate
-DH spreads the wood ashes from our stove in the coniferous forest to reduce the acid soil so the grass will grow better
-we yard sale for whatever items we can use, I love finding garden decor, but also a lot of household items which are cheaper and may be saved from a landfill
-we use CFL bulbs in most fixtures - I know they are controversial because of the lead but they do take a lot less power
-I know many are concerned with the depletion of the peat bogs but I have read that the peat in Canada is being replenished faster than it is removed so not sure if that is a concern
-we are making fewer trips to the city since the increase in gas prices

I think we need to question some of the common gardening "facts" as many of these have been devised by the companies which sell products, for instance, how often does one really need to fertilize their lawn? We try to be organic so have done so only seldom and the lawn is nice and green. I may feed it some alfalfa pellets this year but wonder if that is even necessary.

We use no fertilizers other than compost, mulch, and alfalfa pellets. We use no chemical insect sprays but do feed the birds year round so have few insects. I saw a few aphids late in the year last year but ignored them and I think they went away with the first frost! :)

I thnk it's important to believe that every little bit helps so whatever we all do lessens the burden on Mother Earth even tho it may seem insignificant sometimes.

I wanted to add : keep plastic out of the garden and avoid buying it as much as possible. Garden edging does not need to last a thousand years, but the plastic kind will. Every bit of plastic ever made is still polluting the environment today. One reason there are so many plastic products for the garden today is that plastic cannot be recycled most of the time, but downcycled, that is, made into something else that will go to landfills or plain land in a few years anyways. What is worse, only 3.5% of plastic gets even recycled. Plastic stuff eventually becomes brittle and needs to be replaced. I learned the hard way by having stuff break after five years or so. Plastic is not frugal, but wasteful and it is not convenient for the environment. Just do a google search for the garbage patch in the middle of the pacific. 95% of marine birds have plastic in their stomachs. Adorning gardens with plastic is just terribly ironic. Reusing plastic is not nearly enough. I cringe when I see people bragging about frugality who could have avoided plastic in the first place. It is perfectly possible to be frugal without plastic. -end of rant.

Instead of spraying an insecticide (even an organic one) on my cherry tree to get rid of aphids last year, I bought lady bugs and released them.

I noticed that even though I'm not perfect at recycling everything that could be recycled, on trash day, I have 1-3 small kitchen bags of garbage. My next door neighbors, an older couple, always have 3-6 huge bags of garbage. And I'm going to start composting my cardboard.

Also, I'm a writer, and I've decided to start composting my rejection slips. :-)

What especially scares me is the plastic that "breaks down." It doesn't decompose and go away. It just breaks down into tinier and tinier and tinier pieces. It's still there. It's just not in any condition where it can be recycled or tossed away in a specific place. It never actually goes away.

The dinosaurs had their K-T boundary iridium layer. I think homo sapiens will have their plastic layer. The plastic will be there forever.

Very good, Lilacs! You might as well have those rejection slips do something worthwhile!

I feel as you do about the plastic. The plastic bottles of drinking water are a crime against the planet.

I'm not perfect either, but I did notice that since I stopped using systemic fertilizers on my roses, lizards have appeared in my yard. Yippee!

wondered what 'lapageria' or other gardeners use for edging that isn't plastic. I have trouble keeping the lawn from creeping in my beds if I don't pound in the thin plastic edging.

maryjane43 , to answer your question, I use cement blocks or bricks or pieces of wood left over from demolition or local rocks. and it can all look good. I also use exercise. I go out every year and spend time pulling grass out of my beds. You can also use a shovel, but going around your beds and making a little moat that the grass cannot grow through. A lot of these tricks were used by gardeners before plastic was invented. There is also the no grass solution. French gardeners have had lovely gardens in their backyards with little or no grass, to my knowledge. I lived there in the 50s and every lady had her backyard garden for vegetables and fruit for the kitchen. My great grand mother and grandfather had a huge garden for eating, and it was plowed anew every year by their son, which kept the grass where it belonged.

Great post. Just wondering how many people here are aware that there is a "Going Green" forum on this site?