A few months ago I posted about how we took a few steps to live a little greener in our home. We still love our cloth napkins and got a lot of use out of our rain barrel during some much anticipated downpours that happened over here in the early spring. Since then, there have been other things we’ve been inspired to do to reduce our footprint.

Save them jars! I have a set of 12 mason jars that I bought to store grains, beans, nuts, and other random pantry items. BUT, there are a ton of other glass jars that come along with things we’ve purchased regularly, like pickles, jam, honey, kimchi, and peanut butter. I just give them a rinse when they’re empty and stick them in the dishwasher. Besides storing bulk pantry items, I also love making vinaigrettes and sauces in the smaller jars, and Pat often stores simple syrups he makes in them too. They’re also great to use instead of a Ziplock bag when bringing food over to friends, they can just recycle when done!

Collect kids’ bathwater and water from washing dishes to water non-vegetable plants outside. Pat has been looking into setting up a grey-water system in our home. Grey water is water from bathroom sinks, showers, and washing machines (when you don’t wash cloth diapers) that you can use as irrigation water in your yard. Until we start a more involved project in the future, we’ve started using a bucket to collect Gianna and Caleb’s bathwater and the base of our salad spinner to collect water from our kitchen sink. All of it gets dumped into our rain barrel and we use it to water all 13 fruit trees in our yard as well as our grape vines, potted flowers, and native plants in our front yard. It’s been really awesome to not use a single drop of extra water for this, especially since for a while, our area has been in a drought.

Get free compost! We garden organically and I was thrilled to learn from a few neighbors that there are multiple nearby places for free compost. The one I checked out last week was run by our neighbor city’s waste services. I brought a shovel with me, laid out tarp in the bed our minivan, and shoveled away until I was too tired to bring back anymore! I felt pretty proud of myself.

DIY foaming hand soap. I had been debating about different soap options and landed on this one. I like that foaming hand soap uses a significantly less amount of soap than regular liquid hand soap and it’s so great to use for kids. Gianna loves the foam and can more easily spread it around her little hands. I picked up a foaming soap dispenser at Target and then followed this recipe, using Castille soap I already had.