Saving money!

I just got done reading a great book called Saving Money Anyway You Can......Becoming a Frugal Family. This book was such a great read and although most of the things in there I already do, it did bring some new insight into a few things. For instance, to help save the environment along with saving lots of money is to always buy used. Go to garage sales, consignment shops, and best of all use freecycle. Most of this I already put into play and almost all of my kids clothes I buy used outside of the nice things that their grandparents will buy them. But this can go further than clothing, which is what I have never done. For instance we are really wanting to get new furniture someday......new leather furniture.......big ouch on our budget. I never really considered buying it used which is probably where it will eventually have to come from. Now all my kids furniture is used outside of our baby set which my parents bought us. Adriana's bedroom set came from my cousin's daughter. Andrew's bed is a Thomas the Train toddler bed which my mom bought him for his birthday off of Craigslist and his dresser is my sister's old baby dresser from her kids room. I think the hardest part of buying used would have to be a mattress. I'm not sure I can use someone else's used mattress.
It also had a lot of other good ideas on saving money but these had to do with being green and recycling all your old items and using recycled items. It is an older book so some things are really outdated but otherwise a good, easy read.

Our Composter!

Not long after starting our garden, I saw some articles about how good compost is for you garden. So I began looking more into it. I was completely amazed with how many things you can recycle into a compost pile. I looked into different ways to make your own compost and I liked the containers because I was afraid my neighbors would have an issue with us if we had an open compost pile in our backyard. Well my wonderful in-laws told us they had a compost tumbler at their house that they don't use and we were welcome to borrow it! This was great news to me as the cheapest one I have found so far was around $75. So we immediately went to work on making our compost. I read that it can take anywhere from 6 months to a year to get some good compost to use so this will be perfect for our garden next year.
Of course I got the kids involved with our new recycling program and they love it! I told them all the things we can put into it and they love helping us out with recyling. So here is a picture of them with a few of the things we can put into the compost: Joey holding up some grass representing our yard clippings. Andrew holding up a bag with shredded paper and a shredded paper bag. Adriana holding a container I use to collect all our extra fruit and veggie clippings I have after cooking.

And here is a picture of our compost tumbler. I know not too exciting but I am really excited to see what great compost I can make out of it!

I will keep you updated on how it is coming along!
(Oh and if you are wondering what the red spots are on my kids faces, Adriana got a stamp at school that day from the carnival and they thought it was great fun to stamp their faces.....ugh!)