Thriftiness isn’t really "new" or "green"; people have found ways to reuse scrap or discarded items for years. The pre-industrialization U.S. didn’t have what we call "trash." Every bit of scrap and waste from the home was remade, reused in some way, or sold to peddlers where it was eventually recycled. With the Industrial Revolution came more products to buy with new kinds of packaging, and trash as we know it was born.

Dave and Lillian Brummet’s Trash Talk is a book that aims to get back to minimizing waste and finding everyday uses for trash. Think of it as "Hints From Heloise" meets Mother Earth News. The introduction reminds readers that reduce, reuse, and recycle should be precluded by refuse — as in, refusing to buy items that generate a lot of waste. The book is divided into four sections: the first has ideas for reusing common household items (some not-so-common — who has a plethora of old oven racks hanging around?), and the second has plans for habits you can implement that follow the four Rs, like composting, or cutting open toiletries bottles to get all the product out. The third section focuses on tips and habits related to paper, and the brief fourth section gives statistics that remind the reader that the little things do add up.

It’s clear that the authors walk the walk: many of the tips are reuse ideas that I hadn’t heard of, and their extensive gardening background was surprisingly helpful. The home garden seemed to be a playground for reuse. And, again, this seems to be more for the crunchier crowd — it definitely had the vibe of Mother Earth News as opposed to Real Simple. That doesn’t mean that it was packed full of radical ideas; most of the tips and habits are pretty practical for those who are in the process of going green. But there were a few that I know would cause the light-greenest of readers to drop the book and never look back.

There are issues with the text. The editing leaves something to be desired; I don’t know if the format of the book was the best way to present the information. The second section just seemed a catchall for random green-living ideas. Why is there a whole chapter about picking up trash while going on walks in a book marketed as "an inspirational guide to saving time and money through better waste an resource management?" I don’t think there’s really enough material here for a book like this: there’s a lot of unfocused information that, while interesting, didn’t really have a lot to do with solid waste reduction. And for $19.99, you’d think you get a lot more out of a paperback than 190 pages with a lot of white space.

All in all, the book is worth a read, but not a purchase. You’d be better off checking it out from your library, if you can find it.

When we moved into our first home, our bedroom closet had some hideous doors that we knew were going bye-bye. We put them in our unused garage with the hopes that we'd be able to use them someday. One year later, when I was prepping to start a garden, I needed a way to prevent our black lab, Asher, from getting into the veggie plants. I decided to build a raised garden bed, and my mind immediately went to the doors in the garage.

You can easily build a low-tech box like this for your garden for very little money and with very little construction experience. These raised planter boxes can be as large or as small as you can find doors for. It keeps our dog out and I don't have to kneel to tend to the plants in the box, plus we kept the doors out of the landfill. You could also use this for a compost bin, although you would have to use doors with vented slats, like our long doors, to maintain air flow.

Materials Needed:

• 4 salvaged wooden interior doors or cabinet doors, roughly the same width (solid wood or vented slats)
• 16-24 nails or screws
• electric drill or hammer

We visited our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore, where you can buy salvaged building materials for next to nothing (and give your money to a worthy cause) and found two cabinet doors that were roughly the same width as our old closet doors for a few bucks. We left the doorknobs on because that made the box easy to carry to our chosen location after we finished building.
Construction is so simple that my husband and I were able to build this in about fifteen minutes.

1. Lay all doors out on flat surface in roughly the same arrangement that they will be in your box.

2. Stand one end door up (the shorter cabinet door here). Stand one side door up so these two doors form an L. Make sure both doors are evenly on the ground

3. Use nails to join these two pieces together. Nail the face of the short door to the edge of the long door. Three or four nails down each side should do it.
End View
4. Repeat, attaching the other long door to the shorter side, keeping all pieces evenly on the ground.

5. Attach the final short door to the longer two on the opposite end from which you started.

6. You can reinforce by drilling screws on each cabinet face through the long doors, but ours was sturdy with just the nails.

After you are done, you can paint it, then move the box to where you want it in your yard. We then filled ours with layers of mulch, compost, and topsoil. This will settle over time, so go ahead and fill all the way to the top. We also surrounded the box will mulch to keep weeds from popping up. This particular box held 2 tomato plants, three basil plants, and multiple carrot plants.