Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Glad in conjunction with their #SAVEITSUNDAY program. With #SAVEITSUNDAY, Glad hopes to educate the public about the consequences of food waste, and I am proud they’ve asked me to be a part of the program. I am being compensated to share my #SAVEITSUNDAY experiences; all opinions are 100% my own.
As I mentioned back in my first #SAVEITSUNDAY post, the average American wastes $1500 worth of food each year. That’s right: $1500…quite a chunk of change to basically be tossing in the garbage.
Throughout my previous posts in this series, I’ve shared ways you can prepare and store food in order to cut down on food waste. My goal has been to help you decrease the amount of trash you are sending to landfills (food represents the single largest component of municipal solid waste reaching landfills, and food waste eventually converts to methane, a greenhouse gas implicated in global warming). The average American throws away 25% of the food they buy…we need to work to get this percentage down, and when we do, we’ll be saving more of our hand-earned cash.
As part of my compensation for blogging about the #SAVEITSUNDAY program, Glad recently sent me a $1500 educational grant. This money is meant to symbolize the $1500 that may be saved by each of us when we prepare and store our foods properly so they keep fresher longer. Glad asked me to share how I am going to be spending the money with you.
We moved to this house largely because of the property. Our previous home was on a small shaded lot and all of my vegetable gardening attempts were a disaster; I fell in love with the potential of the giant sunny yard we have here. I wanted plenty of space for our dogs and cats to roam, plus my husband and I fantasized about not just a big garden, but keeping chickens and bees, as well. Fast forward a few years and we’ve got the big garden (I wrote about how we built our garden here) and the chickens. (I did give the beekeeping a try, but my bees died. I am trying to decide if I should give it another go.) Now that we’ve been doing all this for a few years, we’ve got quite a few improvements we need to make at this point. So I’m going to put my $1500 toward making fixes to our garden and the area in which our chickens hang out, and I’ll also purchase plants (and possible fruit trees) for the garden. (Any money left over will be donated to our local food pantry.)
What needs fixing exactly? Well the winter has really taken its toll on just about everything, but our fencing has really suffered quite a lot. Between the deer and my animals, fencing is not optional here and ours is kind of a mess right now. We are also going to be opening up a bigger area in which the chickens can free range, and that will need to be fenced as well (because I don’t want my chickens to be vulnerable to predators).
