3 ways to reuse and recycle in your home (assuming you have a wood stove)

1. Make your own fire starter. To easily start fires for our wood stove, we bought a box of fire starter. Seems like a good idea right?
Can we make it ourselves though? Turns out we can.

Erik researched fire starter and realized you can make your own fire starter by putting dryer lint in a dixie cup then melting wax on top.  He melted some broken crayons (surprisingly with 3 kids we have broken crayons!) on dryer lint to make a fire starter.

We used it this morning to get our fire started and it worked perfectly! Even for someone as fire-creating challenged as me. I tend to forget about the fire and let it go out :(. We've only had the wood stove a few weeks so I'm sure I'll get used to it.

2. Use wood ash to make soap. Our fire everyday makes a lot of ash. While we could just throw it away we wanted to find a good use for it. You can use wood ash to make lye, then mix it with tallow (or fat) to make soap. To gather fat, I *had* to make some bacon and we saved the fat in a tupperware. When we have enough ash we are going to attempt to make lye. I'll let you know how this goes. I'd like to wait until it's warmer. Bacon soap - nothing better :).

3. Composting (you don't need a wood stove for this). We bought compost for our garden last year. This seems a little redundant since you can make your own compost.  So we got a compost bin and are now composting.

It seems wasteful to throw away dryer lint when we can reuse it for fire starter or throw away old lettuce and veggies when we could compost them.  It is especially wasteful since we turn around and buy those items!

We are looking around for more ways to reuse and recycle and reduce our trash!  Hopefully we are more environmentally friendly now.

101 points on quiddler today. I made the word "watering" and the word "hm". I didn't realize hm was a word but now I know!