How’s this for a low impact bath. My kids recently had a bath in my brother’s backyard.

The bath was found lying around my brother’s property – he previously used it as a worm farm.

The water was collected in a tank and the heating came from burning reclaimed wood (see the ashes under the bath).  The air conditioning and heating – well that was provided by Mother Nature.

Ok, so it’s not quite spring but since spring cleaning is such a mammoth effort I’m starting early.

But I’m not going to throw any of my unwanted stuff out. Instead I’m going to keep it all out of landfill by rehoming, reusing and recycling.

Like a good spring clean – that is never quite finished - I plan to keep updating this page as I go. I’d love to hear your ideas about ways you’ve rehomed, reused and recycled your stuff. Please add them to the comments below and I will try to incorporate them into this story.

I’m starting with all the unwanted clothes in the house. This is what I did or am about to do. (more…)

It’s raining here in Sydney, which makes a wonderful break from the intense heat we’ve had recently.

There’s nothing I love more than gardening in a light summer rain. The garden comes alive with dripping lushness and the soil smells sweet and earthy.

Today, I planted some of the native spinach I found last week into one of my vege patches. It’s in a spot I don’t really use much so I am hoping it will spread out quite a lot. This is an experimental patch to see how the spinach grows.

My son helped plant it, so we’ve called it Liam’s spinach patch. It was lovely watching him fuss over it, and then spend the rest of his time trying to catch rain drops on his tongue.

Next week I’m due to have a baby so I’ll be a bit quiet on the Greenfoot front for the following few weeks or so.

I’ve been reading a book called Raising Baby Green, which has some interesting tips on how to have a green baby. It’s American so some of the information is not so relevant to Australia but some interesting tips never-the-less.

One thing I’m planning to do once my baby is born is to try out some of the newer cloth nappies on the market. These days cloth nappies have come a long way since the good old square white, towelling ones, which we used with my son. We also experimented with other more eco friendly disposable nappies, however, this ended up getting pretty expensive.

Carly over at Buddlebums kindly sent me a sample of her cloth nappies, which I will definitely be trying out.

I’m sure there are loads of great cloth and eco alternatives to the regular disposable nappies out there. Please if you know of any let me know in the comments below so I can check them out.

Cheers and see you soon.

Below is a list of nappy related resources. This list is a work in progress and by no way a representation of all the relevant resources in Australia. To add a link, please post it in a comment below or email me at: greenfoot at email dot com. Or visit the feedback page.

Green Nappy
Reusable, environmentally friendly cloth nappies that have a self-unfolding design and are designed by an Aussie mum.