Reusing Archives - Forgetful Momma

Earlier this week we planted some seeds in a mini greenhouse. Thought it was rather fitting to use recycled plastic eggs from Easter, talking about the three R’s and protecting the environment. Dual learning taking place here people. We have already started our seeds for our family garden, you can see how we introduced gardening to our kids here.

Mini Greenhouse Gardening with Kids

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We planted some seeds in these containers from Easter. They were filled with candies, but we couldn’t throw them away because they could come in handy later on. And they did. We filled the bottom half with dirt, planted seeds and watered them.

We popped the cover on them and placed them on the sunniest window ledge we have.

Within a few days, we had our first sprouts growing in our mini greenhouse. We’re excited to get our flowers growing, and for the last frost to be done and over with so we can get them moved outside into a bigger containers where we can share them the butterflies and bumblebees.

Also, due to the container being clear, we’ll be able to see the roots.

UPDATED: These are after just 2 weeks! The one above is the one that was originally in this post. The one below is Brookland’s flowers, which had a longer germination period. But are growing now as well.

Added information for Earth Day:

Greenhouse Effect

A greenhouse is a structure completely covered, usually walls and a ceiling, made of transparent material, such as glass or plastic, in which plants requiring regulated climatic conditions are grown.

While we’re talking greenhouses you can also talk about greenhouse effect… which is solar energy absorbed at Earth’s surface is radiated back into the atmosphere as heat. As the heat makes its way through the atmosphere and back out to space, greenhouse gases absorb much of it.

Talk about the 3 R’s.

Recycling. Reusing. Reducing. We reused our plastic containers from Easter as our greenhouses. We also reduced waste by not throwing the container in the garbage (or recycling).

Different Ways to Garden

What if I told you there’s different methods than a typical garden uses that would lighten the load all while giving you more vegetables? Here is a great course to help you get started gardening with your family and get the most bang out of your garden. It is a complete gardening course designed to help out anyone, even if you have given up on gardening in the past.

Earth Day Crafts and Activities

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We’ve read Don’t Throw That Away!, got some great ideas for reusing common everyday items. We also read Why Do We Recycle?, This book is great for leaning about recycling instead of throwing garbage on the ground, in the ocean, and such. I have one more book to read this morning before school: Fancy Nancy: Every Day Is Earth Day, we love Fancy Nancy.

We have done a few crafts too!

I took some toilet paper rolls and cut different length and sized slits in the bottom of a few. Some packing paper I saved from Walmart online orders, and paint, and we had a fun little craft.

Another fun activity we did reusing items that would normally be tossed right away was painting with markers.

We took some drying out markers that normally would have been tossed away and put them in a little water. Took some more of the packing paper and drew a beautiful picture!

You also can have some fun with the water leftover. If you put each color into a different cup to keep the colors separate, or put them together as we did to have some “rainbow” color.