This weekend at our neighborhood street fair, we saw recycling, trash and compost bins with these fantastic signs and I started thinking about how lucky we are to be able to recycle so many things in our curbside bins. I think I often take it for granted how green our county is! (Shame on me!)

We can recycle a number of things that you typically can’t recycle in other parts of the country including all plastic types, shredded paper, laundry baskets, lawn furniture, plastic toys, bubble wrap, and household electronics such as cell phones, answering machines, stereos, and home printers.

Yes, lawn furniture and stereos. It boggles the mind.

And we don’t need to sort our recycling! Perfect for busy mothers.

Our trash pickup also includes a compost bin that gets collected weekly. In our yard debris/compost bins we can compost tea bags, bread, vegetables, fruits, pasta and rice, eggshells, wood ashe, and yard clippings.

(While this is incredibly convenient, the down side is that we don’t have our own compost pile that we could use to enrich our garden. We end up buying compost instead and that’s a of a financial bummer.)

And in true California fashion, a keen reminder that our trash doesn’t really go away. Evidently we’re all about laying environmental guilt on you. Sigh.

Sorry about that.

This weekend we attended the Ultimate Dress-Up Birthday Party!

I think the pictures speak for themselves.

Drinking apple juice… I mean, tea!

Yes, Miss Leyba’s wearing “butterfly wings!”

Just call this place Little Girl Heaven.

Today, being Friday, we did something new. After weeding, removing less-than-beloved plants, enriching and turning over the soil (all activities most certainly considered to be OLD), we planted bulbs.

Evidently Spritzer-Leyba’s are not ones for planting ordinary things like daffodils or crocuses. Miss Leyba and I had to choose the three feet tall giant purple allium.

They will look like this:

(photos from flickr)

I know, they are gorgeous, gigantic and insane!

I desperately want them to transform the front garden and add a giant burst of color. I think this should do it! (Fingers crossed!)

I just can’t believe we have to wait six months to see if we planted them upside down… ;)

We started with a cardboard tube, the type you mail posters in, that has two secure ends and turned it into our very own rainstick:

Miss Leyba first covered the tube with two layers of paint in several colors that blend nicely together. We used Crayola washable kids’ paint in red, blue, pink and purple.

To add a little sparkle to the project, we used glue to adhere glitter and sparkle stars (most of which fell off… whoops!).

After the project thoroughly dried, we applied two coats of Mod Podge to more fully adhere the glitter and to give the rainstick a glossy shine.

Then we filled the tube with beans, lentils and seeds left over from our Earthy Collage Project. Miss Leyba filled the tube one bean at a time. Although pouring the beans into the tube wasn’t an option for our house, I highly recommend you try it. I imagine it would have been much faster. :)

Miss Leyba really enjoyed dropping beans on the floor instead of filling the tube too. “Ha ha! Don’t worry, Mom, we can sweep them up!” (She did when she was done! In fact, she’s still sweeping twenty minutes later!)

It took a while, but she finally got the cup or so of beans that we used in there.

Then we put the top securely back on and…

Ta-da!

Time to make music!

To refresh your memory, here’s what our garden looked like a month ago when we planted the fall veggies:

We used lots of composted manure mixed into the soil and planted organic veggie starts/seeds from our neighborhood nursery (chard, two types of lettuce, carrots) and cupboard (purple potatoes that sprouted). We then covered the ground with mulch to help retain moisture and heat.

And here is it today, not quite four weeks later:

Hello, leafy green vegetables!

I find it hard to believe that it’s grown so much in such a short period of time! Our veggies have easily tripled their size and we’ve been busy harvesting too!

We still have around a hundred green tomatoes (because of our cool summer), but everything else is growing beautifully.

Once we get tired of the lettuce or give up on the tomatoes, I’m pulling them out and planting kale. Stay tuned!

Do you know about Mrs. Grossman’s stickers?

I remember playing with them when I was a little girl back in the 80s.

Andrea Grossman started the company from her home here in California in the 70s and moved to a gorgeous facility in Petaluma, CA in 1995.

If you live in the North Bay and have sticker lovers in your house, you can tour their factory!

They give you lots of stickers just for visiting and you can buy directly from them at their shop, which also has sticker seconds (with barely noticable imperfections) and surplus stock at a deep discount.

I recommend picking up a few of their $2 takeout containers with miscellaneous stickers inside. A fun treat to open, you never know what you’ll get inside!

A note of caution: try not to go overboard in their gift shop. We only spent about $20 and still came home with too many stickers. And by too many, I mean it will take us years to get through this stash.

Not that we’re complaining! Stickers are fun!

I love the idea of oil cloth, but hate that it’s made out of PVC (polyvinyl chloride). So I’ve never bought any. And my table looks like this:

Terrible, right?!

I’ve been trying to figure out a reusable, washable, and easily wipeable tablecloth for craft projects.

Enter laminated cotton. It’s fabric that is laminated with a polyurethane coating, rather than made out of vinyl or PVC. It’s also free of phthalates and BPA!

Thanks to the brilliance of Amy Butler designed fabric, it’s gorgeous too!

I ordered one yard and it fits our table perfectly.

Now I just need to order two more yards to use when company come over. :)

Lean more about laminated cotton here.