"Simple Living" - Chapters 49 and 50

Just jump in if joining, no "catch up" ... just today is today ...

I will include chapter headings, as we discovered some differences between the US and UK editions regarding chapter order.

Chapter 49 - Don't Let Things Go To Waste - Take a part of some food you ordinarily throw away and find a recipe or reuse them in some other way. For example, these simple recipes for cooking onion skins that we often throw in the trash (https://food52.com/blog/16853-4-ways...up-onion-skins) or for lemon peels (https://food-hacks.wonderhowto.com/h...peels-0168627/). In Zen life, precious resources are used with much greater care and efficiency than most of us bother with in modern consumer life.

Chapter 50 - Don't Be Bound By A Single Perspective - Rescue some item or object about to be tossed in the trash, and repurpose it in some useful way. For example, wash out a used tin soup can and turn it into a holder for old nails, an incense burner or maybe a planter for a seed like in our previous week. Use old worn clothes to clean some part of your house you have forgotten to clean for awhile or, if good with a needle (like all our Rakusu sewers now are :p ) to sew into some new item (https://www.buzzfeed.com/connieesch/...hes-throw-away).

Gassho, J

StLah

Chapter 49 - composting is a good option. I have a open top composter that we put all non meat organics into. The squirrels, skunks and other critter dig through it for what they need then each year the new composted material goes on my garden to recharge the soil.

Chapter 50 - doing but I’ll see if I can do a bit more. We are very much trying to reduce our waste

49--we have a composter too. But it's one of those rotating barrel types that critters can't get into--we have enough of them hanging around :)
Anyway, my favorite thing to do with old bananas is to make banana bread. The blacker and mushier the better.

50--this is a weird one, but I was sitting zazen when it suddenly occured to me that instead of buying piddle pads for my old cat who has developed a house-soiling problem* I could just cut up this old blanket I wanted to toss anyway, and slip in big pieces of plastic bag between the layers and sew them back up again. I can also wash and re-use them!

*yes, kitty is going back to the vet soon in case there's something really wrong

Gassho

Nenka
ST