Recycle

Before taking your Christmas tree to the recycling center this year, consider using it to create backyard habitat for birds. To attract birds to your backyard, you must provide their three basic needs- food, water, and cover or shelter. Your old Christmas tree will provide excellent shelter for birds, providing protection from wind and predators. It can also serve as a feeding station, where you provide a buffet of food that our native birds love.

Beginning in late summer, most gardeners have an abundance of landscape waste; whether it's dead plants from vegetable gardens or ornamental beds, foliage and branches from pruning trees and shrubs, or fallen tree leaves. Why not make use of these great organic materials, instead of piling them into bags and hauling them off to the landfill? You can easily turn them into nutrient-rich compost to use in your gardens next year.

Composting is a great way to recycle garden waste and reduce the money spent on trash disposal and store-bought fertilizer.

Most gardeners know food scraps contain nutrients that can be used to improve garden soils. The most common way of handling kitchen scraps is adding them to a traditional compost pile, but a less well-known composting method also works very well – pit or trench composting.

This method is also called vertical composting and soil incorporation composting, but no matter the name, it's one of the simplest methods of handling smaller quantities of food waste.