Purple rain on Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! Today the wind and a blossoming crabapple tree delivered a beautiful shower of petals that pooled in purple puddles on the lawn and garden. (OK, maybe the color purple is a stretch … raspberry* maybe?)

No matter, I hope you find something in your backyard farm worth celebrating today. Further, I hope that in honor of the day you will commit to any change — big or small — to better care for this planet we all share.

My Earth Day pursuit this year is to minimize water waste in the kitchen.  I collect the water that normally goes down the drain when we rinse dish cloths or pour off cooking water by keeping a plastic dish pan in the bottom of the sink. This gets emptied into a gallon pitcher that I keep on the counter by the sink, then taken outside to water plants. Sometimes I even have the watering can right on the counter for this purpose. For the dishwasher, we scrape dishes into the garbage can instead of rinsing and spraying them off in the sink and having to run the disposal more frequently. The dishwasher works better when I turn on the sink to get the water hot first, so I collect this water so it also doesn’t go to waste.

This is a little thing, in fact it feels like just a drop in the bucket of water conservation when I see neighborhood sprinklers water the sidewalks, but it’s something I can do. How about you?

*Thanks, Prince, for the soundtrack of my youth.