April is the month when everyone turns green for the environment. It’s also the month of Heron Bay’s community garage sale. What a fantastic way to combine environmental protection and extra cash! By inviting others to reuse old clothing and household items, our neighborhood is also diverting tons of materials from the landfill.

You know, we birds have always been good about reusing things instead of throwing them away. Take dryer lint for example. Something you quickly discard would be used by my woodland cousins to soften their nests. Then there are the milk cartons children turn into feeders for hungry birds. Some birds even reuse nests that have been abandoned from the previous spring.

Reuse is second in the preferred methods of controlling the amount of waste we discard. Simply using less stuff, or reducing waste, is first. Then comes reusing what we can so we can avoid buying (and creating) more stuff. If we can’t reuse it, we should recycle it so it can be manufactured into something new. If there’s no other choice, then we can discard it.

If you’re not of the feather to have garage sales, be sure to take your reusable things to a place that will resell or recycle them, such as Goodwill Industries.  It’s the least you can do to help protect our environment.

My budding environmentalist is at it again. This time, she’s worried about our region’s water supply. Of course, we’ve all been talking about it since last summer’s drought, but Haley’s decided it’s time to make a difference in our family.

When we turn on hot water in the faucet, we collect the cold water that comes out first and set it aside to water plants or even to flush the toilet. Helen fills a pan with clean water to wash our vegetables, and Spalding has shortened the time he spends in the shower by three minutes a day, saving up to 700 gallons a month. He very kindly offered to stop taking showers at all, but we insisted that cutting back to a few minutes everyday was doing his part. Haley wanted her mother to start washing dishes by hand, but Helen promised instead to run only full loads, saving up to 800 gallons a month. As for me, I’ve installed water-saving showerheads in the bathrooms. Each saves up to 800 gallons a month, and I bought the high pressure models, so you really can’t tell a difference.

Haley’s found The Water Family Game online. It was produced in the U.K., so some of the words they use sound kind of funny to us, but the nestlings enjoyed the different activities and learned a lot. I have to admit that I did, too. I didn’t even know you could buy eco-friendly dishwashing detergent, did you?