Archive | HOME AND GARDEN

Gardening is a fantastic activity that everyone in your family will enjoy, especially your children. It is the perfect way to spend several days a week working together outside in the fresh air and sunshine. Gardening is also great for instilling a sense of responsibility, cooperative learning and excitement in your child. Not to mention, when all is said and done, you are left with a beautiful bounty of fresh, organic foods that your family grew together — and will enjoy eating together.

The key to getting your child super excited about gardening is choosing fruits and vegetables that are easy for them to grow. You want them to have a successful experience gardening, and it helps when the produce they are growing is relatively foolproof. I have planted many different types of fruits and vegetables with my son over the year and have found 7 items that are tried and true when it comes to gardening with children. Several of these plants can be grown inside (in a sunny window or patio), if you’re a city dweller. Jump over to Inhabitots to learn the 7 easiest fruits and vegetables to grow this spring with your children — and get planting!

photo credit Shutterstock via Inhabitots

Target has been celebrating Earth Day since its inception in 1970. While Earth Day takes place on April 22 this year, Target believes Mother Earth deserves an entire month of celebration, so they will  be sharing a look at what sustainability means to Target throughout April.

What better way to start off the month and celebrate than by making your home more sustainable? As a Target Inner Circle member  I featured an Earth Month makeover for your pantry using items that can be found at Target.

As part of this simple, sustainable and healthy pantry makeover, I caught up with Target Mommy Ambassador Soleil Moon Frye on how she integrates sustainability into her home and her family’s lifestyle. Jump over to Target’s A Bullseye View for the Q & A.

For Earth Day, as a member of the Target Inner Circle I want to share a simple, sustainable pantry makeover with you – using items that can be found at your local Target store.

Our family purchases most of our organic pantry staples in bulk which makes having a functional pantry system essential for keeping staples organized, easy to access and fresh. This is something that we had struggled with for years – our pantry was hard to utilize making it difficult to know what we had on hand or what staples we needed when we did our marketing.

Not to mention, we were using these really old plastic containers to store some of our food – and every time I would go to get something I worried about the effects of storing my family’s food in plastic. And the items that weren’t being stored properly could possible go stale, resulting in food waste. We were craving a better pantry system and knew that a makeover was essential to living a more sustainable lifestyle.

The mister and I decided to use glass containers because we wanted containers that you could see through making finding exactly what you are looking for a snap, and since glass doesn’t leach chemicals we feel that it is the safest way to store our food. After scouring our local Target store and Target.com, we put together a design plan for our pantry space; here are the pieces that we chose.

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These glass storage jars are wonderful because they are large enough to hold large quantities of bulk items, have a large mouth making access to the products inside easy and the lids are air-tight seals keeping the contents fresh.

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These containers are much smaller than the Montana glass storage containers making them perfect for organizing products that you have smaller quantities of. These are also air-tight seals and fit nicely side by side int he pantry.

The mister and I got to work, turning our unorganized pantry into a chef’s haven – using the glass storage containers above and grabbing inspiration from a nice chat with Soleil Moon Frye! I will share our Q + A session later this week.

Our first step was to remove everything from the pantry and give it a good scrub down. I couldn’t believe the amount of food that we actually had stuffed in those cabinets, we did an initial purge getting rid of those non-organic items that we weren’t going to consume and also any products that had been left over from when friends and family visited. We then laid out where we wanted the canisters to be stored and started to fill them with our staples. Here is a peek at the very messy, unorganized before photo and the super organized, easy to find and use after photo.

We are delighted with the end result – it is even better than we thought it would be. Eben is able to find a snack quickly without tearing the entire cabinet apart. When it is time to prepare a meal or do our marketing it only takes a moment to check to see what items we have or need more of and I don’t have to worry about plastic leaching into my family’s food anymore.

That wraps up our sustainable pantry makeover, it’s a pretty simple project that only takes an afternoon to complete – I hope it inspires you to organize your family’s pantry for more sustainable eating. 

I am a member of the Target Inner Circle – all opinions expressed are my own. Target supplied the glass containers for this makeover and there are a couple of affiliate links included in the post. Thank you for your support!

Now that Eben is growing up and his interests are changing, I set time aside each month to go through the toys that he no longer plays with. During this process, I always try to get creative with ways that the toys can be reused or upcycled into something that he will enjoy now. When I came across a bin of well loved plastic dinosaurs in the top of his closet, I knew that I had to find a fun way to reuse these prehistoric cuties. We had a couple of succulent plants leftover from a garden that we had created, and I thought it would be fun to transform the dinosaurs into planters for the succulents. This craft was super simple and much easier than I had anticipated. In a few short steps we were finished, and my son’s bedroom was adorned with new quirky planters. He has already received a ton of compliments on them from friends asking where we bought them. Jump over to Inhabitots for the simple directions, and make a couple dinosaur succulent planters for your child’s bedroom.