Impromptu Trash Project

I recently took Cade out of his daycare, and he is at home with me 100% now. He was starting to develop some less than desirable learned behaviors from a few of the little "thugs" that were in his class. But, I have to say, I did like all the cool activities they had the class doing. So in an effort to continue that in his daily routine, I thought I should come up with some custom stuff to do, Extreme Stay @ Home Mommy style.

Today was a cold spring day, but I wanted to get us out there. So we loaded up the dogs, buckets, shovels, gloves and a giant plastic Tonka excavator in the pickup, and headed off into the adjacent desert. The photo above is a shot of our desert.

Once off the main dirt road, I let the dogs out for a Redneck Dogwalk (I drive, they run). We were scouting for some primo DG (decomposed granite) that I wanted to collect to mulch the xeric aroma garden. We came to a little clear spot off a secondary dirt road. Got out, unloaded stuff, and noticed that it wasn't as pristine and wild as we thought. Someone had made this spot their unofficial shooting zone for quite sometime. It was littered with exploded paint cans, endless spent shotgun casings, busted clay pigeons, some old material that looked like a rug, shot up television parts, spray cans....

Cade was running up and down the sandy lane with the dogs, and I just started to pick up the stuff and put it into a bucket. Pretty soon, the bucket was full. Having no trash bags, I dumped it out in a heap and filled the bucket again. And again. It made quite a pile. Cade wandered over and started picking up empty shotgun casings and tossing them in the bucket, too. He kept asking me, "What's this Mommy, what's this?" to any discarded object he found. So I tried to explain it was trash and someone had left it out here, and that that was wrong. But he's two and half, so who knows what he understood of that. But he did get the concept of picking up trash.

So I think we will try and do that one morning a week. I thought it might be interesting to chart how many bags of trash we pull out of there in say, 3 months. Plus, the dogs get to come along and run all over.

Having a kid that loves the outdoors is so cool. It's pretty awesome having the opportunity to get out there and teach him some basic responsibility, too, at such a young age.

Stay tuned for photos and a progress report.

Here are some pics below of the DG we ended up collecting, plus a little wild beavertail cactus plant we found. We planted him in our cactus garden at home ( he's on the right). That rocky sand is the DG I was looking for. It is also good mulch for drought tolerant plants.