1. Number one on our list is get rid of weeds! All you need are gloves, a long sleeve shirt to protect your arms, long pants to protect your legs, safety glasses and a mask to protect your face, and a spray bottle full of toxic chemicals whose long-term affect on people, pets, and the environment are largely unknown. Oh, and don’t forget to lock up your kids and pets while you spray…

Yikes! If that doesn’t appeal to you (and we hope it doesn’t), you could get rid of those weeds without harsh chemicals while your kiddos and dog play nearby. There are many variations of homemade week killer floating around the web, but we like this one (full instructions found here):

Mix together, pour into a spray bottle, and spray (hint: To speed up the dissolving of the salt, heat 1 or 2 cups of vinegar, add the salt, and mix. Once the salt is dissolved, mix in the remaining vinegar)!

Note: This solution will kill grass and other desirable plants as well as weeds so aim carefully.

2. Now that your yard is weed-free, it’s time to fertilize! As was the case with the weed killer, you don’t need commercially manufactured plant food to grow big, lush blooms. In fact, you may already have everything you need to make your own plant food! The Gardening Cook has a fantastic recipe for homemade plant food. Note: This recipe makes plant food concentrate. It will need to be diluted before using on your plants.

3. Compost. If you don’t have one already, now is a great time to start a compost pile. Each of us generates about 20 lbs of food waste per month! You can drastically reduce the amount of food waste your household generates by composting. In many urban areas, compostable items can be added to the yard debris bin, to be collected by your local waste management company.

4. Become “Bee friendly”. Have you heard the buzz about Colony Collapse Disorder? Honey bees are crucial to the health and vitality of our ecosystem. Most of us are not willing or able to keep bees ourselves, but we can still help by planting bee-attracting flowers. Bee-friendly varieties include asters. foxglove, sunflowers, regional wildfowers, and other long-blooming flowers.

5. Turn all or part of your backyard into a certified wildlife habitat (or at least learn how to attract birds to your garden). This project is pretty darn awesome if you ask us. There are five simple steps to follow to create a wildlife-friendly garden including actions such as planting shrubs and/or trees that will provide shelter and food for wildlife and making clean water available. Once you’ve completed the five steps, your area can become a certified wildlife habitat.

6. Plant a garden. It could be a vegetable garden, an herb garden, or a flower garden. Gardening in any form is a fun summertime hobby. Have you heard the saying “Gardening is cheaper than therapy…and you get tomatoes!”? It’s true. Many people find that cultivating and caring for plants is meditative and relaxing. Numerous studies have shown that there are many positive health benefits to be gained from gardening.

7. Build a sheet tent for your kids (or for yourself, we won’t judge). This is perhaps the simplest project on our list. All you need is a bit of rope, a bed sheet or two, and voila! Instant summer fun. In a world of increasingly complicated technology and digital distractions (aka video games, phones, tablets, etc), it would do us all good to unplug and enjoy an afternoon outdoors. A tent made from sheets or blankets is one of those simple summer pleasures that should be on everyone’s bucket list.

8. Make a hammock like this one we found on Design Sponge. Seriously, what is more relaxing than swinging is a hammock? It is the quintessential backyard summertime activity. Bonus idea: Put the hammock inside the tent fort!

9. Grasscyle your lawn. The term is a new one, but the principles behind grasscycling are not new. In a nutshell, grasscycling is leaving behind grass clippings instead of bagging them. As the clippings decompose, they will naturally fertilize your grass. When done properly, grasscycling is the easiest and most eco-friendly way to maintain the health of your lawn. To reiterate from numbers 1 and 2, you don’t need commercially-produced products to have a healthy lawn.

10. Clean out your closet. We know, we know. This isn’t a backyard project, per se. But maybe you can send your kids out to play in the backyard (in the tent fort! In the hammock!) while you purge their (or your) closets. Regularly cleaning out and taking stock of your children’s and your belongings is a good habit to get in. Perhaps you’ll realize that you’re buying way too many unnecessary things. Perhaps not. Either way, you’ll likely be able to pare down on a few items to get rid of. And that’s where the real eco-friendly part starts. You have a choice: Throw your unwanted clothing and textile items in the trash, or donate them to a charitable institution. We hope you’ll choose the latter! Clothing is cheaper than ever before and we have more of it than any generation before us, which also means that clothing disposal rates are higher than ever. Textile waste is a huge problem in the US. What most people don’t realize, however, is that nearly 100% of textiles (clothing, paired shoes, linens, towels, and rugs) are recyclable in some way. Depending on its quality, the clothing items you donate will either be sold in a resale setting, be sold as mixed rags to wholesale clothing distributors, or be shredded and returned to a fibrous state to be used as insulation or upholstery stuffing. The wholesale used clothing industry depends on your contributions. If you simply toss your old clothes in the trash, they go to the landfill, where they can take hundreds of years to decompose and do no one any good. If, on the other hand, you donate your gently used clothing and household items, they can be used, worn, and/or re-made–to the benefit of a great many people.

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EcoGoodz is a wholesale clothing supplier in the USA. We buy mixed rags, baled linens, paired shoes (used shoes), soft toys, hard toys, and more from charities and thrift stores across the country. We then sell these items at deeply discounted wholesale rates to entities around the world, with an emphasis on developing nations. Through our work with wholesale used clothes, wholesale linens, and wholesale used shoes, we’ve kept millions of pounds of clothing, shoes, and linens out of the landfill–something we are strongly committed to. For more information, contact information is available on our website and on our Google+ page.