Running a zero-waste kitchen isn’t all that hard. And it’s super-cheap. All it will cost you is your sanity.

Once you realize that just about every green thing in your garden is edible, you will never sleep again. I don’t mean kale, spinach, lettuces, where the leaf is the crop, or even the famous “yes you can eat that” broccoli stalks and turnip greens. I mean carrot tops, the weed known as lamb’s quarter, even the frigging clover.

Caveat: don’t eat rhubarb leaves and don’t mess with pokeweed. After that, you can google it all and see just how easy it would be to spend the rest of your life cooking down all the edibles into stews, soups, and broths redolent with vitamins. Making pestos to hide bitter herbs behind bright cheeses. Mixing that patch of ground elder that escaped weeding notice with cucumber and lemon before canning—and you haven’t lived until your mother has brought down a mason jar from your shelves and read aloud: ground elder, serve chilled, and then looked at you.

Gardening isn’t my forte; I tend to spend March drawing diagrams on graph paper and dreaming of trying wasabi this year. By the time planting starts in May, I’m sick of thinking about it and eyeball plant the whole thing. The results look like someone sneezed while carrying open seed packets.

But once I discovered those weeds that sprang from nowhere were edible, well, hey, even a sad little garden is productive. The radishes grew big as bushes and flowered while I was away for a week. Did you know radish pods are delicious when charred with lemon butter? Radish flowers taste great straight.

The problem is, busy people trying to keep one simple patch of carrots from taking over the world thin the carrots and are done with it. A zero-waste kitchener (also known as OCD) will take them inside, dive to the bottom of the freezer for the black walnuts she collected from her backyard last fall and made her husband shell all winter long, and make vegan pate. She will throw the entire overgrown radish bush into a blender for vegetable broth.

Things that can be bought for $3 (last week, it might be $5 now) can be made at home for about an eight hour time investment. Most days my laptop is running next to my canner or fermenting crock so I can jump up and adjust foodstuffs before I go back to adjusting words.

Zero waste – not even a waste of time, because underneath the “not one pea shall fall” lunacy, I know where my food came from (that crazy overgrown garden) and it was fun to make it. Is it worth it, this zero waste kitchen?

That’s a question with two answers for every person. I’m having fun. Go by, mad world.