Simple Seed Holder

It’s autumn, and you have harvested all the fruits and vegetables.  If you are into starting you own plants in the spring, you will want to keep some of the seeds from the fall harvest.

I have started to do some of that and was looking for a way to store the seeds.  I didn’t want to put the seeds in a plastic sandwich bag since some of the seeds were still kind of fresh and moist. I wanted to package them so that they could dry up and keep till next spring. I needed to label the packages so I could tell what was what. I have different types of peppers, tomatoes and melons.  It would be good to differentiate between the hot peppers that I grow less of to the different colored bell peppers.

Rice Filled Sock - your personal warmer

Remember those rubber hot water bottles that you might have used for soothing that cramped muscle or to warm up the bed on a cold winter’s night? Maybe you are too young to have that experience.  My daughter made a rice filled sock that does a much better job than the old water bottle.  She learned it from her friend .  The sock can be painted with a Sharpie pen and can be made into a very attractive companion (see above picture).

Look for an old sock and fill it with rice.  You can use any old sock that is still in good shape (no holes).  It can be any type of sock.  This a good opportunity to use up the pile of socks that you have been keeping while you were hoping that its companion would show up some day. : )   Of course you can also use a pair of socks to make a “twin” set of warmers.

Overall Grafting 2009 was a Success

It’s been a while since I did all those grafts in spring of 2009.  It is now Fall of 2010.  The scions that took had a full two seasons to grow.  Most of the scions took except for the experimental grafts.

The ones that failed were the cross genus grafts between the apples and pears.  Although I had one success before grafting an apple scion to a pear tree, I was not able to repeat that.  Also, except for the branch shown above, all the cherry grafts did not take.  While not having more cherry grafts take is a disappointment, it was not a big surprise.   Most of the branches I got from my friend Dave were mature branches.  Most of them had

One Simple Way to Conserve Water

Generally, it is advicable to run the tap a little bit before drinking the water off a tap, especially if the tap had not been used overnight.  Also, one might just want to run the water till it is cold for drinking or warm for washing hands.  Lots of water can be wasted.  Why not collect the water to use for other purposes in the house.  The water can be used for washing dishes or watering plants.

One easy way to do it is to wash and save a gallon milk or cider jug.  Keep the jug near a faucet so that water can be collected instead of letting it go down the drain.  In our house we collect about a gallon of water every few days.  This is just about enough to water the potted plants inside the house.