Little Things Really Do Add Up

If you put aside $5 a week, at the end of a year you have $260 saved. If you save all of your scraps of bread products (those ends, stale muffins, lone squares of cornbread, etc) in the freezer, before you know it you'll have enough for a strata or bread pudding. If you drink a half cup of water every hour, at the end of a 14-hour day you've consumed 56 ounces of water.

You may remember that last fall I harvested a total of 12 winter squash and small pumpkins. These weren't jumbo piece of produce, just small garden ones. Of the 12, 10 matured enough to contain mature seeds (the kind that you'd want to eat). When I'd cut into a squash or pumpkin, I'd clean out the seeds, wash them,  set aside a few for planting, then freeze the rest in a small ziplock bag (stored in the freezer). Well, by the end of the fall (after using all of the squash/pumpkins), I had 2 baggies full of edible seeds! This was enough to roast pumpkin seeds on two occasions last week, yielding enough delicious seeds for our family's snacking over a couple of days each time.

I'm used to the small size of the pumpkins that I can grow in my not-always-sunny garden. And when I open one up, I'm happy to find some seeds inside, but I never have more than a handful or two in any one pumpkin or squash. If I were to consider washing and roasting just a handful of seeds, I might not bother and compost them instead. By saving seeds over the course of using all of the pumpkins/squashes, there really was enough to "bother" with.

It was really satisfying to use all of the edible portions of each pumpkin or squash. And as a bonus, my family was super happy with the healthy and tasty snack.

An Easter Tree Done for Free

I can't take credit for the idea. One of our neighbors did an outdoor tree like this last year. And then this morning, while out for my walk, I saw they'd done it again. It's cheery, seasonal, and just so simple.

With my kids grown now, I have a lot of plastic Easter eggs that don't get the use they once did. A few scattered around the house look cheery, and my kids like to hide a few eggs for each other. But otherwise, I needed to find another way to use some of these.

We have a slim tree-like shrub just outside our driveway/kitchen door, yet visible to the street and passers-by. At Christmas, I put lights and outdoor ornaments on this tree. In February, I string it with pink-purple lights. I had been wanting some outdoor Easter decor. These plastic egg ornaments seemed like just the right thing.

I took a dozen small plastic eggs and attached wire hangers. I used florist wire, as that's what I have and it's cheap. The top end of each egg either had a small hole in it already or it had a dimple, which I poked a hole through using a corkscrew. 

I threaded one end of a 5-inch length of wire through this hole. Using pliers, I turned the end of the wire into a small spiral inside the egg half, preventing the wire from being pulled out of the egg's top.

I used the pliers again to form a hook on the other end of the wire. Once this was formed, I snapped the egg halves back together. Each egg and wire took about 3 minutes to do, so I think I spent about 35 minutes on this project in total.

We had a dry spell in our rainy day, so I headed outside to hang these "new" ornaments on our tree. I have a few kids-at-heart in my household who really love it when I decorate for holidays.