travel tissue

this is a personalized take on another camping hack that i have seen floating all around pinterest/buzzfeed/etc

i couldn't make the original because i apparently don't buy the correct quantity of ground coffee in a plastic tub. this is the container from the 11.3 oz size of ground folgers. 

i have sometimes in the past, but that canister is currently in use as my "washing kit" for travel and camping. 

so i was working with the small size, which does not hold an entire roll of toilet paper. 

good thing it's not too hard to swap out the roll at 3/4 full.

sorry, i didn't have a photographer, but this one is easy to do without a lot of step by step.

wash coffee canister. make a cut down the side at least a 1/4 of an inch wide and as tall as a roll of toilet paper. i started it with a pocket knife and used titanium shears to cut it, but i suspect that was overkill. tough scissors should do it. i was using what was already on the coffee table. 

insert roll. 

for the large sized canister you can use a full roll, or if you don't buy the giant mega super charmin family size garganutan rolls that i do, normal ones probably fit in the 11.3oz sized canister. 

this is the first draft. it was not quite right. if you look closely at the top of the cut in the plastic, the tissue is squeezed. this did not pull out smoothly and ripped. 

you can see the rip from the inside 

riiiiipped! if you look carefully past the flash, you can see the top of the tissue catching on the plastic and making a little tissue wad

cut a little taller and a little wider. 

yay! there's the correct fit! the tissue pulls out smoothly and cleanly, no tears. and the container is small enough to fit under some car seats or in shoe pockets on the back of the driver's seat, unlike the full sized coffee canister. 

so the original hack is to take this camping, and you can tie a string through the canister for hanging on a tree or campground bathroom door.  (you ever go to a campground in the off season? be glad they unlocked the restrooms and turned on the water, but don't count on TP!)

personally, i will be taking it to the beach this weekend. not camping but good for the road trip and for dealing with excess sunscreen spatters. 

this seems like an excellent way to have tissues at the ready in the car for those of you with kids. cheaper than fancy kleenex boxes and better protected from sticky small ones. 

Trashy Terrariums

it's time to start planting and to that end, i've been saving some trash and recycleables.
might as well start with reuse and move into recycle later

first, i saved a couple of cardboard trays from soda cans. it's a good place to start seedlings - easy to move, no mess on the counter, and sturdy enough to hold several pots or terrariums

and here you see the bottom of a gingerale bottle. clear bottles might work better, but this is what was available.

i cut the bottles in half, then on the bottom half i made 4 or 5 slits about an inch long down from the cut edge, evenly spaced

lettuce seeds from the asian market. no idea what kind they are. the only instruction in english is to soak the seeds in water in the fridge for 2 days. it's 62 degrees F in my house so i felt ok to skip this step. the terrarium doesn't have drain holes so the dirt will stay as moist as i tell it to while the seeds germinate

 when it's time to put the top on, just push the cut edges of the slits to overlap each other, reducing the circumference of the bottom half just a bit

 

push the top half of the bottle down over it as far as it will go

the overlapping edges don't matter a bit to the inner workings of the terrarium as the top should slide down well past them and you shouldn't have to cut as far down as where the soil and water come to

for the time being, i haven't put the bottle cap on, but make sure you save the cap as that is your humidity control


these fancy little containers are single serve pretzel & sabra hummus snack tubs. hat tip to my friend jon for this one - last year so many of his tomato seedlings succeeded in these that he had extra plants to give me. i've been saving the containers ever since

i'm experimenting with the seeds for the san marzanos. almost none of the tomatoes survived, between a late bloom, deer eating them, and an early freeze. i got one plant indoors while the tomatoes were green and most of the green ones went to my sister when the plant died. i found a few small tomatoes that ripened anyway, so i set them aside to dry. they may not be mature enough seeds, they may not make it for whatever reason. but i put one small tomato each in two hummus tubs with LOTS of water to soak and rehydrate. in the past i've gotten the best plants from putting whole, overripe tomatoes into dirt so i am guessing they might do better if they have the fruit to feed on as it rots into the soil.

make sure to write your variety on the top with a sharpie.
the cherokee purple seeds are a pinch of seeds leftover from a trip to monticello last year. i put half a dozen in each of 2 tubs and i figure if i get 3 seedlings out of the old seeds i'll be doing ok.

for the time being the seedling tray (cardboard box) is parked under my skylight. there's not a lot of sun this time of year but it's 35F outside tonight so i can't start seeds indoors.


update - the lettuce didn't grow. the tomatoes grew quite well, although most of the sprouts succumbed to a late and unexpected freeze. i recently found some sprouts that i didn't think would grow in one of the hummus containers in my carport, 3 months after i put a not quite ripe dehydrated tomato from last fall's frozen san marzano plant in there. fingers crossed!

first crop, these got frozen after i had transplanted and set them outside

halfway done: the wasp trap

my carport is full of wasps. i was content to live and let live as long as the were building paper nests in the far corners away from my door in places several feet above my head.
and i don't even mind mud daubers that much because they aren't aggressive but they started building on my doorframe. um... not cool. they tend to fly in the house every time i open the kitchen door. this ends badly with wasps in my sleep, cats chasing wasps and the dog snapping at them. and the inevitable finding of wasps dead in weird places.

http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/iiin/bmuddaub.html