How To Use Leaves in Fall

It's Fall. Your yard is covered with leaves. How do you use those fallen leaves to your advantage? If you do any type of gardening you can make leaf mold with your leaves. And use that leaf mold in your vegetable or flower beds come next summer when you need a good mulch or soil amendment to hold moisture and enrich your soil. Making leaf mold need not be a difficult task. Simply rake and bag your leaves and throw the bags in a pile hidden away somewhere in the backyard. By mid-summer the leaves will have broken down good enough to use as a mulch around plants to conserve precious moisture. If you have the space and some leftover fencing you can make some leaf mold bins and stuff the leaves down in them tight. If you have a vegetable garden you can go ahead and till your leaves into the garden now and the leaves will help improve the tilth of your garden soil. You can also add leaves directly to your compost pile. There is no reason for anyone to have to burn leaves in the Fall. If you're not into gardening, just bag the leaves up and offer them to your gardening friends. Most will be happy to take and use your fallen leaves.

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How To Make a Homemade Ice Pack

You may, at one time or another in your life, find yourself needing a homemade ice pack. A sprained ankle. An aching back. It doesn't matter what the condition is, you'll just want relief, and quick! You can make an ice pack quickly by adding 3 cups of water and 1 cup of rubbing alcohol to a one gallon freezer bag. Seal the bag and then slide this bag inside another 1 gallon freezer bag and seal, to minimize any leaks. These really work better than many of the commercial ice packs found in stores. And the best part is that it is cheap!

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How To Get Engine Grease Out of Clothes

I love working on cars and trucks. But with some projects you'll find me covered in engine grease and grime and it inevitably ends up staining my clothes. You can use a commercial laundry detergent to try to remove the stain, but most of the times you'll pull the piece of clothing out of the dryer and find that the stain still remains. Well, those clothes usually end up becoming my work clothes, if they weren't already. That is, until I started using a product I just recently found at our local auto parts store. Greased Lightning. The stuff is like a wonder cleaner. There are actually three different formulations that I've found locally. One is in a purple bottle. One is in a white bottle. And the third is in a clear bottle. The stuff in the purple bottle works like magic. You should be able to find it at Auto Zone if you have one nearby. The stuff in the white bottle is good for using on clothes to remove stains and general household cleaning. I found it at Dollar General in the cleaning supplies. The orange stuff in the clear bottle, well I haven't found a good use for it yet. It does smell good though. Maybe it would make a good air freshener? The company that makes it also offers coupons for their products. To get engine grease out of your clothes, simple spray the cleaner on and rinse off. Now back to the Greased Lightning in the purple bottle. Again, this is my favorite. I've used it to detail the engine bay. It melts brake dust buildup off of wheels like ice cream on sizzlin' blacktop in July. So if you have a stubborn greasy stain (like engine grease) that you want to get out of a piece of clothing then go see if you can find some of this stuff because it really does work great!

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How To Tell the Age of a Tree

You can tell how old a tree is, or the age of a tree, by counting the dark rings from a trunk cut section of the tree. You will notice that trees have a very dark center in the tree. This is known as the pith. Start counting the dark rings outside the dark center (don't confuse the pith with the heartwood) and you'll have the age of the tree by however many rings you counted. By knowing the age of a cut or fallen tree, you can guesstimate the age of a local stand of similar trees. You can also learn about the growth of the tree by its rings. Large bands will indicate years when the tree made substantial growth. This means the tree grew under optimal conditions in those years. Small bands usually indicate that the tree grew under less than optimal conditions, such as stress and dry weather. Try counting the rings on the next downed tree that you find to see if you can tell the age of that tree.

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