My local dry-cleaning establishment will not reuse these white metal shirt hangers. I also can’t put “loose wire” into my curbside recycling bin. Thus, it is up to me to find something to do with 5 to 10 hangers each month.
Today I’m making garden tags…little placards in case I don’t remember the difference between tomatoes and broccoli. HA! Open the hangers by untwisting the top or cutting the top off completely. Then start bending. The ones I have bend easily by hand.
Bend the wire into a shape a bit like the one above and snip off the extra from the end.
Poke holes through a piece of card stock (in this case a bit of packaging board reused) and attach the card to the top of the garden marker. I used a bunch of teeny tiny zip ties because I’ve had them for several years and never found a teeny tiny use for them until now.
As you can see on the right side of this photo, my 7-year-old made one as well! Total cost for this project was materials on hand plus $0.00. Make two plant tags from each wire hanger.
P.S. It occurred to me after I took this series of photos that I could just fold the paper over the same length as the front and have a full, writeable back too. DOH! Two sided version below….
I haven’t been keeping up with thinning the lettuce, but these three plants had been thinned out and repotted on their own a couple weeks ago. They made a lovely little butter crunch salad last night.
Cut off their heads
Then just eat!
Grown sometimes in the greenhouse, sometimes indoors, depending on the weather.
Saturday a good friend of my wife’s told me that her husband was willing to let me watch/help/learn the process of butchering and cleaning some meat chickens. She has been providing us with 75% of the eggs we need for 9 months or so now, but they also raise meat birds once in a while.
I wish I had some pictures, which I don’t, but it was a good educational day. He taught me everything, step by step, from the hen house (where the chickens had been fasting for 24 hours) to the freezer and I got to do it all myself, twice. It took 3 hours.
It feels good to learn something so basic…like I’m reconnecting with a process that most people would have known 100 years ago or so. I have a new appreciation and respect for the animal and the meal. I also have a new determination to understand how local big-box stores can sell me a prepared rotisserie chicken for $2.50. It doesn’t make sense.
He let me take home one of the two meat birds that I butchered and cleaned. We’ll be preparing it tonight and we already plan a chicken barley soup for the leftovers. To thank him I brought over two bags of feed for the egg layers.
