With all that holiday baking and homemade gift giving I’ll bet you ran through a fair bit of vanilla extract. Good news! If you start a new batch now it will be absolutely perfect for the 2015 holiday season. Homemade vanilla extract is about as simple a DIY as you could hope for, and the…
DIY
Can You Seal A Pond With Clay Kitty Litter?
I wanted to build the ducks a pond. In fact, I started on the pond months before we eventually adopted ducks. Now, just so we are clear, our pond isn’t really a pond…it’s more like a very large puddle. It’s about 15 feet by 8 feet and holds about 1000 gallons of water. But for…
DIY Non-Toxic Weedkiller That Works
There are situations where you want certain plants dead, but hand weeding is difficult or counter-productive because it will bring fresh seeds to the surface to germinate. This may be a situation for an herbicidal spray. I approach this topic with hesitation, because some of you stopped reading at the second sentence and are right…
Relaxing Bed Time Bath Soak
Periodically, I have trouble sleeping. The reason for this is a certain three-year-old boy. I’ve vented about the challenges of having a hard sleeper before. My son’s sleep is better than it used to be, but on a typical day, he still wakes and gets out of bed two or three times between his bedtime…
Dirt-Busting Sugar Hand Scrub For Gardeners
I am the queen of perma-dirt. You know those lines of dirt on the edges of your index fingers and thumbs? With all the time I spend playing in the garden, that area on me looked like I’d gotten a dirt tattoo for about a decade. I once asked folks on my Facebook page how…
Toxin Free DIY Citrus Cleaner
As you may have noticed by my Meyer lemon obsession, it’s citrus season, and I couldn’t be happier. As I’ve mentioned before, any pretense of locavore principles goes out the door for a case of mandarin oranges or a perfect, juicy grapefruit. While I’m paying the karmic debt for the food miles it takes to…
How To Make DIY Really Cool Bath Bombs
Bath bombs are so cool. Basically, you’re doing a chemistry experiment in the name of Spa Day. How could anyone not like that combo? They also make great gifts (hint! hint!) and kids love them. Since I started this Bath Bomb making experiment, my son has refused to take a bath without one. Bath Bombs…
Build vs. Buy – A Garden Soil Dilemma
We’ve all been there, out of room and eager to expand the garden. That sod starts to look like the enemy and eventually the only question is, do you smother the grass with whatever you can find, or do you buy ready-to-go soil and get your seedlings in the ground asap? Build vs. Buy, a…
Infuse Your Booze! A Complete Guide To DIY Flavored Liquors
This is one of those posts where I will come off as a lush, and an opinionated one at that. But these cocktails? They are simply research, baby – this is all for you. Infuse Your Booze If you like the creativity of cooking and combining flavors and you drink hard alcohol then booze infusions…
Homemade DIY Whole Wheat Waffle Mix
If I give my kids carte blanche to pick breakfast, as I often do on the weekends, they want waffles. It never fails. Waffles are one of those foods people seem impressed by. If you are used to thinking of waffles as something that comes from a yellow box in the freezer aisle, those little…
All Natural DIY Facial Exfoliator with Coconut Oil and Baking Soda
The Facial Years and years ago my husband treated me to a massage and spa facial for Mother’s Day. I had never had a facial before. I told the lady doing the facial, “I have really, really sensitive skin” and she said, “Good to know” and then proceeded to slather what I can only assume…
Mini-Money Challenge: How Handy Are You?
My friend had a leak under her sink. Big puddle of water. They called the plumber, who quoted her $800 to pull and remove the leaking faucet and replace it with a new one. She related the story to me: “$800?! Are you kidding? That’s a lot of money! That’s almost a thousand dollars!” “So…