April 22 is Earth Day and I began thinking about doing a craft for the garden. Earth, dirt, garden, are you seeing the connection?
Maybe a plant marker made from a pop can or a pop bottle made into a drip watering system but one of my pet peeves about gardening is the dirt – the dirt that comes in on the veggies and goes down the drain.
We only have water to a tap outside, with which to rinse things off with when the irrigation is on and packing a bucket of water out there is just a pain.
My friend Nina says that washing veggies outside makes her hands so cold they ache.
She grows a fabulous garden every year and always shares her bounty with others, so I thought I would make her something to let her know that I appreciate her garden gifts and it will help with cleaning up and is environmentally friendly.
I work at the Grand Forks Gazette and am surrounded by newspaper all the time, so it is my focus for many a crafty idea and this week is no exception.
Nina and I both dislike using plastic bags when gathering in the garden. We have used cloth bags but they need to be washed often and sometimes get lost along the way, so I have decided to make her and I a disposable bag that we can use.
Using 2 pages of a well-read Grand Forks Gazette, I folded it as it would be normally to form a 38.1 cm x 29.21 cm booklet.
Then with cotton thread, I sewed down the open side and across the bottom.
This forms a nice-sized paper pouch. Two to three potatoes fit in it as well as a carrot or two and an onion... hint, hint, perhaps a handful of leaf lettuce, a few green onions and
some radishes. The pouch will hold enough for a meal or two and if you give it a bit of a rub back and forth you will take off a lot of the dirt that is then collected in the bag, saving it from going down the drain.
After prepping, put all the peels and such back in the pouch and out to the compost it will go.
I was telling her today about my little idea and she thinks it will be great.
I am quite anxious to give them to her knowing I will get some of them back – full. (Mmm, did you ever wonder why things taste better when someone else grows them?)
Hopefully the bears will not get all her carrots this year.