The Sun Bay Paper Page 3 May 20, 2022 - June 2, 2022 Do you have an old bottle of ground cinnamon in the pantry and are unsure what to do with it? One natural attribute of cinnamon is that it has fantastic antifungal properties and can help keep fungus like slime mold and mushroom spores from sprouting in your garden or on household plants. To use cinnamon, simply dilute it with warm water and let it steep overnight. When the mixture is cool, transfer to a bottle and spray all over the leaves and on top of the soil of potted plants. If you are an animal lover with pieces of jewelry you wouldn’t mind donating to a worthy cause, consider the nonprofit organization Indigo Rescue. Since 1999, Indigo Rescue has been accepting jewelry - - whether it’s fine or costume quality –- and reselling it through a variety of events to raise money to help homeless cats and dogs. You can mail your jewelry to the organization, and you’ll receive a tax receipt for your donation. To learn more, visit their website at indigorescue.org. The kitchen is one of the biggest energy hogs in the home, so every little effort to save energy there can help lower your utility bill and save money. One easy tip is to defrost frozen food before cooking. By simply remembering to place that frozen lasagna in the refrigerator for a few hours before cooking, you'll use 50% less energy to bake it from frozen. And bonus tip: Defrosting in the fridge also helps your refrigerator use less energy, since frozen items give off a chill too. Do you want your flower arrangements to stay fresh longer? There’s no need to add chemical flower preservatives to your vase full of water. Instead, simply add a splash of white vinegar (it helps inhibit the growth of bacteria) and toss in a little sugar (it feeds the flowers and helps closed blooms open up, too!). The simple combination of these ingredients is enough to give your arrangement a few extra days of fresh life. And if you happen to have a little lemon-lime soda, you can add a splash of that to the water, too. Cut Flowers The next time you fly, consider choosing an airline that only offers all-coach seating. It’s a surefire way to save money on your roundtrip flight, and it also means the plane you’re flying in is the most fuel-efficient of all planes heading to whatever sunny destination you’re visiting. The reason is simple: When you remove the larger first- and business-class seats, additional coach-style seating can be configured on the plane. More seats means better fuel economy per person flying. This, in turn, cuts down on the carbon emissions per passenger on the flight. Consider an allcoach flight an upgrade for the environment! Flying Coach Coffee bags are nearly impossible to recycle, so it’s a good idea to find a new way to upcycle them around the house. One great attribute of waxy or foil-lined coffee bags is that they are the perfect container to start seedlings in for your garden. All you have to do is trim them down to the desired size and fill with organic matter (including old coffee grinds!). Then grow whatever seeds you want inside. If you need a lot of bags to get your garden growing, this is a great thing to ask local coffee shops or your friends to save for you, too. Grow Seedlings If you're tired of discovering wasp nests on your home, don't call the exterminator or use chemical sprays to remove them -- prevent them from being built in the first place. An all-natural device called a "wasp deterrent" looks like a pretty outdoor lantern, but it's actually designed to play on a wasp's natural territorial instinct to avoid building a new nest where one already exists. The fake nest will keep wasps about 200 feet away, so place a few around the house in the spring to prevent nests from being built. Wasp Away ! Animal Lovers Cinnamon Defrost Foods
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