Home Improvement

Paint Color Trends for 2021

Paint color trends for 2021 will reflect the mood in the coming year. This year’s paint trends reflect a more subdued direction mimicking nostalgia and nature. As this year was so filled with anxiety and unrest, 2021 colors reflect calm and comfort.

Colors of Nature


Many colors reflect nature neutrals as earthly browns, watery blues, and dark greens of nature. The greens are still the mainstay adding beige as accents.

Blues for Accent or Main Colors


Another timeless color is blue. Whether an inky blue to a less dark blue can be paired easily with other colors.

Aegean Teal


Benjamin Moore came out with Aegean Teal, a blue-green often found in eggs of certain breeds of chicken eggs.

Urban Bronze

Sherwin Williams came out with Urbane Bronze, a dark brown color that mixes well with a warm white paint.


Painting is often the cheapest way to update a room. Either you know what color you fell in love with or not, that is why they make paint samples.

Wildlife

Backyard Birds in the Winter

What to feed the backyard birds in the winter. Starting with mixed seeds which are good for beginners bringing different types of birds to your feeder. They can be messy because birds will pick them through to get to the special seeds. The smaller seeds will end up on the ground, but the ground feeding birds will pick them up.

Platform Feeder

Black oil sunflower seeds will attract blue jays, cardinals, finches, chickadees, nuthatches, and sparrows. Sunflower seeds are the most popular bird food.

Niger sock feeder

Niger seeds are tiny, black seeds that require a special feeder with small slits so the seed does not run out. This will attract goldfinches and other types of finches.

Flicker Woodpecker

Suet is a block of animal fat mixed with seed. This type of food is a healthy source of protein when it really gets cold. The favorite food of woodpeckers. Many seed feeders have a suet cage on the ends for inserting the suet.

You can feed peanuts, cracked corn, peanut butter, and a mixture of fruit both dried or fresh to give the birds a variety.

Vegetables

Sweet Potato vs Yam

The terms sweet potato vs yam are used interchangeably on canned ingredients in cooking and at the grocery stores. But they are totally different roots. The sweet potato is in the morning glory family and the yam is in the lily family.

Georgia Jet Sweet Potato

Sweet potatoes can be grown in our gardens (along with some patience). There are two kinds: one being a yellow and light orange flesh with a dry texture. The other is the darker varieties of deeper orange and red color which are sweet and moist. Varieties you can plant are Georgia Jet, Centennial, and Puerto Rico.

Centennial Sweet Potato

The basic sweet potato comes from Central and South America imported to the southern United States. The African slaves grew them because of the high productivity from small gardens. Being cheap to grow, they incorporated sweet potatoes in most dishes including my favorite sweet potato pie. So, they substituted sweet potatoes for the African yams they knew about.

Yam

Yams grow in the tropics of Africa and later grown in the Caribbean and Asia. Yam is a vining plant producing white or light-yellow flesh. Some yams can weigh over 150 pounds.

The African culture began calling the sweet potato a yam because that is what reminded them of. That is where the confusion comes from.