DIY Projects, Home Improvement

Antiques connect us to our ancestors

An antique is something older than 100 years. They connect ourselves with the past. Maybe our ancestors homesteaded and antiques connect us to our ancestors. We can say our grandmother had this or used this.

Old kitchen scale and metal sugar tin
Old kitchen scale and metal sugar tin

So, let not store an item away but use it in our home décor. Either as a centerpiece like an old cabinet radio or to highlight a wall with an antique dressing table. Place your tv or media center in a large, upright dresser.

Part of an old sewing machine used as decor
Part of an old sewing machine used as decor

You can use old cookware on shelves in your kitchen. Maybe you have an old butter churn, scale, or coffee grinder you can set on a shelf and decorate around them. I have a shelf on old blue mason jars (one pink one) along with some glass insulators on a kitchen shelf.

Use old picture frames for the old family pictures you have. Map out your family tree on the wall.

Of course, an old piece of pottery or crock can be used as a small planter on a window sill. A piece of old stained glass can be hung by a window.

It is about breathing life in old things!

Small fruits

Vipipary

This is called “vivipary”. The seeds on the strawberry plant are sprouting using the strawberry fruit as a source of food and water. If you are patient, you can separate the little sprouts and plant them in a soil media and grow. While not common, it can occur in overripe stressed fruits.

Seeds on a strawberry fruit germinating.
Seeds on a strawberry fruit germinating.
Flowers (annual and perennial)

Aster Plants

This time of the year when many of the spring-blooming plants are long done and the summer-blooming ones are fading out. You want a little more color to take you to frost and beyond, try fall-blooming aster plants. These plants are deer and rabbit resistant.

Purple aster
Purple aster

Try my favorite flower, the aster.  Much tougher than mums, they will come back for many years. Many varieties growing from 1 to over 4 feet tall with a rounded growth shape. The colors are from white to pink and red to purple. If you pinch the stems back in June, you will get more buds.

China aster

Do not get these workhorses confused with the China aster or pompon aster. These are single to double flowers which bloom in the spring and again in the fall as annuals. China asters have bigger blooms but are much more delicate to grow.

The wild aster is a white flower blooming on roadsides and other places this time of the year. The word aster is Greek for star. There is a species native to most countries including this country. Queen Victoria planted them and Thomas Jefferson cultivated the China aster.