Easy Pinecone Bird Feeders

A few days after Christmas, I had some spare time and spare pinecones on hand, so I put together some easy pinecone bird feeders for the back yard.  I remember doing this when I was little, in Girl Scouts and in church camp. Then when I had young kids, we did this together.  And even now,  I like to make these now and then just to add a little something different to the bird feeders.

One Last Look at Winter

Last week, we had a couple of days of heavy rain, and one of those days also brought heavy winds in our area.  Unfortunately, this meant that one of our Leyland Cypress trees in our backyard blew over, uprooted from the saturated ground at the roots.  It is a sad loss for us, because the tree was one in a row of trees that we planted 8 years ago as a natural screen to provide some privacy in our back yard.  Now we have a gap in that tree screen, and it will now look uneven and irregular even if we replace it with a large specimen.

So as we cut up the fallen tree to get it out of the yard and adjoining driveway, I took the opportunity to use the natural greens in an indoor impromptu arrangement in our foyer.  There was no art involved, I just cut up a bunch of branches and put them in an urn.  Matched up with a wintry pinecone wreath and some birch-bark candles, it makes a simple vignette on our foyer table.

I know spring is on its way, and I'm really looking forward to it!  But this is a simple and easy way to give winter one last hurrah in our home.