Miracle-Gro For Christmas Trees

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Blend the salt, sugar and spruce tips in a blender until the spruce is chopped up and mixed nicely with the salt and sugar. Pour half the mixture into a bowl or bag. Put the spruce shoot, or douglas fir, in a blender with 750ml tequila and blend until the liquid turns a nice light green. Pass the liquid through a cloth or muslin to remove any hard bits of tree. A household with a string of 200 LED lights using 6W power could expect to increase their bills by 27p if used for six hours a day for 22 days over the whole festive period, based on current electricity prices, according to Uswitch calculations. Battery-powered lights are another good option, especially if you already have a stash of batteries at home. You can always turn off other lights in the room and enjoy the glow. Millions of families around the UK celebrated Christmas with a beautiful Fir or Spruce tree in their home, but when the decorations are taken down, it’s important that we dispose of trees sustainably. As the country winds down from the festive period, millions of households and businesses will be looking to take down their Christmas decorations – and in total dispose of eight million Christmas trees.

Take into consideration how many people you are cooking for and how many meals you will be expected to prepare,” she says. “And factor in that some of those meals will be perfect made from the leftovers of your main Christmas meal.” A Christmas pudding. Try to work out the food quantities you need to buy. Photograph: esp_imaging/Getty Images Let your children make paper chains. These are inexpensive to buy, and as a bonus keep them entertained for a while. When mine were little, they also enjoyed making snowmen from old toilet roll tubes and cotton wool, so let them loose with a few Christmas craft supplies.” Sky-high energy bills have meant a renewed focus on home usage but making your home look festive with fairy lights won’t add much to your bills. You should avoid decorations that use older lights with halogen and incandescent bulbs because they use a lot more energy but outdoor lights are often made using cheap-to-run LED lights. Spruce cones are long and hang down from the tree. The scales are smooth and overlapping, flexible and soft.Fir trees often have a classic Christmas tree shape: their branches are dense and slightly upturned. The needles are short, soft, flat, and have a rounded edge and they connect to the stem by suction cup-like attachments. For example, Aldi’s mince pies, which were half the price at 29p, came a close second to Waitrose’s No 1 Brown Butter Mince Pies in Which’s annual mince pie taste test, with both products earning its coveted “best buy” badge of approval. While some keen Christmas-lovers may have hung up the decorations already, most households wait until December before putting up the tree, meaning this is the weekend many families will be heading to the garden centre, and hunting for baubles and fairy lights in the loft. Great for drizzling over desserts or pancakes, using in baking or as a syrup in tea or a gin and tonic. Layer pine cones and sugar in a sealed jar and leave in a warm place for about three weeks, then sieve to remove the pine cones. Rub the squeezed lime around the rim of the glass and sprinkle with salt, or put salt on a plate and put the glass into it rim side down.

This is an area where it is possible to economise and still get great results, with handmade decorations and charity shop finds cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

How to eat (and drink) your Christmas tree

There are three main types of Christmas tree belonging to the conifer family, meaning cone bearing: the fir, the spruce and the pine. Here's how to identify them: When setting up your Christmas tree, remember to keep it well away from heat sources, including heat registers, fireplaces, wood-burning stoves, space heaters, and south-facing windows, as these will accelerate the drying process. If money is an issue, Ross Duncton at Columbia Threadneedle Investments suggests speaking to friends and family members so as to “manage expectations with gift-giving to take some pressure off the purse strings this year”. No one will want you to get into financial difficulty to fund the festive period, he says. Andersen points out that some people swear by commercial Christmas tree preservatives, which can be mixed into the water in the stand. Others have said that they’ve had success by mixing a tablespoon of corn syrup or sugar into the water as a food source for the tree. Some people even add aspirin to the water.