Save those 1.75 liter plastic coke bottles!
Rinse them out and fill 3/4 full with water.
If you have a large freezer fill up the empty space in there with those coke bottles! This serves as a energy saver, a guaranteed source of good drinking water, and they are great to use in your cooler to keep stuff cold when your traveling/Fishing/Picinicing/etc!
Yes, the frozen bottles are excellent for food storage on camping trips, or just to set on the counter, for kids and company to drink as the days goes by, saves opening the refrigerator.
I went a step further, I filled them with water and lined the wall around the wood stove.
They absorb the heat and give it off, when the stove is not going.
I do / did the same with them when I could still garden, the sun warms them all day, to keep tender plants warm at night and they cool off, to keep the temperature down in the sun, sure it is only fractions of degrees........but it felt good to do it.
And it was a lot cheaper than the ‘wall of water’, you see in ads to put around your plants to protect them.
I also use them for bug catchers, beer is best, but old colas, juice or anything that will attract bugs, a couple inches, with a half inch of stale cooking oil on top, the bugs go after the beer, and get in the oil, which makes sure that they cannot crawl out again.
Most herb books will tell you that the small ant does not like the citrus juices.......but they will crawl in and drown in a bottle of 7up, that is at a slant, with the mouth at ground level.
I was curious and there was a couple inches of 7up in the bottle that had gone stale, so I put in in the greenhouse and found it later to be black with ants.
My mobile sits in the middle of an ant townsite, or so it seems.
During the summer, I keep a spray bottle of about 2/3rds of it being vinegar, the rest being water, with a few drops of either Peppermint or Orange essential oil added. This feels good if sprayed on bites, or will stop the ants from crossing the wet trail until it dries, handy when typing and not wanting to vacuum them up, this instant.
And it is a good cleaner.
This is Arizona, and we have more and bigger bugs than any other state. or so it seems.
Actually, distilled water (about 75 cents a gallon) is excellent for storage, no minerals,bacteria,etc. Leave sealed until needed. Water is the most critical for hard days, then food .