Usually when you think of a pencil, you think of the old, trusty, yellow number two. But at Smencils, they want you to look at and smell pencils a new way. Smencils are pencils that you can choose one of ten different smells for. Smells like orange, cherry, and watermelon, or even chocolate and cotton candy. They say the smells last for a remarkable two years even if you don’t keep them in the included “freshness tube”. The best part about Smencils though, is that they are made from 100% recycled newspapers. They give some fascinating statistics on their site such as “172,000 Smencils can be made from 430 newspapers” and “recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times saves about 75,000 trees”. The idea to make recycled newspapers is a great one and we can only hope that as a society, more brilliant ideas like these will be developed and successfully turned into alternatives to the way things are done today. 

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Smencils

It has been quite a while since I told you about our “Project Appleseed.” Well we ran into a little trouble. We ordered the pines on September 15th as promised, but our trees did not like us. We tried to plant them in a pot so that we could plant them in the ground later. Well they did not take to well to the pot… and I am afraid that they are no more. 

We tried our hardest to keep them from death, but they did not take to well to CPR. I mean I do not even know where to breathe. On top of that every time you try to do chest compressions you just get pine needles in your hand. Not all that fun. 

But as a side project I had been trying to create the actual namesake for “Project Appleseed.” I was working in secret to create some apple trees from scratch. Yep, I planted some seeds and now they are getting along pretty well. I started them out in the classic black plastic nine hole pot type thing that you get when you buy your flowers for your garden and now I transplanted them into real pots. Soon they will be able to hold their own and I will plant them outside. “Project Appleseed” will live on. 

The two different apple trees that I have growing were planted from one Fuji seed and one Breburn. They were stubborn little seeds though. It took about 6 seeds to get two trees. I have been also trying to get some Concord Grape seeds to grow also with no luck. 

So to clarify, we are still working on “Project Appleseed” but we had a minor setback and we will be continuing the project soon. I need to get the apple trees to a state that they will be all right on their own and also wait for the weather to get a little warmer. Michigan is pretty cold as of late, currently 23 degrees fahrenheit. 

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