Happy Easter!

 I decided to share a photo collage of the latest additions to Katy Trail Creations on Etsy.  The world of hand crafted items is flourishing on Etsy and I hope you'll take a few minutes to head on over and "like" my shop!!

From Pinterest, I aspire to have these types of items available in a 'wearable' form.

Stay tuned for some interesting additions this summer!!

In the meantime, I'm patiently waiting for gardening season to begin.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to "rub it in" that my persimmon seeds were right this year :)

Happy Easter Everyone!!!

The Second Annual Persimmon Report (West-Central Missouri Version)

The lure of folk lore leads us to the search inside a persimmon seed to view how our winter will unfold.

Here is the traditional version........

A Persimmon fruit has many seeds inside.
Upon cracking them open, you will find any one of the three pieces of "silverware" shapes.
• KNIFE: you'll slice through winter (mild)
• SPOON: you'll need to spoon out the snow (moderate)...
• FORK: you'll have to "dig in" (severe)...so —
...whichever you find the most of, within the seeds, is the winter prediction.

Thanks to Dave Wilson Nursery.com for the explanation.

To begin our local forecast, we choose a tree as close to home as possible, so of course we get ours along the Katy Trail.

View of leaves and fruit of a persimmon tree.

And finally close up of the fruit. Due to the extreme drought we didn't expect to find many. Squirrels around here have been eating all our apples in the back yard. Apparently, persimmons are not their favorite, lucky for us. Or at least not until they ripen.

For more lore about persimmon trees, check out ehow.com. 

There's more than just weather predicting where the persimmon tree is concerned.

We only found 1 seed in this particular fruit. 

And it predicts snow with a spoon.

So should you choose to open your own persimmon seed, 

I recommend that you proceed with caution. 

No need for disfigured fingers.

The Annual Persimmon Report(West-Central Missouri Version)

We made our weekly trek to Walmart this afternoon and along the way home we stopped at our favorite persimmon tree spot. It's on the Katy Trail naturally. Ron brought his handy dandy cell phone for the photography.

The fruit was smaller this year. These hadn't yet fallen so I chose them as they are less gooey.

Here's the inside of one of the three I picked. The drought/heat of this last summer was evident with the fact that each fruit only held 1 seed. Slim pickins for my winter forecast I guess.

This photo gives you an idea of the actual size of the seed.
Here's my opportunity to ask my Aunt Glenda for her persimmon jam recipe. Pretty please???? I do this before the results of the winter prediction you notice??

It's not pretty. I see we have a knife (mild temperatures)

& a spoon (lots of snow......again)