Don't Throw Out Mesh Produce Bags - Try A Cool Home Hack To Reuse Them Instead

Those mesh bags that some produce comes in serve a lot of purposes. They're flexible and lightweight. They use less material than plastic bags. They encourage you to buy seven onions when you only wanted two. But best of all, they allow ethylene gas to escape from produce in order to slow down the ripening process. And, believe it or not, mesh bags have purposes beyond the grocery store. They often aren't recyclable, so rather than sending your mesh bags to the landfill, put them to one of dozens of uses — from storing bulbs for your garden to making a DIY laundry bag. 

But, there's another option that you can use inside the home and look at every day. Turn a mesh produce bag into a lovely, fragrant potpourri sachet. Meaning "putrid pot" in French, a potpourri can freshen the air in any room but is often employed to mask unpleasant odors in a space with poor air circulation, such as a closet, drawer, or bathroom. A potpourri can be any medley of pleasant-smelling flowers, herbs, and other organic material. You can rotate your potpourri mixes by the season. Read on to learn how to make this easy DIY potpourri sachet.

Creating a potpourri is simple. Collect spent flowers from your garden, and gather together spices, leaves, fruit slices or peels, or other materials. Some highly scented spring and summer flowers that go great in a potpourri are lavender, scented geranium, jasmine, sage, violets, various herbs, and, of course, various types of roses. Create a fall mix of dried leaves, walnut shells, cinnamon sticks, cloves, star anise, or dried oranges or apples. A winter blend might include balsam, nutmeg, bay leaves, or cloves. You might even add aromatherapist-approved essential oils to the mix. The combinations are nearly infinite. Spread your collection on a drying rack and leave it there until it's fully dried out. You can also place the drying rack on top of a cookie sheet and bake it in the oven at the lowest temperature setting for an hour or more. Once dried, simply arrange the medley in the mesh bag. Mesh bags with smaller gaps are ideal for potpourri so that bits of dried flowers don't slip out and end up staining your carpet or floor. Double up the bags if you only have those with larger holes.

Place the potpourri in a spot that gets good air circulation, such as the entryway to an otherwise enclosed room. When your potpourri has lost its fragrance, compost the contents, rinse out the bag thoroughly so that no organic material remains, and re-use the bag to store food items, dry herbs, keep socks from separating in the dryer, hold soap, contain beach or bath toys, or use as a scrubber pad.