Have you ever wondered what you can do with conkers, apart from actually playing conkers?
I’m guessing your answer is probably no that one. Me neither, until we went to the park last week and came home with about a million of them!
We had lots of fun kicking up leaves and collecting conkers – so much fun that I didn’t realise just how many we had until we got home and emptied our pockets. We had so many of them that I instantly thought there must be something we could do with them all.
While I decided what to do with them, I popped them in a bowl on the sideboard where most of them are actually still sitting over a week later so I give you my first use for conkers – looking pretty in a bowl….
Next up is a use for them that I’ve read about a few times and although I don’t think there’s any scientific backing to this theory, I’m choosing to believe it. Apparently spiders HATE conkers and they won’t come near them so I’ve now got a few conkers dotted around the house for this reason – a couple near the front door and a couple in a smaller vase on my bedroom windowsill.
We’ve used another few conkers from our pile to play our own version of bowls. I marked six with a dot of red nail varnish and six with purple and then we chose one large one as our target. The kids took in in turns to ‘bowl’ their conkers at the target and at the end, we saw whose conker was closest to the target.
We’re planning to make some tree decorations with a few of the conkers and I have plans that include lots of glue and glitter to bling them up although I may keep some of them au naturale as they’re so pretty.
My final use is a fun one – we’re going to throw some in our bonfire on Bonfire night as I’ve heard that they make little mini explosions when they heat up quickly. It’s because of the steam from inside the conker needing to escape apparently so we’ll be standing right back and trying that next week!
I can’t think of any more but if you have any ideas for what to do with conkers, please let me know in the comments.
