Trash Talk

Recycling Load

One serious consideration when you live in the boonies; what do you do with the trash? Most people in urban areas have a pick up service at their home. There is no convenient pickup service where we live, so we have to come up with ways to reduce, reuse, recycle and haul off what trash is leftover by ourselves. Unfortunately, many of our neighbors have decided to burn all their trash, including things that do not burn, like plastic and metal cans. You can drive down the road and see their burn piles in their yard with the melted plastic and charred cans scattered about. Thankfully, I live far enough away from them so I don't have to breathe the burning plastic smell. When it gets really windy, which it often does up on this ridge, their trash gets blown into the woods. It is really sad. I wish that our county would provide the pick-up service and educate people about recycling and not burning garbage.

We try to compost all of our kitchen and yard waste or feed it to our chickens. Some things just can't be composted like meat, fat and oils. We put all our eggshells and coffee grounds in our compost bin along with all vegetable matter from the kitchen and leftovers from the garden and flower beds. We also add the chicken poop and used bedding to the compost bin. If you tumble, stir and "cook" the material for 6 months to a year, then you can put it on your garden beds to enhance the soil composition. You can speed  up the process by constructing a solar oven. You simply put the compost in a large plastic bag and place it in a box lined with aluminum foil or some other reflective material. After a few warm days, you shake the bag around so that the material sifts inside and then bake it a few more days. This should kill any microorganisms or weed seeds that remain. Compost making is much faster during warmer months, the process really slows down in the winter.

Soil needs lots of organic matter. Since compost can sometimes be contaminated with persistent herbicides (see my previous post about this), it is best to make your own so you know what is in it. If you are adding any type of manure, even chicken poop, it is best to let it cook for a year or in an outdoor oven to the proper temperature to ensure that you do not transfer any pathogens to your garden. This is how E-Coli bacteria and other pathogens can end up in vegetables, so make sure you are using safe practices with any type of manure. Mother Earth News has a great article about building the compost oven and proper methods of making compost here: Mother Earth News - Compost Made Easy

The rest of our trash is paper and packaging. Some packaging can be reused for other things, like starting vegetable seeds. We save plastic berry containers so that we can put our berries in them at harvest time. Plastic jugs can be reused for watering plants and target practice. Cardboard and paper can be laid down in walkway areas of the garden to discourage weeds. Some packaging can be used for play. My cat loves to climb in a box or pretend like she has something cornered in one. The kids like to beat up boxes for fun. My husband and his friends enjoy shooting at them for target practice. I like to use them for crafty projects and storage.Obviously, we can't save all cardboard, etc for later. We collect it and then use it to start a fire in our outdoor fire pit on those nights when friends are over or we just want to sit outside and look at the stars and talk.

We still accumulate bags of trash that are a mix of plastic wrap, food scraps, food packaging, glass, etc. My next project is to start separating the plastic and glass that we don't reuse and take it to the recycling center in town.

We are fortunate to have friends that own an apartment complex in town and have a dumpster. They have given us permission to use their dumpster for the bags of garbage left over. We usually haul the garbage there once a month. At home, we keep it bagged in very large cans with heavy lids to cut down on the odor and keep rodents out until we haul it away on the trailer.