Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Ewwww yuck!

In our rural county, garbage service is nonexistent. Instead, our taxes pay for garbage dumpsters in various locations around the area. You can drive there and dump whatever garbage you have, in whatever amount.

This is actually rather nice because, in our case, we don’t generate a whole lot of garbage (mostly plastics such as toilet paper wrap, that kind of thing), so paying separately for garbage service would probably be a waste of money for us.

This afternoon I cleaned up the placenta from Matilda’s calving. The chickens were starting to peck at it and the neighborhood kids found it grossly fascinating, but I knew it could attract coyotes as well as start to smell, so I took a pitchfork and sort of scootched it into a plastic garbage bag (I couldn’t lift it because it kept sloshing back to the ground – “Like picking up an egg yolk,” my older daughter noted).

I tied off the plastic bag and lifted the lid to the garbage can and put the bag on top the dead rooster who had finally expired a few days ago after getting severely attacked by our other two roosters.

And it occurred to me you really don’t want to know what’s inside a rural person’s garbage cans.

5 comments:

  1. We have the same typer trash service, you are correct about the contents, deer bones etc! Congrats on the healthy birth shes a beauty!

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  2. I'll never look at rural living the same way again.

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  3. Patrice, I realize this is sort of off-topic, but I was wondering if you compost. If so, I'd be interested in reading about how you got started and how you make it work--how beneficial is it for your garden, how hard is it to minimize smells, etc.?
    That's still sort of trash related, right? :)

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  4. We do compost our kitchen scraps (what we don't feed to the chickens, that is). All I have is a wire cage over the fence that I throw stuff into. It doesn't smell, at least not badly. But honestly, I've never emptied it. The stuff just sort of composts down and compacts and even after three years I've never emptied it (I'll try and remember to get a picture and post it).

    So we don't use it on our garden, though we could. The reason we don't bother is we have so much composted cow manure - literally tons - that the small amount of kitchen compost isn't worth the effort.

    - Patrice

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  5. You can chunk the dead animals on the compost if you sprinkle them with lime or ash. The caustic nature breaks down the animal flesh...of course, you'd have to smash up the bones later. I had a neighbor who used to actively hunt up road kill to put on hers. She claimed that the animal remains made the compost richer. She used lime. We only occasionally butcher the odd chicken...I put the head and the guts in a bucket, and mix it with ash (I figure, well, it's what you make lye out of) and dump it on the pile. In the bucket, actually...it's too dry here to have an actual compost heap. We keep ours in 5 gallon frosting buckets we scarf from the local bakeries.

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