A New Homesteaders Life
Garbage Disposal in the Boonies Hey everyone! I did not realize when you live out here your choices of waste disposal was limited to either hauling it yourself, or burning it. Never had to think about it, the Garbage magically disappeared when the big truck showed up. Well we took the choice of burning. Okay we still had a lot to learn, LOL! Did you know there are things you just can’t burn? Like metal for instance. We are such green Homesteaders didn’t even know to think about garbage as a problem. So we kept burning, but our burn barrel was filling up fast with a lot of unburnt debris. I had Mr. Britches dump it out and look to see what was left of our burns. Well a lot of tin cans, aluminum cans and stuff that the fire just could not touch, because of all the other crap in there. So we drilled some holes bottom in the metal barrel. That was a good start. It helped with the flow of air. I also started sorting out the metal products. I ordered a can crusher and Mr. Britches mounted it and we started crushing cans, of which we will save up and take to get recycled. The tin cans, mostly from canned veggies I rinsed out and placed in another bag to take to the dump with any other stuff we couldn’t dispose of here on the Homestead. We still had a problem with air flow so I started looking for alternative barrels. I found one that looked like a regular metal garbage can with holes in it all over, even came with a lid that also had holes. It works wonderfully burns everything down to ashes, with very little debris left. I got excited about that, I know right, what a thing to get excited about. Behrens is the brand we purchased it is a modified 20 gallon metal trash can burn barrel. ( I am not an affiliate for this product. In fact you may be able to find it cheaper elsewhere.) We decided to keep the big metal barrel for the stuff that just would not burn and the ashes of the waste that did. I did think about adding the ashes to the soon to be made compost pile, but when I thought about it I did not want to add all those possible chemicals from the plastics and other junk in there polluting the compost. We can take trash to the dump. So now we have four things to sort out for garbage; compostable items, burnable stuff, aluminum, and stuffs that just won’t burn. I’m hoping this next year after we get the garden going we will have less metal cans as I’m going to start canning.
The next big thing we have to get going is the composter; stay tuned in for those adventures.
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