I thought I would try a shorter newsletter, a blog right? Our newsletters seem so overwhelming to me, we have so much to say, so much to tell you, we get excited, it must be an over load of information. So I will try to blog, notice I said try. Right now with kids home from school and snow on the ground it seems like a great idea, come April with seed boxes filling the house, gardens needing to be edged, baby chicks, muddy boots.....you get the idea, right?
When I was a kid I lived with my Great Aunt and Uncle. They both grew up on farms here in Little Compton. I'm not sure recycle was a word then, but it certainly was a way of life. We didn't have a recyle box in our house or at the dump, I mean transfer station. We had a compost bucket in our sink and a mulch pile in our yard. We had a paper bag full of old newspapers, junk mail and anything burnable, we had a burn pile in our yard. We had boxes in the basement where we kept containers that could be used again and again, my favorite being coolwhip containers which we always used to store brownies. We had a bucket that held swished cans, after they were emptied we would cut out the other side and jump on them, that way they took up less space. We had boxes of old greeting cards, that were cut up in following years and glued to colored paper to make new greeting cards. We had baskets of old tea cups with broken handles and chips that had been thrown out at the homes where they worked (cooking, cleaning and gardening). The tea cups became saucers for the pots of geraniums that filled our house from January to May. The geraniums were clippings from plants pulled from gardens where they worked and tossed into the compost. The clippings sat in old jelly jars for weeks rooting in our kitchen window until they made it into the teacups. Not once did I hear the word recycle, it was just common sense. As I write this I sit in our office filled with egg cartons. Someone started a rumor that to buy eggs from us you need to bring your own carton. Not true, but certainly appreciated. The state requires us to black out other farms info, but incorages the reuse of egg cartons. There are days we finds stacks of egg cartons at our stand or in our cooler. Sometiems pint and 1/2 pint boxes. Just when I think I am going to have to buy nursery pots for our perennials (which would totally raise our $5/pot price), stacks show up in our yard. Our newest projects of reusing materials have been egg mobiles. We collect wood, old fencing, wheels, you name it and make them into laying houses. We have used everything from lobster pots to wine cellar doors.
So before you recycle something, see if you could reuse it or maybe pass it on to some who can.
