One Man's Trash ...

One big bonus with our little block (that at the same time seems to be a huge pain in the proverbial) is the amount of well, crap that was left lying around.

We’ve cleared sheds that were chock full of “other people’s treasures” and found more and more just lying around the place.
 

Hubby gets on a big neat binge every now and then and goes through it all, sorting and tidying while trying to be hard and throw away what isn’t going to maybe be useful someday.  We’ve found leftover rolls of chicken wire - mostly in 2 metre lengths that did get used in the chook run after I spent a painful and painstaking day tying all the bits together.  Bits of sheep-fencing mesh, one I found when it blew against a fence from Gods know where and my darling heifer Brownie got her head stuck through it.  Poor girl, I guess we were both lucky that she is so tame and didn’t panic when I was untangling her head and horns from three or four layers of fencing.

Some of the irrigation hosing (as far as we can tell it’s been partially set up but never used) has been useful, some of it has perished or been damaged by animals.  There are jets and sprayers and bits of every imaginable type and level of usefulness.

Pipes, tanks, tubs and hoses galore.  Enough corrugated iron to build a chookhouse and to go around the pigs.

And tyres.  So many tyres.  Every so often, Hubby gathers up more from the various spots we’ve found them.  I would have assumed that there was a huge silage pile at some stage, if only they’d all been remotely near each other.

We try to make use of these bits as much as we can.  We don’t have a lot of spare income and we do have a lot of grand ideas.  Being resourceful with this stuff is also part of our self-sufficient philosophy.  Why buy stuff new if we can make the old stuff work for a while?  Although the gates held shut with baling twine are a very temporary measure - especially since we’ve found the steers figured out which bit to pull on to open the gate!  Might have to go to proper knots rather than slip knots for a while.

Hubby also started to bring home pallets from work for firewood.  Every so often he’ll spend a day with the skill saw cutting up pallets and filling the woodshed.  It only takes a day or two to fill our small wood shed.  Although, with the storm a few months back, we have probably enough macrocarpa drying for at least one winter.

The pallets have turned out to be useful in so many other ways too.  I know there are plenty of sustainable living websites that show ways to make furniture out of them, but we’ve used them for pig fencing, building compost bins and some are being pulled to bits to make a bench seat around the deck.

For me it is a point of pride to be making useful stuff around here out of what would otherwise be rubbish.  I love that we didn’t need to buy a single thing to be able to build two chookhouses.  The only purchases for the farrowing shed were the electrical components.  We still have a number of projects in mind and the first place we look is at the crap pile!