General Craft & DIY discussion

Recycling is about trying to ease our impact on the environment. What do you do to help out? Catch rainwater from your roof, compost your table scraps, or what?

Warning! Global Warming & other environmental movements can resemble religion & we all know how arguments about that go. Keep it civil.

One of the things I do is try to minimize my use of herbicides & pesticides. My lawn is not a thing of beauty, but I refuse to use a service like Chemlawn or Trugreen or whatever. I think those services have to be hard on the environment. If nothing else, the run-off from the lawns they treat is certainly high in nitrogen which is a major problem in the Chesapeake Bay & it's tributaries.

I buy herbicides in gallon containers of concentrates, but I spot spray with them. I use a 4 gallon backpack sprayer for the herbicides & generally use them only on invasives or weeds that are getting out of control. I'll manually cut down weeds that are too close to delicate 'good' weeds (milk weed) which is very susceptible to herbicides.

I'm very wary of pesticides, but use them occasionally & was sorry to see chlorodane outlawed since we used it to keep termites under control around the old barn & fence posts. I think it got a bad rap due to the government overusing it & don't think its replacement that we got (dyasopin?) was any better. We had to use twice as much & it still didn't do as good a job on termites. Both were mean & nasty, but we only used it when we saw termite tracks - reactive, not proactive.

The last major pesticide I used was to kill off grubs along the fence line because they were attracting moles which meant our dogs dug holes along it constantly. It was a tough call to make, but the dogs started getting out too often. I just couldn't keep up with them since they have all day to dig & I do have other things to do in the evenings besides fill in their work.

I researched it & bought a type that was supposed to kill off just the grubs, but not harm dogs or horses that ate the grass. I put it down &, of course, we had a dry spell. The pesticide needed to be watered to work, so we watered the lawn - something we never do otherwise. Then a bird feeder broke & Harley ate the seed off the ground. (No, I have no idea why. None of the other dogs was interested.) She wound up having a liver problem that cost us $750 to cure. I can't say for sure it was the pesticide, but we can't figure any other poison she could have got into.

I have to say that since I did that, we haven't had the moles back in those areas. Still, it was too high a price to pay & makes me even more wary of them.

Lawn.. what lawn?

The three acres of open land here used to be mowed. I came along and let it become fields.. rich habitat for all sorts of flowers and critters, though once it went natural I stopped seeing mole hills when I did the Autumn mowing. I mow once a year to harvest the hay for compost and keep the saplings from taking over the edges.

I do mow walking trails and a four foot swath around the gardens to minimize weeds from wild seeds.

I must admit, I do have a ten year old container of pesticide I used for dealing with carpenter ants in the garage before I fixed the drainage. I also have a container of herbicide for dealing with stubborn weeds in the drainage swales around the house.

Yet other than building maintenance, chemicals have no business on an organic farm. I control pests with crop rotation, hand plucking potato beetles and sharing a little bit of the crop with less destructive insects. In the gardens what weeds there are are easily scraped back until the crops take over, and elsewhere I don't really have weeds anymore. I did have an invasive species when I first moved here, but after five years of digging it up by the roots it's now under control. No herbicide could have killed seventy year old roots anyway!

And the shop and vehicle chemicals are kept out of the reach of wild and domestic animals with any spills quickly contained with cat litter. (Antifreeze overflowing from a radiator tastes sweet to animals and can cause liver damage.)

I don't want to harm the environment or animals... sounds like you need to go to dog obedience school (it's not the dog, it's always the owner)and teach your dog the command "NO!".

I almost accidentally trained Roscoe not to chase squirrels. When I went to fill the squirrel feeder yesterday he nearly knocked me down trying to get to the squirrel and I told him, "No, leave that squirrel alone". Today when we were walking by he saw the squirrel and kept looking at me until I told him "look! squirrel!" and he happily chased it up the tree.

Once a dog is well trained you gotta be careful what you tell him!

The bird feeder broke & we cleaned it up, but Harley went after the seed later. We didn't notice at the time & did stop her once we did.

Harley is a Jack Russell Terrier. Terriers are not known for being easy to call off anything, although Marg has pretty good success. They're bred specifically not to give up, the only reason why a dog would go after a critter twice its weight in a tunnel & manage to win.

I'm not shooting for an organic farm or produce, but I do have an aversion to using pesticides, especially systemic ones on stuff I'm going to eat. That's why when I lost my squash to squash bugs 2 years in a row, I quit planting squash for 3. I've had to before & it does break the cycle. Plenty of folks around here grow their own squash, so it's easy enough to get some whenever we want it & it's in season.

Those little dogs are often the most aggressive! Yet I gaurantee you any dog will obey instantly once it knows it's place in the pack... I guess that makes Marg the alpha dog!

I tried lots of different crops. The trick is finding crops that grow well in your location without high maintenance or too many pests. I'm sure pests could be more of a problem in the south...

I'm willing to spend a few minutes every day for two weeks to eliminate potatoe bugs eggs before they cause problems (If I can stop the intial hatching they are gone for the season) because potatoes are very productive.

I don't like squash so other than small experimental crops I don't grow it, yet I produced a heck of a crop one year when they showed up in the compost pile! (And then there was the year 400 pounds of pumpkins showed up in the compost... farming is always an adventure..)

Actually, we refer to Marg as the top bitch. Properly, the dog is male, bitch is female. We do say it with a smile, but she is. I just call her 'The Boss'.
;-)

It's often not a matter of who is in charge with the Jacks. They just plain don't hear people when they're in their attack mode. Their focus is extreme, all extraneous systems shut down.

That's a lot of pumpkins! How do you keep the weeds down? Do you compost? I tried cardboard this year. The year before I bought straw & raised the most amazing crop of grass you've ever seen. That's a first for me. I've done it before, sometimes in combination with some newspaper first. Newspaper is getting tough to get, though.

I need at least a ton compost every Autumn, so the compost pile is about as big as a minivan and twice as big right after the Autumn hay is added until it settles. The Ferguson is a 57 year old orchard tractor with a loader, and while it's nice to move heavy objects and transplant 500 pound trees, it's primary job is stirring and moving compost.

In the spring I add wood chips from the Spring pruning, which is getting to be less each year as the healtthy trees win and the saplings and brush run out of energy.

Throughout the summer I add grass clippings when I mow, which adds up! I tow a hand lawnmower with a bag behind a very old and tiny lawn tractor I rescued from a dump and restored 22 years ago. I don't have a lawn but what mowing I do is equivalent to running with a hand mower for 45 minutes nonstop, so the pile slowly grows all summer.

In the Autumn I add the garden debris and the "hay" from mowing all three acres with the CASE 446, a 30 year old compact tractor souped up with a new engine. (As opposed to the 40 year old CASE 442 with a rebuilt engine which now deserves slow easy jobs like plowing snow and moving the hay trailer). Usually I start a second pile at this point so I can get at the compost that's ready to be spread on the garden and tilled in before Winter.

I always leave some finished compost to get the new material processing and it becomes a neverending process... sustainable agriculture!

One year a cow farmer gave me 12 trailer loads of cow manure... boy were the gardens great two years later! Then the guy decided to sell it for much more than I could afford... but it gave the compost pile a good kick start!

I never thought of using paper of cardboard... but gee, if you have horses what great compost you could make with what you clean out of the stalls!

As for what grows in the compost... I let nature take it's course. Pumpkins don't mind weeds at all when their roots are buried in a compost pile!

Our horse manure is mixed with pine shavings, so turns into acidic black dirt if just piled off by itself for a year or two. That has saved the azaleas since this area is full of limestone, so tends to sweet soil - when it isn't clay.

When the barn was built, I had Eddie level the area with his bulldozer & push the topsoil into a pile nearby. That area was once a tobacco field & then a garden, so saving the topsoil was a great idea, although half luck. I didn't have any place I needed it at the time & know how nice it is to have some around, so it seemed like the natural thing to do. He was going to just waste it by grading it out. I'm glad I had him pile it. We have very thin soil over several feet of clay & then layers of limestone rock, so the topsoil is precious.

Anyway, the horse manure keeps getting tossed on that pile along with other stuff & I toss pelletized lime on it a couple of times a year, but I suspect it's pretty acidic. I grab a bucketful of the older manure with my John Deere 5103 & dump it on the gardens occasionally, depending.

That's actually one of the chores for today. The asparagus & most other stuff is all down & gone, so I'll get manure on them now. The winter will finish breaking it down & I'll mulch it all in the spring, except those places where I have volunteer seedings. There I just put a thin layer of the manure until the plants are up. I may mulch after that, but often don't bother.

I'm not exactly a candidate for Better Homes & Gardens. My gardens tend to be kind of wild & wooly. I pull out the weeds occasionally but rely more on the plants themselves to keep them at bay. I adore hostas & such for their abilities in this area.

Do you think an herbicide like Round Up would kill off grass this time of year? We've been just hitting 60 most days this week. I tossed a lot of seeds on this bank & I want to give them a boost over the grass next spring.

Jim wrote: "Actually, we refer to Marg as the top bitch. Properly, the dog is male, bitch is female. We do say it with a smile, but she is. I just call her 'The Boss'.

It's often not a matter of who is in charge with the Jacks. They just plain don't hear people when they're in their attack mode. Their focus is extreme, all extraneous systems shut down.
"

Term is 'alpha bitch' here. When I was still doing a lot of dog shows, I found a T shirt that had that that term across the front with a Rottweiler with lots of teeth showing.

Loved it ... I raised/trained/showed Rotts for nearly 20 years.

But the 'alpha bitch' ended up being the Miniature Bull Terrier I got as a puppy, who proceeded to establish herself as alpha everything as soon as she arrived. Entire litters of Rott puppies were traumatized by her after her arrival ... and she tried to eat the neighbor's Angus bull, starting at the fetlocks and went for a 'ride' once attached to the Shire stallion I was leading through the arena, all the while diligently trying to chew her way down through all the 'feathers'.

Yes, alpha is the term & I'm not too surprised at a terrier being one. I am surprised at how nice your Shire is. Harley, our oldest Jack Russell got fresh with Cutter one day & she is now a 3 legged dog.

I have sandy soil with a little clay hear and there, so I really need compost to add both nutrients and moisture retention. Seven years ago the garden was so depleted from 70 years of "conventional" farming that it was like beach sand and could hardly grow weeds. Now it's a nice coffee color and things grow great.

I get the gardens tested yearly for PH through the extension service and while I use a lot of pine chips in the compost there's very little effect on the soil.

At first the soil was severly alkaline, but three years of adjustments have made it perfect.

What's "Round Up"? Sounds like something for cattle....

Round Up is an herbicide. Actually, I'm using Bronco, the Southern States generic version that's about half the price. I guess an herbicide probably doesn't belong in this topic, but it's handy & I don't use a lot.

The main time I use it is a few days in the spring when the garlic mustard, multifloral rose, & honeysuckle are all out, but the native plants aren't yet. Then I can spray them & kill them off. I've tried 2-4-D since that only kills broad leaved plants, but it doesn't work as well.

Killing off invasives such as the above is a good, environmentally friendly thing to do. All of them will crowd out native plants. My woods was a real mess when we first got here. The local forester, Ben, & our Extension Agent, Kim, are both impressed by how much I've knocked the invasives back.

I do a lot of hand pulling of garlic mustard & honeysuckle, but that can make worse problems with erosion in our thin soil. I try to cut them back when I can so that I can spray low & as small an area as possible, too.

Jim wrote: "I am surprised at how nice your Shire is. Harley, our oldest Jack Russell got fresh with Cutter one day & she is now a 3 leg..."

He was so tolerant. The only reason I 'discovered' what this little brat was doing was I realized the stallion was walking oddly, kind of a hitch with one foot. Stopped, looked down and this little white terrier was attached to the white feathers ... can you say natural camouflage?

Didn't work so well with one of the Rotts, though. He was going to 'heel' one of the other horses while I was leading it and he ended up unshown ... no front teeth so disqualified in the show ring.

Tough, though. I didn't even know what had happened, thought the kick had missed until I realized the dog was slinging blood when he shook his head.

Jim wrote: "Round Up is an herbicide. Actually, I'm using Bronco, the Southern States generic version that's about half the price. I guess an herbicide probably doesn't belong in this topic, but it's handy &..."

We fight weeds all the time in the pastures and never manage to quite keep up with it. We use a combination approach ... two different kinds of herbicide, broad leaf that will leave the grass for the pastures and 'kill everything' for the fencelines.

Then mowing and harrowing. But it is a constant battle. This year we somehow missed a big patch of burdock and all of my mares have burrs matted in their manes from grazing through it.

I use the 'kill everything' Bronco (generic Roundup) on the fence lines every couple of years & the broad leaf killer (2-4-D or Gly-4) every other year. I should have this year, but didn't, so I have a grassy fence line. It's pretty shaggy looking. No way to weedeat the wire we have. It just eats up the blades or string & beats up the fence.

I'm careful about it because we have thin soil with some steep slopes in places. The dead areas will start to wash pretty quickly. Also, it seems like it promotes grub growth, which means moles, dogs digging & getting out. Typical farm life, there is no perfect solution.

Ouch! That's a shame. The missing teeth aren't unusual or unexpected, though. Cutter & Speedy are plain mean to dogs, but Blue won't step on one at all, no matter what. Chip & Topaz don't go after the dogs, but I'm not sure that either one wouldn't run over one if it was in the way.

Jim wrote: " No way to weedeat the wire we have. It just eats up the blades or string & beats up the fence.

I'm careful about it because we have thin soil with some steep slopes in places. "

We have to keep the fencelines clear as all of our interior fences are electric and we have to keep them clear. We also fight the erosion problem as well as probably 90% of our acreage is on the side of a hill ... the only flat spots are where the house/barn/shelters are.

Honeysuckle is the invasive plant I've had to deal with, made worse as it had been left for decades and had huge roots. Yet WithOUT herbicides I won!

First I dug up what I could (two trailer loads to the dump!), and started cutting back what was left to weaken it, making sure I never let it flower. As the plants got weaker the roots became weaker and got dug up. Now I walk around once in the spring and pull up what appears, now tiny easily removed plants.

But then, sounds like you get more of everything down South....

I do pull up some honeysuckle, but it really opens up the soil, so I have to be careful. Even too much pulling of garlic mustard will. I'm really having trouble with it. We have so much & I read somewhere that one plant can put out 11K seeds! That sounds high, but touch a mature plant & it sounds like rain, so maybe it's not.

No one is pulling up multifloral rose by the roots. That's about impossible even with a tractor, when I can get it near the bush. I've tried before, but the roots are too strong for what you can grab on top, even with a small chain & slip on it. Besides, getting to the trunk is like fighting a herd of upset cats. Nasty stuff.

Mustard is an incredible plant! Maybe you shouls harvest it and sell it alongside your boowls....

I'm not familair with the roses you refer to, though a good general procedure is to keep cutting it down to ground level a couple times a year until it finally runs out of energy. That works for maple saplings here, which when first cut sprouts ten replacements, It takes four years to kill a maple sapling this way but it works.

The problem with the 3 invasives I listed is that they have longer growing periods than the native plants, so tend to shade them out.

Garlic Mustard is used in salads, but it's from Europe & Africa, so is a horrible invasive here.
Read more on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliaria...

It's a biennial. The first year it grows low, but the 2d year it gets about 18" tall. It stops trees & other plants from getting enough light to germinate by seed, which means it gives an edge to stuff like honeysuckle which grows so well from its root. It has a LOT of seeds that can come up for years & grows all over the forest floor crowding out everything else. There's just too much of it in too many tangles to really get to it properly. it does pull up easily if you can get to it before it blooms in the 2d year. It's fairly easy to kill with an herbicide in the first year, but then it is often growing alongside native plants.

Multiflora rose is worse. You can try to kill it just by cutting off its branches, but it spreads a lot, all through woods & hedgerows. It will climb trees, almost like honeysuckle at times, so it is tough to get to. In the fields, you can mow it & it just grows low to the ground. Once mature, it leaves behind seed beds that can stay active for 20 years.

Originally introduced around the time of the Civil War as an ornamental, it is pretty, smells wonderful for the week or so it blooms & makes a great haven for small animals in hedgerows. It would be great if it didn't spread all over the place.

A century or so later the US Ag Dept really screwed the pooch & used it for erosion control. You see, they tested it to make sure it couldn't spread by seed. They fed it to 3 different species of birds & swore it wouldn't. So, West VA planted it extensively.

Then it started spreading like crazy. Some research showed that birds were spreading it. But they had tested for that, right? Sure they had. They used 3 species of birds that had gizzards which ground up the seeds. They didn't think to test birds without gizzards. Turns out they like to eat the seeds, too. All their digestive system does is strip off the outer shell & then plant the seed complete with water & fertilizer in their droppings.

KY never planted it, so my 86 year old neighbor remembers when it first came to this area. It's now all over the place. The thorns are so tough, they will pierce tractor tires causing slow leaks. Tubes put in get torn up again. Trying to clear mature bushes is horrible. It pokes through thick leather gloves easily & the long branches grab at anything & hold on for dear life. Branches over 20' long aren't unusual.

Frightening! I can't imagine a plant that punctures tractor tires! Thank goodness what invasives survive this far North only survived in the front five acres where the ground was once cleared. The woods here tend to take care of themselves, it's just open fields that honeysuckle could get to.

Invasives are a REAL problem throughout the country, and I think ultimately they are going to win and change habitats permanently.

Things will change, have changed, for sure. It's been going on a long time. In New Voyage to Carolina (1709), John Lawson notes how the white mulberry trees have gone native. They were brought over by early colonists to see if silk farming would work here. Well, the trees loved it. Most people don't realize the only native species of mulberry is the red.

The American Chestnut is gone (except for a small stand of American Chestnuts in Ohio in a protected glen or something. No one is allowed near them as they're the last mature ones known to exist.) & that was 20-25% of the trees in the Appalachian mountains. I hear they have some 15/16 American Chestnut/Chinese Chestnuts that they're trying to reintroduce. They have the disease resistance, but we won't be alive to see mature trees back.

I really hate the poison hemlock that lines the roads around here. It's the same stuff Socrates drank. I've killed it off on my property & the animals won't eat it, but its a worry since it crowds out good grass & dies back to allow the Johnson grass, another invasive to take over - or so I've heard. Two invasives working together is just scary.

Yep. I grew up in Western Massachusetts and spent a lot of time in the woods... never saw a tick or an opossum.

Opossums appeared in Western Mass in the 1970's, and last time I visited (2009) I couldn't walk more than three feet without getting ticks all over me!

Now opossumns have come to Southern Maine, and the ticks were well established, especially along the coast, when I lived there in 1995.

Here it's still cold enough in the Winter to keep the ticks at bay. They are around but I've never seen one. Instead we enjoy swarms of the traditional native mosquitoes and black flies in late Sping and early Summer. I'll take little buzzy pests anytime over sneaky mean ticks!

I hated the bugs in Maine. Mosquitoes were so thick one time they were landing on my uncle's stogie when we were out fishing. They flew in clouds. Noseeums are just nasty flying into your nose & eyes. Black & deer flies are irritating. No, there were a lot of things I liked about Maine, but the bugs weren't one of them. If we were right on the shore or up on the mountains, it wasn't that bad. My one grandmother had a camp that was situated in bug heaven, though.

Ticks come & go. We've always had them around MD, but some years they're worse than others. Just before we left MD, I guess 2006, they were horrible, but they weren't the next year & it wasn't a very cold winter. It was dry, though. I've heard droughts kill them off. We had very few here in KY & are now getting more.

Bugs and mosquitoes ebb and flow here as well. I don't go out to the woods unless it's windy three months out of the year, but most of the time around the farm's open places it's tolerable.

But then again, one evening I was waiting for some visitors to show up from down in Pennsylvania. Just before they arrived I was thinking how nice it was... no mosquitoes anywhere! Then they pulled in the yard and suddenly I heard this buzzing zipping by me... my guests got inundated in seconds!

Maybe I'm just too old and foul tasting....

No comment.
;-)

For some reason calling paper books 'dead tree books' is beginning to really irritate me. What's wrong with 'paper'? Is a semi-disposable electronic device that sucks up electricity & rare earth metals really so much better for the environment that we can disparage paper? Hasn't it served us well for centuries & doesn't it still do so?

So, here's a big raspberry to all the wanna-be, hip environmentalists who call 'paper' 'dead tree'.
THHHWWWWWPPPP!!!!!

I like your response!

Paper, combined with the printing press, made books accessable to everyone. Hey, nobody in my neighborhood can afford a ebook reader... what will happpen if only the rich can afford "books"?

Middle ages here we come!

I don't believe I have ever called a hardback book or paperback book a 'dead tree' book and I still do buy some print books. All of my equine training books and all of my art reference books are still traditionally printed books.

I also use my Kindle a great deal ... and have to say it's paid for itself. I live 20 miles from the nearest library and I read a LOT. To even start to keep myself in books (pre Kindle) meant a trip to the library twice a week at least and even then I was out of 'new' books before the two weeks were up.

With the Kindle I can download from the library and get a lot of free books as well, so I have been able to cut back my town trips to once a month and my library visit is combined with grocery shopping.

We can't afford to run two vehicles so only have the farm truck and while it is reasonably economical for a big pickup, it isn't like a small car. A round trip to town is about $10 in fuel. The Kindle has pretty much paid for itself in one year.

I like my Sony ereader, but some people seem to be fanatics. A lot of the books I read are only available in electronic format & it has another advantage in that stories can be as long or short as they need to be. No more forcing an author to cut or pad to fill a specific space.

There are a lot of books I'll never want to read on an ereader, though. Like Sharon, I have art & reference books that just wouldn't fare well in that format. Others are too old to be available that way & probably never will be.

They each have their place & I'm glad for both.

Just paid the property taxes... and I still have money for food, medicine for the doggy and maybe even a few bucks to buy a some more used books to add to my library, most of which came from dumps, library book sales and used books sellers like ABEbooks.... (I do on occasion buy new books, but not if it needs plugged in)

Yet compared to some of my neighbors I'm RICH!!!

That I no longer have access to many new "Books", and never will since e-books can't be resold for 50 cents at Goodwill, perhaps we're all a bit poorer.....

Technology is nice, and I'm not a "fanatic" or a "luddite", but given that the other 3,000,000,000 people on the planet have more basic needs (including access to books, education and new ideas) I must ask the question, "What's wrong with this picture?".

One of the worst things about the electronic gadgets is they just don't last long. They could last a lot longer, but most people seem to want the latest & greatest. They spend incredible amounts of money on it, too.

I watched ereaders for a while before I decided on my Sony, then asked for it for Xmas a few years ago. My wife & I both use it, too. It's handy, but we both prefer paperbacks. One of these days I'll need to replace it, but I won't until I have to & then I'll likely whine about the cost. We rarely replace any electronics until they've died, but cost is only part of the issue. It just seems like a waste to us. Even my cell phone is 6 years old. Our TVs usually easily pass a decade & we only have one in the house.

I'll help out a neighbor if they need a hand, but I don't worry much about the rest of the world. Life isn't fair & there are usually a lot of reasons that things are the way they are for those folks. Understanding, much less fixing, them as an outsider is often impossible. What we are sure of, often isn't actually the case.

I read a book by a guy about my age who lives in Rhodesia, for instance. He's sitting in class hoping that democracy won't be voted in because they all know it will be the worst thing that could happen to the country. I can't say for sure that was right, but it hasn't been pretty.

A class mate of my daughter's from Uzbekistan said she hated it when UNICEF or one of those charities gave them school supplies because they'd be forced to buy them & they didn't have the money.

Not at all what I would have guessed.

I think that in the larger scheme of things no matter how "environmentally friendly" we as individuals try to be, the only power we have is our meager checkbook, and when the larger powers, the politicians and corporations with the HUGE checkbooks, choose profit at any cost, be it environmental damage or social injustice, there's little we as individuals can do.

Thus global warming proceeds unchecked, European corporations buy the rights to wells in Africa and sell the water to local people, and jihadists seeing thier culture undermined by corporate greed have good reason to be angry (not that their methods are justified, but regardless of what the corporate controlled news says, it is understandable).

Even if I could afford an e-book I wouldn't buy it. When books and ideas become nontransferable and inaccessable to the "have nots" it's a step back for mankind. (and womenkind!)

We recycle probably about 80% of what we bring into the house. We don't have a compost heap, which would be a bit difficult based on the size of our yard, but if I was able to get one of those contained one, that would be even better.

Eventually, I think it would be interesting to do some reclaimed wood and material furniture making.

I like using wrapping paper and ribbons in my Christmas Cards. It adds a three dimensional aspect to them.

I'm not sold on global warming being a human caused issue nor on ebooks being nontransferable to have-nots. Personally, what someone else has doesn't have a huge effect on what I want or need whether they have more or less. Different lifestyles make for different needs & wants. I doubt an apartment dweller would want my pony & I sure don't want their alarm systems.

My son is using broken iPhones as servers now. He says you can't believe how much computing power they have once you turn off the GUI & such. We're getting to the point where it might just be cheaper & better to give people mini-computers with books on them than paper books.

Ever seen anything about the One Laptop Per Child program that found out just how smart kids are? Short article, well worth reading:
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/eth...

Lady Danielle aka The Book Huntress wrote: "We recycle probably about 80% of what we bring into the house...."

I wouldn't even know how to guesstimate that. We've always recycled a lot, more now that the trash company will do recyclables, although they're a lot more limited than our old one in MD. They only do a couple of types of plastic, for instance.

At least we can mix all the recyclables. We used to have feed bags out in the barn for colored glass, clear glass, tin, aluminum, steel & paper. It was a pain. Then we had to take it to the dump occasionally.

That's a rough estimate, but I'd say fairly accurate. Yeah, they finally started picking up recycling on the curb, and we can mix it. The only thing they don't take is plastic bags and batteries and stuff. We can still take those downtown, but we don't get down there that much. Hence, they sit in the garage. :)

I had a hard time setting up recycling at work. I swear some of those recycling companies prey on small business. They want to charge $25 to take a PC. I kept looking around until I found a place that would take them for free & were happy to get them.

Another thing I did was quit buying new UPS's. We have to have one on every PC, but I swap out the batteries when they go bad. It's about half the cost & places like the Battery Warehouse take the old ones to recycle.

Now, if I could just figure out what to do with alkaline batteries... Anyone know? Can they be recycled?

When my current legal issue becomes a matter of public record I'll tell you how difficult it can be to recycle when you don't have a car....

Here they do take alkaline batteries... very bad for landfills! Plastic bags get dropped at the grocery store, though they only take #2 plastic at the transfer station. I try to eliminate as much as I can, and managed to eliminate the awful foam meat packaging (and the dreadful stinky blob they put inside to absorb juices that attract bears) by going to real butcher who uses paper.

I must burn stuff like tissues... mostly to reduce what I have to carry out since I can't often get to the transfer station, but if I don't it gets shipped to an incinerator anyway.

Yet I still have a small bag of trash (like packaging) each week that I drop in the trash can outside the grocery store.... can't recycle everything yet!

Sounds like you're doing very good, Foxtower.

I hate that styrofoam. I don't know why that is still in use.

Jim, our recycling place does take alkaline batteries. I assume that they have some way of reusing it.

Thanks. They use styrofoam because it is cheap & satisfies health department regulations a lot easier than most other stuff - or so I was told.

Yeah, and who cares if it takes 300 years to break down?

Exactly! It won't be their problem after all.

Hehe! Maybe that was their thinking after all!

I did keep some of the foam trays.. they make great sorting and project trays! You can even make them into airplanes, but by and large it's easier not to buy them at all.

And my thought is that whoever the grand collective controlling "they" are (could it be us?) doesn't think much past todays profits.

Could be us, although I think the world is so complicated that we don't realize the ramifications of our decisions. For instance, folks shop by price, so they choose Walmart & then whine when the local groceries & other stores go out of business & the poor quality. Unfortunately, if most people choose to buy the cheapest, that's what we're all stuck with.

...most people... I'm not "stuck" with it though! I make choices that don't include Malwart or wasting precious resources. I am the steward for my bit of the planet and what I can do is guarantee that when I'm done here this bit of the planet will be better than how I found it.

Herbicides get a bad rap since they're often overused. Personally, I love them & keep a few gallons around. I spot spray the worst weeds in my fields & woods.

If I can, there's about a week in the spring when I can spray some of the worst invasive species (multiflora rose, Japanese honeysuckle, & garlic mustard) in my woods. These 3 leaf out earlier than the natives & choke them out, so spot spraying them during that week allows me to knock them back a lot faster & in greater quantity than the hand work I do the rest of the year.