June 27, 2018 Trash, Trash, and more Trash

Just one shining example of trash.
Once the vegetation is cleared
this is what remained.

When we found what came to be the Farm, the place was a real mess. There was (literally) many tons of trash on the property.

We scraped and we cleaned up trash, loaded trash into many sizes of dumpsters, and spent every available dime we had to get rid of the stuff. But just as soon as one pile cleared up, another took its place.

The people who had owned the property had piled the stuff up, accumulated it, collected it, and even threw some of it over the back fence. It seems that they did this since the seventies, operating a business which created trash that they didn't really think about as it collected in the corners.

De-trashing is a process.
It takes time and money.

But the previous owners were not the only trashy types. The woman we bought the property from was a hoarder who, following on her divorce, had her hoard loaded into a shipping container and moved onto the property as well. The container probably never had anything of value in it when it was moved, but twelve years on what was left in the container was entirely trashy stuff. The container was opened up and the stuff spilled out, or was carried, until it covered a large area at the center of the property.

This was AFTER we cleaned it up quite a bit.

But wait! There's more!

After the gates were breached, following the abandonment of the property by all concerned, some of the locals began bringing their trash to the property to avoid dumping fees. They brought couches, tires, and old Christmas lights to the place and added as much as time allowed. We even found a new pile of debris unloaded on the place after we began cleaning it up.

It is needless to continue to write about it, you might get the idea.

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Enter the Smith's (us). With dreams of farm based weddings, foody experiences, and maybe some light antiquing. . . .

We bought the place cheap, knowing that it would take months of time and money we did not have to clean the place up. We bought in and began work. Eventually we got the place to resemble an open field (of sorts).  This brings me to my point: The place itself seems to generate trash all on its own!

It might sound strange, but once any area is completely cleared of trash, down to brown dirt, without a speck of debris, weeds, or trash, anywhere to be found . . . Within a week the Farm has somehow brought more trash to the surface of the otherwise clean dirt. And this is weird.

One expects weeds popping up everywhere (and they do (repeatedly)) but it is completely unexpected to walk a path through what ought to be clean dirt . . . Only to find a saw blade, a table spoon, and unlimited amounts of broken glass, wire, and bits of plastic strewn across everywhere.  That is what is happening every day on our little Creekside Farm.

Even in McGreggor's Market Garden, land which has been tilled deeply, raked to a fine powder, re-tilled, and then planted, continues to vomit to the surface myriad sorts of trashy stuff. It creeps up out of the soil, falls from the trees, and then lays hauntingly under the leaves of potatoes or squash plants. I even find trashy things in the Greenhouse dirt, for which there is no accounting since I bought the dirt somewhere else. Surprisingly the only place I don't find trash is in Gopher mounds. (But don't lets move into that horrible area of conversation.)

It is possible that this may go on for years, but we have years to clean things up and are resolved to win over the trashy past of Creekside Farm.  We are always thinking about some means of sifting the dirt more efficiently. Searching for a tool we might make or buy that will sort the trash from the soils. Our hope is that, someday, we might walk a clean Farm that stays that way. But until we find, or fight the trash out of the place, we must continue the work.