July 19, 2018 Trash Update

A few weeks ago I ranted about the trash on Creekside Farm. I suppose the it was all part of my process... Anyway, we have (perhaps) found a semi-efficient solution. I built a sifting machine that makes quick work of removing the millions of small pieces of stuff littering nearly every inch of the Farm.

The shear size of the problem  required something to make cleaning it up more efficient. We had been clearing an area by first picking up the big stuff, then raking the smaller stuff up, and then picking out the miniature stuff by hand. Every shovel load of ground contains glass, plastic, textiles, wood, plant materials, and stones. This stuff roughly takes up half the volume of the load, the other half is just plain old dirt.

Some of the places are merely horrible.
A large area is really horrifying.
And a few are much worse than this.

This sifter is in two parts. The first is a screen on a frame which can be handled by two people. We put the unsifted stuff in and agitate it. Anything under one-half inch, like sand or dirt, falls through to the ground when you shake the sifter hard enough. What remains gets dumped.  The other half of the sifter is a table-like apparatus to make the job easier. The sifter sits in the top of the table and can be agitated back and forth on bearings.

I made the whole thing wide enough to load using the three cubic foot loader bucket on our mighty little tractor. I also made it so that the tractor can carry it around. We have to split the bucket loads into three or four smaller bites, but it gets the job done quickly and leaves only the smallest of debris. Last night we used it for the first time and got about two hundred square feet cleared in less than two hours. We sifted out about a yard and a half of debris, leaving about the same volume in a pile on the ground below.

After sifting we have almost nothing left to clean up.
Very small pieces of trash remain after sifting so
this dirt will have to be used for hole filler.
(We won't use it for planing.)