“I understand that it is illegal to burn household wastes these days.  What do we do with our trash?”,  I asked the realtor who was showing us the property.  “Well,” he replied, “most folk out here just burn it anyways, those who don’t call M…n Sanitation, who will pick it up at the paved highway weekly.”

I thought back to the earliest days of my youth, and I remembered an appliance that was a common sight in suburban neighborhoods at the time, called a backyard incinerator.  You can see an incinerator behind my cousin, Reed, in the photograph below. 

Backyard incinerators were banned in urban areas long ago, due to air-pollution concerns.  Today, residential incinerators and their rural counterparts, the burn-barrel, are prohibited from burning household waste materials in all areas.  So, regardless of what others may do, I dismissed the possibility of burning my trash.  Besides, who wants to breathe in all those toxins anyway?

Another method of trash disposal that I have seen employed on rural acreages is a self-built landfill.  Using a backhoe, a large notch is carved out of the side of a hill.  A layer of trash is piled into the notch, then a layer of soil, another layer of trash and so forth until the notch is filled, at which time another would be dug.  Besides being illegal, under many authorities and for many reasons, I would not want to be the one relying on my well for pure, drinkable water with a home-made landfill on the premises. 

Needless to say, we opted to call M…n Sanitation, and for $18/month they put me on their weekly trash route.  We were allowed up to 4 bags of trash per week, which had to be placed at the junction of the paved highway and the dirt road leading into our property. 

On each side of the dirt road, where it meets the highway, are houses with small yards.  There is no reasonable place for me to place a permanent trash collection bin, so I had to leave my trash at the highway in plastic trash bags.  Each Tuesday morning, prior to 7:30AM, I hauled my trash over the two miles of dirt road to the highway, even when the dirt was covered with snow in the wintertime, as shown below-

I followed this routine for about 2-3 years until, much to my dismay, a neighbor’s dogs discovered that there was a nice supply of trash about a quarter mile down the road from them, and if they waited until about 7:35AM, they would be in for a treat of one sort or another. After a few weeks of my having to pick up trash strewn up and down the highway after the dogs got into it, I decided to sit guard, in my truck, until the sanitation truck came to pick up the bags.  This routine grew old after the first two or three times that the trash truck ran late, forcing me to sit, like an idiot, in my truck guarding my trash!  Enough of this nonsense – I needed to find a better way.

You might remember from a previous post, entitled A Tractor For Chickens?, that I was using a metal chicken tractor for storing trash.  You can see it in use in the following photograph-

It just happened to work out that when the chicken tractor gets full, it creates a perfectly sized load for the bed of my pickup truck.  Beginning with the lightweight recyclables, such as the cardboard and feed bags shown below, I load the truck in layers, with the heaviest items on top.

When all of the bags have been loaded into the truck, it forms a tight load, and because of the weight, nothing blows away.  When the loading is finished, the truck looks like this-

With the truck now loaded with the trash and recyclables accumulated over a couple of months, it is a simple matter to drive the 30 miles to the County Transfer Station, where the trash is deposited into the massive, industrial-sized compactor you see below.

The Transfer Station also acts as the county recycling center, where selected items are collected for recycling.  Additionally, every spring and every fall, the Transfer Station hosts a countywide cleanup for the benefit of our area.  For the duration of one week, residents are allowed to drop off one truckload per day of trash, construction materials, and other landfill-permitted items, and old appliances.

There is no provision at the Transfer Station for the recycling of electronic equipment, which is very harmful to the environment if disposed of in a landfill.  But all is not lost, as there is a wonderful, FREE program for the recycling of electronics available to residents of Arkansas and other states, that can be found in a previous post entitled Project Green-Fed E-Cycling, in which they send you shipping boxes and materials that you fill with old electronics, and call for a free Fed-Ex pickup from your home.

On our next outing, I might take you with me to Tom-Barr Industries, where I periodically drop off a truck-load of scrap metals and old barbed-wire for recycling.  Remember to bring your gloves, if you want to help me.

 

Here it is, Labor Day weekend in the Ozarks, and this morning I am found to be doing the very thing one would expect an Ozarker to be doing on a holiday weekend – surveying trees.  Not just any trees, but Black Walnut trees, which thrive in this part of the Ozarks.  The Black Walnut produces a nut that is used in cooking, and the shell and hull of the Black Walnut have commercial uses as well.  Every fall, Hammons Products Company sets up 250 collection stations across 12 states, where the Black Walnuts are purchased from the local collectors.  The following photograph shows a Black Walnut tree as it appeared in early August.

You will see from the photo above that the Black Walnut tree is not particularly distinct from a distance in the middle of summer.  They are easy to identify up close, but from far away they look much like many other trees that commonly grow here.  One of the things that I have noticed about the Black Walnut is that it is one of the last trees to leaf out in the spring, and it is the first of our local trees to drop it’s leaves at the end of summer.

The leaves that appear on the ground in the photo above are from a Black Walnut tree.  The picture was taken this morning, September 3.  No other trees in my area are shedding leaves yet, however there is a brown carpet of leaves below the Black Walnuts.  The leaves that remain on the tree itself have now turned either yellow or lime green.  So why, you may ask, do I care so much that the leaves of the Black Walnut are the first ones to change color and drop in the fall?  Because when the Walnut trees are the only ones in the forest that exhibit this coloration, they become easy to spot from a distance.  In fact, as the following photograph shows, the Black Walnut trees stand out like a beacon in the night, they are so distinct.

Now that the Black Walnut trees are easy for a non-botanist like myself to identify from a distance, I can proceed to make the preparations that will facilitate a successful harvest of Black Walnuts from our property.  The first step is to map all of the Walnut trees on our property that are currently bearing nuts.  Regular readers of this blog might recall a previous post entitled If They Can Do It, So Can I, in which I introduced you to my “super-duper, multi-purpose, portable cartographic data collection machine”  (SDMPPCDCM).  Using this device, I can easily drive around the property locating the Black Walnut trees that now stand out like a sore thumb, and examine each tree to see whether or not it is bearing nuts this season.  The following photograph shows a Black Walnut tree that is currently loaded with walnuts.

When I find a Black Walnut tree that has produced nuts, such as the tree above, I record the tree as a way-point in my GPS mapping system.  After pinpointing the coordinates of all the nut bearing trees, it is a simple matter to plot this data on a topographic map of the property.  The results are shown in the following screen capture from my mapping program.  The data layer that is selected below shows the results of this little exercise.  The location of all the nut bearing trees are clearly shown on the map (as blue way-points).

I do not know how many Black Walnut trees we have on our property.  My best estimate is between 200-300 trees.  This season I located 94 Black Walnut trees that are bearing nuts in a prolific manner. 

Step two of the Black Walnut harvest will be for me to get out the tractor and bush-hog the areas surrounding all of the nut bearing trees.  The goal will be to ensure easy access to the trees by Jasper Smith, my octogenarian friend who collects the Black Walnuts from our ranch each fall.  You may recognize Jasper Smith as the same friend who also keeps and courses bees as an avocation (Jasper, and photos of a “bee tree hunt” can be found here).  Jasper is an amazing man with amazing stories.  I will save my comments about him for a future post, when he comes around to gather the fallen walnuts. which will be step three of the Black Walnut harvest here.  Stand by for future posts on the subject.