Things to Do with Fallen Leaves

As we quickly approach November and the portion of the year when things are mostly bare and brown instead of lush and green, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about things we homesteaders can do with all those fallen leaves that will help our general productivity over time.

We were gifted with one of those noisy, gasoline powered leaf blowers a few months ago when a friend moved from the countryside back into town and had no further use for it. Made me chuckle considering the fact that we live in the middle of the southern Appalachian forest – “thick” by anyone’s standards – and have enough fallen leaves to drive most towns crazy. Worse, living where we do we also get fairly regular fires that love nothing better than a good thickness of dead leaves to burn. I’ve learned through the years that the low-level “brush fires” that don’t burn much other than the leaf fall and a few scraggly saplings are actually good for the forest. So long as they don’t manage to get hot enough to engulf trees. Heck, most of the mature trees can (and have) survive the ground fires just fine, a bit blacker around the trunks than they used to be. And kudzu, of course, loves fire. Always comes roaring back twice as thick as before, and does way more than its share of eating forest trees, engulfing dead cars and stray cattle herds overnight.

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Filed under Environment, Food Production, Future Planning, Garden, Homestead, Maintenance, Recycling, Sustainable Living, Yard | Comment (0)

Earth Day 2011 – What’s Your Project?

Earth Day 2011 is officially marked for Friday, April 22. There are events scheduled all over the place, through the Earth Dar organization and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In my region – the Southeast – there are a host of events planned in Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and elsewhere, but in my own neighborhood [North Carolina} the closest event takes place downtown Asheville in conjunction with the WMCA, where grandson works. The focus will be healthy living (and a lot of fun and games. And music!). I encourage readers to check on events in their area, or renew their efforts to ‘green’ the planet within their own circles by sponsoring community gardens or joining a CSA or helping populate a local tailgate farmer’s market.

While I need to go ahead and plant potatoes and corn this week despite the continuing plume of errant radiation still coming from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, today I’d like to talk about resources for community gardens. There are often grants available from community funds, corporate set-asides and governmental agencies that can help establish community gardens. For homesteaders offering or hoping to offer CSA memberships or Agritourism adventures, it can be a great promotional asset to be part of such a project in your local town, especially in conjunction with your homesteading neighbors.

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Filed under Activities, Agritourism, Community, Environment, Garden, Recycling, Sustainable Living | Comment (0)

Used Tires: Pollution or Resource?

I don’t know about you, but I pick up junked tires that other people dump off the side of mountain roads in my county – usually along with assorted junked appliances and badly bagged household trash – and take them with me when I do the monthly trash run to our local Inconvenient Center. I call it that instead of its own self-title of “Convenient Center” because it’s damned IN-convenient. They put all their dumpsters inside a compound with high chain link topped by barbed wire and guarded by a grizzled old grouch (and his junkyard dog) who seem to really hate the idea that people have trash and recyclables to responsibly dispose of, which is only open 3 days a week when almost all of us are actually out working honest jobs instead of hauling our own trash.

Anyway, there is a corner of the inconvenient center devoted to junked appliances and tires, which supposedly get recycled at some point (though I’ve never noticed the piles to go down any). Better to have those big junk items at the center than on the roads and hillsides. They never biodegrade, they are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and they look really nasty. So, you might have been wondering, how exactly do they recycle things like the 190 million car, truck and equipment tires tossed every year in this nation, and what COULD be done with them?

My friend Vito over at RideLust has asked the obvious question, based on a recycling technology that could actually be of some great use and wouldn’t spread West Nile Fever. It’s called Rubberized Asphalt Concrete [RAC], and it would not only give us better, longer lasting road surfaces, it would save us a whole heck of a lot of petroleum dependence!

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Filed under Energy, Environment, Pollution, Recycling | Comment (0)