I started out vermicomposting but wild bsfl took over the worm bins. So now I just bsfl. I don't have to buy new larva every season, they just show up. They get all my household paper
water waste which I shred before layering into their areas. I used to sort all my kitchen scraps, chop the stuff for the chickens, throw in the trash pickup the oil and meat and other things you aren't supposed to
feed the chickens or the worms. The chickens know I put the kitchen waste in worm bins and they follow me and beg for me to give them larva. so now I do not even have to walk up to the chicken pens with the larva as a result. since its hard for me to walk the hundred yards between the bins and the chickens I am grateful for that. Someday the chicken pen will move to worm bins which live inside the
deer fenced
raised bed gardens.
All my
wood waste goes on my flood defense swales which have been seeded with spent mushroom production. Now that I am digging a
pond, the dirt from the
pond is going on top of the 8 years of waste I've been throwing on those swales.
The chicken
poop goes on the orchard, and nut and banana groves
The mammal bedding went into compost boxes for baking and then once a year they went into the raised vegetable, fruit and herb boxes. But I no longer have mammal bedding to process and eventually broke down the cooking boxes and threw them on the swales as well.
I try to compost everything. I don't yet compost my plastics as I don't yet have a plastics grinder.
I don't process my glass. It takes a lot of
energy to melt it down and reshape it so I'm not doing that, though I worked on a
project to take it out of Guam's trash stream, cart it to the University, and have classes teaching students to make useful objects out of the mountain of beer bottles currently thrown on the mountain of mixed trash in Ordot. Nor I am saving my bottles to build with. I am regenerating a tiny farm on a bridgeless island that I bought a couple years ago. The first job was to clean up the trash tucked piled stacked strewn neglected over most of the half acre. One particularly dangerous job was picking up the piles of colorful wine bottles the previous resident had horded. They were filled with water and insects and in leaf strewn piles I could easiy imagine venomous snakes hiding in. This cured me of any desire to save my own glass for any future building project.
I have my own hoard of cloth, old clothes, towels etc which I used to sew into anything I needed. But as the arthritis sets in I have less interest in needlework. During the pandemic I boxed it all up and shipped it to my sister, the international missionary, who is living at a camp in Louisiana sitting out the travel bans in Asia with her two suitcases, which hold the sum of everything she owns. She borrowed a sewing machine and is busy with all my lace, brocade, prints, silks, cottons...
I used to save bits and pieces of anything that held significance and then turned it into ritual
art, but now that I have a cell phone, I just take a picture and then write about the feelings the picture invokes.
Before the pandemic I regularly invited people to my home for gatherings. I always had a giveaway table, where people could take any and everything on the table. They could also bring any and everything they wanted to give away. When the inflow outpaced my ability to store items beetween giveaways, I just took it to
local charities.
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