Slaying the trash pile

When we first saw the farm (and everyone we took to see it in the early times) we couldn't really find words to describe the mess it was left in.  A good friend came to help me but then just walked around, mouth open, too stunned to do anything.  Fortunately we have big imaginations and Tim has a lot of stubborn energy and a few amazing friends and family really stepped up in a big way to help us slay the beastly pile.  Thank you Rachel, Justin, Matt, Alex, Nick, Ryan, Cobb, Susan, Ben and others!



So, 200 hours of labor later, how much trash was there?

Not everyone is enough of a spatial thinker to easily conceptualize what 1 cubic yard of trash looks like.  So to help you visualize this, it is about one small pick-up load.  Hopefully that will help you to understand the amount of work required to remove:

• 60 cu. yards of landfill trash
• 3 cu. yards of beer bottles and cans
• 50+ cu. yards of scrap metal
• 50+ cu. yards of scrap wood
• 8 cu. yards of recyclable black irrigation tubing

You can also probably imagine our excitement that we have finally managed to remove all of this material from this piece of earth so that we can best grow healthy clean food, and maintain an organized farm!  We can't wait to bring people to see the beautiful farm-scape to be.

We also want to take from this experience strong lessons about how we choose to use materials and resources in the future.  It's not that we don't value saving useful things (we definitely salvaged some useful materials from the chaos)... we just want to close loop on farm inputs wherever possible.  Stay tuned to see how we do at accomplishing that (HUGE) goal.