Spring Clean Up

It's tip free days at the dump this week, which also means spring clean up at our house. 

The first trip was mostly from my new neighbour's yard- my parents.  They cleaned up a bunch of stuff left by the former owners.  Our couch- a total wreck- and a few smaller items from here topped the load.  Furniture has to go to the big dump, and I got 'lost' on the way to the dump.  Not actually lost, I still knew where I was, but the dump wasn't where I remembered it 'should' be.  Nothing like driving up and down the backroads with a truck full of junk.  We made it there before they closed.

Day 2, I took two loads to our local dump.  I don't go at all through the winter, so I had quite a build up.  4 bags of garbage and 22 bags of recycling.  There was a bear sitting on the hill watching when we got there.  He ran off before we could get a picture though. 

The first time I went to the dump when we moved here was in the winter.  I pulled in to this fenced off area in the woods.  Everything was white and clean, covered in fresh snow.  They told me to go throw my junk in the pit.  Totally disturbing.  You couldn't tell it was a dump, except for the signs.  And there I was, tossing garbage in the woods.  In the spring, there's trash everywhere, stuff that's blown out scattered along the fenceline, and it smells like a dump.  In the winter I feel like I'm being unfaithful to Mother Earth, and I'm a bad environmentalist.  So I don't go.

Yesterday we spent the day cleaning up around the workshop.  There's still a lot of junk left by the former owners to clean up.  An old oil furnace that's been sitting in the workshop since we moved in got the boot.  I'm not sure if it came out of my house, or if they picked it up somewhere with plans to use it for something.  We found 3 5 gallon pails of used oil just off the yard, along with about 10 empty 5 gallon pails.  The empties will get cleaned up and reused.  The oil has been relocated to the garage where it will find a new purpose and get used up.  Some broken feed dishes, broken buckets, broken heat lamp bulbs, etc, were cleaned out of the workshop, chicken coop, and tack room.  Then we were off to the pasture.  I think I could spend half the summer out there and still not get all the bailer twine and netting cleaned up.  I filled 4 feed bags with it yesterday, and called it a day.

After this load gets dropped off, we'll still have time for one more walk about tomorrow.  The space we use is pretty well cleaned up now, so we'll be working back farther into the trees.  Who knows what trash and treasures await us there.