It is amazing how much junk people can leave lying around. We bought our farm last summer and have spent the past year fixing it up and cleaning it up.
This fall has been dedicated to cleaning up the junk left behind from the previous owners. According to a 1969 license plate we found the stuff has been there for a long time. We have found an old refrigerator, bed frames, bird cages, chicken coop, oil tank, farm equipment, fencing and tin sheets, as well as a lot of unrecognizable metal.
We have spent hours pulling this junk out of the back field. Some of it has been there so long that the trees and vines have grown up around and through it and we have had to be creative, and destructive, to remove it. We have used the tractor to lift, push and pull trying to clear all this junk.
Rod has hauled around 20 loads of junk to the scrap yard in exchange for cold hard CASH. They pay us by the pound and some of that stuff was really heavy.
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| one of our many loads of junk |
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| junk, junk, junk |
Now that the field is almost all cleaned up we can finish clearing the weeds and scrub brush. If we find a nice calm day we can burn the old scraps of wood left lying around too. If we can haul things to the junk yard why couldn't they? I will never understand why people leave things like that around, and spread out all over. It would have been a lot easier if they had just one big junk pile. It's been a lot of work but it will all be worth it in the end when we have our place cleaned up.
Next spring we have 1500 small trees arriving and our back field of junk will be turned into a forest of evergreens. This is part of the 1 million tree project, where the province provides trees to farms to plant to improve the environment. For a small price they even come in and plant them for us. We have decided to take them up on that. Last year we planted 300 cedars and that took almost an entire day with 4 of us working. I can't imagine how long it would take to plant 1500 trees.
