Monica King
  • Contact & Bee Removals
  • Store
  • Calendar
  • Blog
  • Workshops / Classes
  • Consultations / Hive Maintence
  • Beekeeping
  • Recipes
  • Homestead Birds
  • Gardening & Orchard
  • Homestead Power & Heating
  • Skills
  • Beekeeping
  • Beneficial Plants
  • Arts & Crafts
  • Organizing Ideas
  • Wanted
  • Bio
  • Bee Removal Gallery
  • Hive Walk
  • Library
  • Foraging/Survival - Snake Processing Class
  • Craft Retreats
  • Donations
  • Butterflies, Moths, Caterpillars
  • Native Birds

Saving & Reusing - Making Do

9/27/2018

0 Comments

 
Rich folk could always discard more than the poor. But should they?

Country people used to depend on what they had on hand, using ingenuity more than those living in the city or near a store. Is this still true or do you drop everything to drive to a town an hour or more away to get your missing part for a project or ingredient for a recipe? 

What is really waste? Try to practice an everyday regard for each object. Think about the labor involved in making it. The materials used in the making of that object. The money it took to purchase the object. When the object has come to the end of its life, will it be reused or will it take up space in a landfill? 

History:

During the excavation of a 1620s Virginia Plantation called Flowerdew Hundred, a fragment of a stoneware bottle neck was unearthed. It matched perfectly with the bottom of a large German jug already in the plantations museum. The two pieces were dug from different sites. The most logical explanation being that the colonists did not have many things. When the jug broke, it is quite possible that the bottom was continued to be used as a bowl and the top turned into a funnel. 

Seventeenth-century Dutch paintings show broken plates and bowls sitting on shelves along with intact ones.

Sewing was women's work. It is proven by diaries and novels and even embroidery samplers signed by five year olds. Women kept their families clothed. Of course not all women felt the same, some thought of it as an art and a chance to show their creativity with what they had on hand. Others found it a detestable chore, but one that had to be done. The plainest cotton shirt used to take a good seamstress half a day to make. A more complicated shirt could take a day or two. Closets were small, only the wealthy had more than a few changes of clothing for each season, many people had one change or none at all. Then came the sewing machine, invented in 1846. 



0 Comments

Recycle - Thin Metal

9/10/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
Living out of city limits has some down falls. One, there is no weekly trash pick-up. We could pay to have a dumpster, but that is very expensive. It certainly makes you think about what you throw away when you have to haul it yourself somewhere. So we sort our trash before we take it to different places such as the dump and different recycling centers. Our "Bone Yard" has pile areas. Unfortunately, this last time the metals got thrown all together. The recycling centers have different prices for Sheet Metal (I call it thin metals) and what I call heavy metal, I think they call Prepared but I am  not sure. I had used feed bags to keep our metal food cans in and those fell apart in the sun. So the best way I found is using large heavy duty black planters that trees come in.  The drain holes are great to allow water to pass through without becoming breeding grounds for mosquitoes.  You can see pieces of an old kiln, old washing machine, scrap we found while cleaning our mile of highway that we volunteer for. We also pick up other peoples litter in the desert and toss it into the pile. Oh, and truck parts. 
Picture
Feed bags and cardboard box fell apart........ made more work for me! I thought I would be making a run to the recyclers sooner and be able to catch them before the sun rotted them. 
Picture
Heavy duty rubber planters work best for small metal pieces and tin cans.
Picture
After removing all the thin and small metal pieces I have a pile of heavy stuff left for another trip.
​ Dan will remove the tires from the rims.
Picture
So I did use new feedbags to run the metal in.
Total weight was 360 pounds (adds up fast!)
​and it paid for the gas into town to run other errands..........$25.33
0 Comments

    Archives

    January 2023
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    October 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    March 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    May 2016

    Categories

    All
    All In A Day
    Family Recipes

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly