We live a rural life in our retirement, in a county that has only about 15000 residents. Since we bought our property, several suburban changes have been made along the main Route that bisects the county, installing town water instead of wells to most of the residents along that route. To dispose of your garbage, if you live on a main paved secondary road, there is garbage pick up once a week. If you live off of the main route or the paved secondary roads, you still have well water and you pay a mandatory monthly fee for the privilege of taking your garbage to one of 4 collection sites in the county. We fall in the later category.
This is a fairly recent development, within the last decade or two and before that, the rural method was to have a garbage pile on your property or find a place that no one would complain and dump it. Taking your garbage to the collection center is a hard pill for some of the folks up here to swallow and many have the mindset to never throw away anything and to take anything that is free, because maybe someday you will find a use for it. As a result there are properties that regardless of how close their neighbor is, have junked cars, dead tractors, collections of plastic yard toys and yard ornaments, piles of half rotted lumber, barrels and buckets of who knows what, old tubs or toilets, you name it and it is in their yard, creating an eyesore. Don’t get me wrong, that is not the norm. You see many neat well kept farms as well.
Another facet of cattle raising land is the use of old tires to hold down tarps over silage or to line the edge of a difficult to fence area as the cows won’t step inside or over them.
Our 30 acres was used to graze cattle, then miniature horses prior to our purchase. The land had been rented out to various farmers over the years. And our land has a natural sinkhole with a creek running down into it and then disappearing into the a cave. Two edges of the largest hayfield had well over a hundred tires placed in an alternating double row, just in the edge of the woodlot. The sink hole was a repository of many years of dumping, right off the edge of the cliff, so that the junk fell near and into the creek. This wasn’t just cans and bottles, but an old wringer washer, part of a car, an old stove, a water heater, rolls of rusted fencing and more tires. This bothered us, a lot, and every weekend that we could visit our land before construction, we came armed with boxes of huge garbage bags, work gloves and boots and we loaded and hauled sacks and sacks of glass and plastic out of the pile.
Once we brought our trailer up to store, we started collecting the tires and had to pay to drop them off, not at the nearest collection center, but the central one in the county. Each tire costing us $1.50 to leave it.
Two summer’s ago, a neighbor, Jim and I with our tractor and the neighbor’s long steel cable, spent a couple of day hauling the big junk out of the sinkhole and piling it up in the edge of the closest field where one of the local men came and loaded all of the metal onto his truck to take to the metal reclaiming site for whatever money he could get for it.
We thought when that was hauled away that we were done with the worst of it and had done a part to help clean up the environment and local groundwater.
When the leaves fell this fall, we noticed another tire in the edge of the woods, then another, and another. Now that the snow has melted and before we get any more rain or snow, we hooked up the trailer, put on our work clothes and dragged 15 more tires out of the edge of the woods. We are afraid to say that we have finally gotten them all, because that might jinx us and we will find more. For now, the sinkhole, the barn, and the edge of the woods look better. We will never get all of the old rusted cans and broken glass from the edge of the sinkhole, but hopefully, each year, Mother Nature is dumping a new load of leaves to compost over them and they are settling into the earth.
Life is good on our mountain farm.
Cabin Crafted 