resource management

Retro art. This picture was stretched already, we found it at the local Salvation Army thrift store. Why stretch a new canvas when there are all of these great artworks waiting to be updated? ;) Phoenix painted this on her birthday. The hearts were cut from the foil of a Newman's chocolate bar.
Our upper room is evolving! I love these couches that we found at the consignment store in town. They actually have mattresses under the tweed covers for our future guests. These are also on wheels! Oh, couches on wheels. . . I made a room divider out of materials from the Habitat For Humanity Restore. The divider behind the couch is made from salvaged shutters, hinges, and screws.
One crate full of leftover potting soil. We will be mixing it with compost to start seeds for our veggies.
Wooden baskets for gathering strawberries.
Trays and starters for veggies to be. We are stacking these and moving them to a particular corner of one of the greenhouses.
Flower pots. These were outside in a crate. I moved them inside one of the greenhouses so that they didn't get too weakened by the cold weather.
More starter pots in the hoop house. Some of these had remnant of tomato plants past. We pulled out the old dried out plants and had fun burning them in the fireplace. The leftover potting soil we dumped back into a crate in the hoop house.

We put in a wood burning stove downstairs and have the fireplace in the upper room. Recently some friends of ours nearby that own land told us that we can have as much wood as we want by helping to manage their woodlands. We obtained a chainsaw from one of places we found on craigslist. One of their buildings had collapsed on a chainsaw and broke it. We were gathering bricks and tin from the rubble and they said we could take the broken chainsaw as well. Jerome got it fixed up and has begun teaching me to use it.

Bottles Bill Mccabe has been saving from his bar for us. We will be using these to build and make bottle bricks. I have fun plans for bottle bricks in tires and adobe around the fire ring, but I have to wait until Spring.

~ * ~

Mike Reynolds got my attention when he said (in the video Garbage Warrior) that trash is a natural resource of the world today.

Lately we have been doing a lot of resource management. By this I mean lots of cleaning and organizing. When we bought our land there seemed to be trash everywhere. The owners were cleaning it up and throwing it away, but we told them to just leave it! What appeared to be trash was a were a lot of slightly used and highly disorganized resources. Since last June we have been slowly sorting . . .

honestly to start our CSA most of the resources are already here. There are so many flower pots and trays and smaller starting pots that its hard to imagine

using them all, especially if we continue to reuse.