Now, before anyone starts thinking that I'm really, really, really old, I'm not! When I tell this story, though, you are going to think so. Just keep in mind that I grew up in my Great Grandparent's home, in a very rural setting.
Maybe it's because we had such a large amount of trash to put out for pick up yesterday, but I was reminded of my childhood when we didn't have trash pick up every week. We didn't even have trash pick up every month. I think it was more like every 6 months or so someone would come around and pick up the tin cans and glass. They would put a note in the weekly newspaper that there would be pick up and everyone would drag their barrel to the edge of the yard.
We burned our trash back then. There really wasn't much to burn. I would say the majority of it came from the bathroom because, well, we were on septic, and I'll leave it at that. And really, there wasn't that much from the bathroom either because we had an outhouse. Yes, I grew up using an outhouse! We had indoor plumbing, but why waste the water?
We didn't have much to burn because we didn't buy that much from the store, therefor there wasn't much packaging material. All our meals were from scratch. Meat was from the freezer and vegetables were from the garden or from the cellar where the home canned goods were stored. Those jars were reused year after year, so the only part of it that would go into the tin can barrel was the lid.
Glass jars from storebought items were reused. Grandpa would use them in the garage to store nails or he would save seeds in jars. There weren't too many either. Grandpa made pickles and Grandma canned fruit, so there weren't too many things bought in cans or jars. I do remember that Grandma really liked canned plums and would buy them in cans from the grocery store. I'm pretty fond of them myself... :)
As far as table scraps or other organic waste from the kitchen, if it was something that the dog could eat, he got it, otherwise the scraps got thrown out behind the shed into the farm field. There weren't many table scraps, really. We usually ate everything up and if there were leftovers they were lunch the next day. Potato peelings might have been one of the biggest scraps thrown out into the field, but honestly, Grandma pretty much just scraped those skins off to leave as much potato as possible!
So that's my little trip down memory lane today. I'm going to be 49 years old this year and these memories are from my single digit years and early double digits! I sure had a great childhood.
1 comment:
It was the same on our farm in Central Illinois--although the hogs ate all the scraps, including potato peels. Yes, we burned our trash. We had a spot by the smokehouse behind a partial brick enclosure where the empty cans were thrown for decades (not that there were that many). About twice a year some scrap merchant came around wanting to buy old metal such as broken parts of equipment and old baling wire (which also had a special disposal spot as it was removed from bales of straw or hay). A lot of things have changed; I doubt that my daughter will ever have a clue about the way things were in those not so distant days.
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