Your land may have a landfill on it. This is a homesteading reality if you are looking at rural land. In this brief (hopefully) post I'll touch on some thoughts about poverty and trash and why they are connected and why many old homesteads have trash piles on them. Let me know in the comments if you have had or are dealing with trash piles!
THE BONEYARD
When we bought our previous homestead (we still own it but I let my parents live there in their retirement) we noticed that there was a sizable trash pile on it. This isn't uncommon unfortunately. Here's a few pictures of what I called "The Boneyard. The boneyard covered probably 2500 square feet and was mounded up in one area (where they had their burn pile) and spread all over. It consisted of every imaginable thing."
...even the kitchen sink... and the bathroom sink and the refrigerator door. No big deal. Scrap metals are something I can handle having grown up (literally) in a junkyard. My dad was a recycler so I saw this as potential money. The BAD stuff was just under the surface of this.
Stuff like vinyl, plastics, cloth, rocks, trashbags, styrofoam...
*And old paint cans, broken porcelain and glass, fencing, car parts and don't forget all the blackberry prickers growing up through it all.
But the vast number of bones led me to believe that someone in the past had quite a butchering operation going on. Well, that or a there was some ritualistic cult here... :) But I found pig skulls, cow bones, deer... some I couldn't identify and whenever I dealt with cleaning bones up I hoped none were human!
WHY ARE THERE TRASH PILES IN THE COUNTRY?
Without going TOO deeply into it, trash pick-up really started as a city thing. Everyone used to throw their trash and even their human waste into the streets, it was sort of normal... until disease hit. Then they would round it up... first it started with manure from horses... and people running pickup services, to trash and waste pickup. Typically they'd just take it out to the country and dump it somewhere. That was fine and well as most things were organic and would waste back into the earth, but as man developed more packaging and compounds and chemicals the stuff wouldn't burn as easily or decompose as readily.
Rural people have always just thrown the stuff into piles. It was common for farms to have dumps. In fact county dumps were typically just that. Some land that the owner charged people to dump stuff on. Even if it were drums of chemicals. Some of those are SuperFund sites now.
But rural folk... they didn't want to pay for what they could do on their own land. Truthfully, they probably couldn't afford to. There is a great connection between trash and poverty... and poverty and rural.
Of course the more man-made compounds and chemicals that we developed and the advent of the petroleum age a lot of those dumps grew and got bigger and more toxic. Many times they would just dig a hole and bury it.
So some of the "pristine country land" may not be so pristine. It's nothing to panic over, but it IS worth looking for the signs when you are looking for land in the country.
Have any of you had a trash pile on your land? Tell me about it. Any pictures? What did you do or what are your plans.
Honestly, I'm STILL cleaning up (slowly have recycled most of the metal and been bagging up other stuff and then burning what I can burn) the Boneyard, which is complicated since I don't live there now. How about you?
GROW WHERE YOU ARE
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