HAVE YOU TRIED TAME FORAGING?
(Page 3 of 3)
July/August 1971
by NANCY BUBEL
VI. TRASHMONGERING
RELATED CONTENT
Like others who make a game of being non-consumers, we've found it worthwhile to develop a fine eye for trash collections. Why let them burn refuse at the dump if you can use it? In the fall we load up on plastic-bagged leaves put out for the trash by residents of gardenless town and development houses. We use the leaves as bedding for our goats and chickens and as garden mulch. The bags, as long as they come with the leaves (we have a THING against plastic), are used to underlay our straw mulch in the garden row.
Some of our more picturesque finds may be worth cataloging here, if only to indicate the range of possibilities in this area! Here, off the top of my head, are a few of the useful things we've rescued from curbside trash:
What are the most fertile fields for foraging trash? Well, there are two ways of looking at this. Small, efficient new houses have scant storage space and the owners seem often to tend toward an early-obsolescence-of-gadgets mentality. So unused things aren't kept around long before . . . out they go! Old, capacious houses with attics, on the other hand, have a lot to offer too . . . for the opposite reason. The folks who live in such houses have room to hoard stuff for years, and when they DO clean out the attic—whee! Some of our more interesting picture frames and old books have come from this source.
What are we waiting for? Up the alleys, down the riverbanks, through the city parks and vacant lots. Call it foraging, call it serendipity. Take several empty bags and an open mind. You're sure to find something your homestead can use!
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