Wednesday Vignette January 10, 2018

This year I was organized enough to recycle the Christmas tree into the garden instead of into the green waste bin.  All the branches cut into 4"-6" pieces made a lovely mulch.  I'm making more of an effort to reduce what we put into a landfill.  We don't produce a lot of trash in this home, but it would be good to reduce it even more.

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Comments

  1. Very good! If I'd been thinking, I'd have added my branches to the back slope. As it was, I just scattered some of the loose needles.

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    1. The needles are the best part of the mulch. The chopping does take time.

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  2. I agree with you and am trying to reduce what goes in the green bin, too. I read about making a short brush fence: two parallel rows of brush stakes about a foot apart with all sorts of longer branches smashed together in between. I have the material. Now I have to figure out where to build it! Great for little birds and lizards, don't you think?

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    1. Would fire safety be an issue? I think about that now.

      Otherwise sounds like a stand alone slowly composting compost pile. I think it would be an orderly way to get a lot of branches to decompose--difficult stuff in a dry climate. At one point I piled a lot of Marjorie Channon branches up--took about three years for them to all become about a half inch of mulch. Green stuff does decompose into a very small final volume--a shame to fill a landfill with it. It takes space to compost it all, though.

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  3. You're setting a great example for others to follow, incl. myself.

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    1. Well, it can be an option for some. Not everyone has the time or space.

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  4. I hope my dry piles tucked out of sight will, rot down to mulch.
    They seem to be sitting there snickering at me.

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    1. Here too it takes a long time. Dry climate disadvantage. In a place like Louisiana you get mulch in weeks, but also mosquitoes and uncomfortably high summer humidity.

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  5. Great idea! We usually throw our Christmas trees out in the wild woods behind the house, where they gradually rot and meanwhile provide shelter and nourishment for countless critters. There is also a local drive each year to collect Christmas trees for dumping in lakes to provide shelter for fish.

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    1. Those are good ideas, too! There are all sorts of little things we can do to help our environment if we all just think a little. :)

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  6. Haha, I do the same exact thing with the harder to decompose trimmings and such. You just need a little out of the way spot, but I'm surprised you're not more concerned with fire hazards. I stopped using a real tree after seeing how enthusiastically it went up in flames when I decided to 'recycle' it a little faster.
    I never have green waste since I have enough room to compost here, but don't think it's the worst thing to do when it's collected and composted. The household waste is such a different story with all that plastic and mixed stuff. First off I'm not 100% sure that the recycle bin ends up being recycled once it leaves here, and even if it is it's still just plastic waste somewhere else. Secondly I'm at a loss to reduce some of the loads of packaging we seem to go through. There's just so much of it...

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    1. Very concerned with fire hazards, oh yes yes yes! I put the trimmings surrounded by a masonry wall on one side and bare soil on the other, and the rainy season has finally begun (though it will be a poor one), so those clippings are pretty safe. In the house, the tree is away from everything else, and we have automatic fire sprinklers in the ceiling (mandatory building code requirement in this neighborhood). Be assured I take that very seriously.

      The green waste here is unfortunately used as "daily cover", not composted. The trash-trash is taken and distributed at the landfill first, then they cover that day's trash with the greenwaste to reduce odor, and pests, then they compact it with bulldozers and repeat the next day.

      The plastic especially packaging is a terrible problem, it is filling our oceans, killing sea life and contaminating everything. Every single day on our walks we pick up plastic trash so it doesn't get washed into the sea.

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    2. You've got me going on plastic trash, sorry!! The past decade or so a whole lot of it has been shipped to China and supposedly recycled there; lately China has decided it doesn't want to do that anymore, so a lot of it is going into landfills.

      Then there is the source of all plastics: the oil industry! They see plastics as the replacement profit center for the oil that currently goes into vehicles. With the rise of EVs, the vehicle market is going away (yay!) There is beginning to be push-back against all the plastic packaging (yay!) and it needs to happen soon.

      Sorry about the rant!

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