Recycling

With the aim of recycling as much as possible, we're striving for "zero waste" at home.  It focuses the mind to regard everything as a potential fuel for processing. 

• Old apple cores get processed by chickens into eggs
• leftover food gets added to dog-food
• used tissues get composted into a substrate to grow vegetables in...
• Anything that is combustible is processed by the stove into heat energy

So the only items which leave our property are things for which we don't have a processor: tins, glass, and batteries.  Here is a copy of the chart we keep on the fridge in the kitchen, just to keep everyone mindful of the opportunities offered by waste materials:

 

 

War on Twitch

Twitch, also known as Couch Grass, Quack grass, and plenty of other unmentionable names, is a stoloniferous grass, Elymus repens. We've got a magnificent crop - and a particularly vigorous strain.  It romps away, and before you know it, it's winding its way into and through whichever area you thought was already cleared.  While digging, almost every spadefull has to be broken apart and the succulent, wiry and brittle underground stems teased out from the clod - to which they are hanging on with great tenacity. 

This large bucket of twitch is sitting in the middle of the area that it was cleared from, an area about 1.2 metres x 2 metres:

CT
 

plastic fuel

A few years ago, on the boat to Istanbul, I met some experts whose business was selling PET plastic bottles to CocaCola in Bursa.  One was Dutch, the other Austrian, our common language English, so naturally we fell into conversation.  Their know-how and subsequent background research that I've been following, has solved one of my waste management concerns, and we now burn much (not all) of our plastic waste in our stove.  It gets rid of the waste and contributes heat.  (According to my PET experts, up to 95% of the energy is re-gained from incineration.)

The logic, of course, is simple - plastic is made from hydrocarbon - so it's oil.  When you burn it, Carbon dioxide and water are the by-products from the combustion.  Here is an excellent demonstration - watch the video!

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/02/14/award-winning-inventor-makes-fuel-from-plastic-bags/

We're basically talking about polyethelene, here, and all of it's relatives - polypropelene, polystyrene, etc, but there are also some other groups of plastics which I'm not so confident about burning in the stove, so they still go out to the garden incinerator.
CT
 

water source

The other day we decided to set off in search of the source of our water, so we followed the river right up to the head of the valley - but on this occasion we could go no further without getting wet.  Winter rains and the recent snowfall meant the river was too full to continue, so we'll have to try again in the late summer when the water level is at its lowest, and we can get up the rest of the valley - I'm expecting to find a natural spring and/or waterfall - will let you know!... The large pipe which you can see on the left of the photo is the village irrigation water pipe, which has been lifted out for the winter and tied up to a tree.   CT