The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Cardboard cache

Hauling cardboard

After we stole two loads of cardboard, the recycling dropoff center near us shut down. Which means my huge pile of wood chips has been waiting in the driveway, with no kill mulch layer to spread underneath and keep weeds from coming back up if the wood chips are applied.

Kill mulching aisles

Wednesday, Mark and I went out to get my flu shot and scope out the backsides of area businesses. On our third try, we hit a cache of recyclables and loaded up the car.

One hour later, several more garden aisles were kill mulched. And now I need another load of cardboard....



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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My husband has good luck getting cardboard from Dollar Tree and Shoe Sensation. He also goes to a local appliance store. He asks the employees and they are really cool about it. Bigger retailers tend to be rather stingy with their cardboard as the recycle it.
Comment by Pam Kaufman Fri Oct 26 09:59:24 2018

Wait...what?

You grow your garden without using pesticides, chemical fertilizers or herbicides. (Bravo, BTW) You probably do this for many reasons, but I'm sure one of them is that you only want good, healthy things in your body, not bad chemicals.

However, you willingly allow yourself to be given a nasty chemical cocktail such as the flu shot??? There are so many natural ways to prevent and/or treat influenza.

You have a strong scientific background. You owe it to yourself to put those skills to work and spend a few hours honestly researching the pros and cons of taking vaccines.

It's kind of like taking meticulous care and maintenance of your car and then getting home and dumping in some sugar water into the tank.

Comment by Jason D. Fri Oct 26 11:53:17 2018
I think I recall that you live near a university. You may want to scout out some of their buildings to see if they have easily accessible cardboard recycling bins or just general recycling bins. The university near me has one or the other by each campus building, so getting a haul of cardboard would be easy, especially on the weekends when there's less traffic.
Comment by jennifer Wed Oct 31 09:07:40 2018
Yes, I would have to agree about the flu shot comment and was surprised to read this too. They are ineffective, have mercury adjuvants, and can cause a lot of problems. Definitely not worth the risk and most often are a crap shoot at treating the current years' flu. I believe I got my Crohn's disease from some Hepatitis shots I had to get at work during the winter Olympics in our city. This has taken me over 25 years to figure out and most of the good years of my life spent dealing with this nasty thing. I was also told I had to get them every year by my doctor because my immune system was compromised by the drugs I was on to deal with the disease. A big giant load, to be sure. It's big money for the pharma companies so health agencies push them a lot. I hope you will look into this for future decisions.
Comment by Commenter Fri Nov 2 21:01:01 2018





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