The property we are on right now has some history behind it - and some parts of it are not that flattering.
Before us, there was an old lady living in this house. I don't want to be ungrateful or disrespectful, but she did not the best job by keeping the place clean. When I was a lot younger when I'd come to visit her I recall times when she was taking out the trash - and by that, I mean throwing them in the backyard bushes. It was back in the 90's and Latvia just broke free from occupation by Russia. Everything was raw, everything was new, everything was unexampled. So people had to figure out a lot of things. And waste management was one of them. Some did it better, some did it worse.
This is how the place looked back on 18 Sep 2015. There where giant bushes and a lot of wild rose shrubs.
We cut down all the bushes in 2015 and pulled out most of the stumps and roots in summer 2017. A lot of garbage came up while pulling out the stomps. And just a couple months back I decided just to go over one more time with a shovel. I focused on the area that was just next to the bushes and wasn't touched by the tractor. The area I covered was about 2x2 meters.
But it was enough to find several perfume bottles and drugs.
Shoe-polishing cream.
Several empty milk bottles/ a lot of broken ones.
3 buckets with a different type of waste
And the thing that scares me the most is OLD BATTERIES. If I recall correctly, it was over 35.
And these old batteries make worried about the soil condition. Some of the batteries were broken down to the level where they were not holding together anymore. I guess we will leave this place alone for now and maybe we will decide what we can do here later.
That's it for now.
Yikes! That is a lot of junk. Reminds me of the junk piles that most homesteads around here used to have.
This may be a good starting point for thing you could grow there the first few years: http://www.botanyeveryday.com/online-classes/2012-plant-talk-15-plants-for-phytoremediation
That is crazy. The same thing happened to us when we moved here...I am pretty sure there was basically a car buried the first place we tried to dig for a garden. Old school trash burying happened a lot on these old farm properties!! Crazy.
:D I guess this is an international problem. I can't understand their short-term thinking no matter how hard I try.
When we were younger we cleaned up a place where we went swimming in the nearby river. OMG, all the crazy things we pulled out of the river... including a fire extinguisher and even a motorcycles sidecar.
But on the other hand - government institutional used to dump toxic waste in the ocean... And then there is the Enewetak Atoll... it's just so sad...
Wow look at all the trash you got out of the ground. Interesting though, almost like a time capsule. Definitely no edibles going there. Maybe a flower garden after some dynamic accumulator plants.
And I guess there is more. This was just one area 2x2 meters.
I thought about making a greenhouse or maybe a chicken coop. Or maybe use this place to make compost piles and grow pumpkins there.