Stonehaven Burning

Categories:Country life, DIY
Jan

Rusty BarrelWe don't have trash pickup. Lots of our neighbors do, but we have never arranged it.

When you live in the country, you can burn whenever you like as long as the fire is contained in a trash barrel or something similar. We went through several steel barrels. They'd start out looking nice and painted. But as we'd burn trash, the paint would flake off, and after just a short time, they'd look much like the image at left, only shorter as the bottom rusted out.

DIY Stone Burn BarrelWe got tired of replacing barrels all the time, so hit on a sure-fire fix: Collect some squarish rocks from the pasture, buy some Quikrete to use as mortar, mix it up, then build a stone burn barrel. The idea had merit, but the execution proved challenging.

It's one thing to find squarish stones in the field—they're all over the place. It's another to get them to stack and fit together well. After working on our burn barrel, I had a much better understanding why builders might prefer constructing with brick as opposed to stone. Those rocks just didn't want to stay where we'd put them.

We were determined, however, and with the help of a lot of Quikrete, we prevailed. Our stone burn barrel is not exactly an engineering marvel, but after a couple of years, it is still standing, and serves us well as we burn our trash. We use the chicken feed and bison mineral bags as our trash bags—we haven't had to buy garbage bags in years.

You may wonder what we do with trash that doesn't burn:

  • We toss all our plant-related kitchen garbage in the compost pile. It never really gets a chance to compost, though, because the chickens eat it. I guess in reality, they are composting it, because it eventually ends up in the lawn or garden, but in a different form.
  • We recycle everything we can't burn or compost, simply making a trip to the recycling center a little south of Paola about once a month.

In this way, we can be environmentally friendly and still avoid the extra fees associated with trash and recycling collection.

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