We have had a large number of dumpsters brought up here to take away large quantities of garbage. When we first moved in, the dumpsters came and went fairly regularly, as there was the huge trash heap to get rid of, the Great Wall to be rebuilt, and the other random piles of trash left by the previous owners.
For the last few years though, we usually only get in one thirty-yard dumpster a year. We accumulate a pile of stuff out behind the sports court and when it reaches critical mass, we make a call, a dumpster arrives, we fill it up (and if there is extra space let neighbors toss things in–which sometimes results in awesome crafty projects), and the dumpster goes away. Anything big that has been dumped alongside the road is often brought to us by our gardeners after I ask them nicely.
The last two years were no different. Now, though, the trash at least is something we generate, not stuff left behind by the previous owners. Bits of race cars, building material scraps, the old cabinets from the garage, and more recently some “old fencing” (as we recently had to re-fence almost the entire east property line because of the neighbor’s awful horses and even more awful propensity for pushing down the fence to climb over to get their horses back onto their parcel, but more about that in an upcoming post).
At this point I no longer have an accurate count of just how many dumpsters we have filled. The kind folks at Ecobox did send me over our history since mid-2017, which says that we have filled seventeen. I know the first four months of living here, we loaded up five because I put that in a terrible holiday song. The wall project was another ten. Four were used for the road cleanup efforts, and cleaning out the stables used another six. All told we’re well over forty–that’s a lot of garbage. Too bad none of it was compostable.