by Bill Whitney

Created on: August 14, 2007   Last Updated: September 23, 2008

In the world today and the mess everything is in, recycling is very important and we should all be participating in recycling programs of paper, metals, glass and everything else. I can't say about other cities but her in Denver, the Shriners have recycling bins all over town and when people recycle it helps pay the expense of operating the Shriner's Childrens Hospitals across the country. I am a Shriner and have always been interested in helping cripple children but now that I have a granddaughter with Spina Bifida and special needs, it is even closer to my heart and I recyle everything they will take.

As for recycling in the garden, there are many ways to recycle that really helps in making the soil in your garden better and more procuctinve, If your soil is heavy clay material like we have here, recycling the plants and compost in the soil helps to aerate it and make it more loose and easy to work. If your soil is sandy, all the recycled vegetation and compost adds body and materail to the soil. When the garden is spent and not producing anymore. it is good to till the plants into the soil or if you have a composter, put them in it and compost them and then till in the compost.

When we lived in Gillette Wyoming we bought forty acres of pasture out in the country and put a mobile home on it. Being a big gardener and loving fresh vegetablew this was a real treat to me because I had almost an acre of garden. I bought a brand new Troy Bilt tiller but the ground was so hard that I finally went and rented a big tractor and tiller to break up that old virgin sod. I had a good friend that hadd a 27,000 acre ranch and had more rotted manure than he knew waht to do with so I went out there and got probably fifty pickup loads of manure and tilled them into the garden and yard. My little Troy BIlt worked really good after the big tiller got it good and broken up about 14" deep.

I had a compost pile but found that a compost pile was a lot of work for limited results so I invested in a ComposTumbler and that is and was probably one of the best investments I have ever made. All you have to do is throw the stuff in and every time you walk by it give it a crank or two and in about two weeks you have nice rich compost. It was so good in fact at making good rich dark compost in about two weeks that I got a second one. Once the lawn got going good and the leaves started falling off the many trees that I planted, I had plenty material to compsot and my garden got better and more

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