(Not Trespassing): Mr. Teacher's Trash Treasures & Dead Deer

Earlier today I got a call from a neighbor down the road, let's just call him Mr. Teacher. Mr. Teacher said during the night someone had shot a gun in front his house, turned out they had shot a young deer which was slowly dieing in view from his window. He called the police and the game warden, but no one ever showed up... so his third choice was me? :)
When I got there the deer was a bit bigger then i expected, very dead, and was getting too stiff. After checking out all the peculiar marks along the deer's side, we hefted it up into the back of my truck.
Before leaving and investigating the scene a little further, i wanted to walk around and see all the neat things Mr. Teacher had on his land... land handed down to him by his grandparents - which is land bound to hold stories and treasures.

In his mildy overgrown pasture there was an amazingly demolished old car.....

it seemed everything i touched would fall apart, metal cracking with rust, broken bits of what was once a tanker of a vehicle decaying in ruins...

Mr. Teacher also has a ginormous beautiful old barn. The kind with a rock foundations till in tact, one that was well cared for and used. Clean even. Many old things were in there still from days of old...

stacks of tobacco tieing strings and even the baskets they sold tobacco in at the market!

wood so stunning & antiqued that Mr. Teacher says people come and ask to buy the barn wood, and dismantle it. No way! is he not going to do that - he feels selling the land or doing things like that would dishonor his grandfather.

And the deer....

we came back around to the dead deer sitting in the back of my truck making me wish i could bring it back to life like the alien man does in Star Man! It was then i noticed more clues as to what happened in front his house -- broken pieces of headlights, fur scattered in the grass, and empty cans of alcohol where the person who hit the deer had opened their door. They must have shot it after they hit it, then drove away. But they didn't bother to shoot well enough to kill it and it still took hours to die. The deer was still able to walk 15 feet or more before collapsing.

Amazing, at how wasteful people are taught to be these day , they could have taken the deer for meat, for food, for leather.

Amazing that so many people drive with guns ready in their cars.

Amazing, they they attempted to put it out its misery and didn't bother to even shoot it in the head.

XOxoxooxX

Trash To Treasure: Pitchfork

Ya'll, I love trash to treasure junk! Inevitably when you till dirt on an old farm you will unearth various rusted metal pieces... like this bad ass little pitchfork we found. Even as a kid growing up in New Orleans there was buried treasure in the shape of crusty shoe horses, signs of a pre-suburban time that really wasn't that long ago.The rusted little pitchfork had no handle anymore, so Bort attached a piece of bamboo to it. You can use glue, pine pitch, or just ram it in there at the right tightness and you have yourself a new tool again. He used a large drill bit to make the hole in the bamboo just the right size. Farming tools with wooden handles break way too often, especially these days where everything is made cheaply (AKA with pine). It's good to be able to repair tools instead of just falling into the trap of chucking it and buying another one just to get a new wooden handle. Check your tools out when you purchase them to make sure they can be fixed later on (some companies indent the metal so you can not pull out the old wooden handle, which is exceptionally lame and un-eco).xoxo

Creating Gardens with Bottles and Bamboo

This is what I have been working on the last few weeks, in spite of the non stop rain storms we've had. Creating a place to garden, which is alot like putting together an art installation or some wild 3-D project that actually can feed you in the end.The space in the picture above was just a hill covered in brush. I found an old path under the dirt which I dug up and lined with rocks, some of the dirt got hoed some tilled, and the terraces on the hill are made with the plentiful (taking over & invasive) bamboo growing next to the house. I found a few treasures in the ground like the cool light post in the left corner of the pic and tons of old dried up snail shells (they get ghostly white and brittle).
One of my favorite trash to treasure garden borders though are bottles - which there seems to be tons of around here between the alcoholics, parties, and my personal consumption of olive oil ... would be super neat to build a "cord wood" style hut using some bottles too! I am using the bottles for my new herb garden. Drink up people, I've still got half way to go with it! ;)
xoxo