Wild Things Farm

  (Crab Orchard, Tennessee)
Farm life adventures of the Happy Hoer
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Recycling--Country Style!

Any farmer knows that to make ends meet, you've got to get creative!  I'd like to share with you some of the ways items find new uses around this farm. 

The chicken coop is framed out of pallets that metal roofing is shipped on.  They are 9 feet long x 3-1/2 feet wide, they are very sturdy, and a few straight ones and a little imagination go a long way.  The house is now covered with board and batten siding salvaged from a dead tree.   Inside the chicken coop are a kitchen cabinet with 4 nest boxes in it and a chest of drawers with 6 boxes in it.  You could say the Happy Hens have a "furnished house", complete with floor covering made of rubber roofing salvaged from a roofing job. 

The shop attached to the greenhouse is also framed from pallets and the windows are from an old house.   The greenhouse was salvaged for the price of hauling it off on a trailer behind a pickup truck, but the real cost was in figuring out just how all the buckets of gasket materials, different size glass panes and different channels would all work out to make a greenhouse to attach to the shop (without instructions).  It leaks here and there but it's great!


An old laundry tub serves as a washing station down at the gardens.

The 3/4" solid oak paneling in the farmhouse was salvaged from a local restaurant being demolished.  The oak covers the bottom half of all the walls in the house, plus made some very usable kitchen cabinets.  The glass doors on the upper cabinets were salvaged from a bookcase that had been discarded.

The floor in the foyer is made of rosewood, salvaged from---you'll never guess---pallets made to ship copper coils.  It hasn't been sanded and finished yet, but it's really unique. 

One of the bathroom doors came from the same restaurant


and the other one came from an old house in town.  The kitchen sink (temporary) is an old service bar.  It has a really nice big tub and two side drain boards, but the hole is rather small for a kitchen sink.  I've got my eyes open........

The door under the stairs is a door from one of the Homestead Houses built about 75 years ago.  The backside is a "z" bar.  The wooden latch is handmade and the knob was found at an old house site in nearby Knoxville.   The hinges have been in a box for years and the entire ensemble was provided and orchestrated by my awesome significant other :)

Feed bags are utilized for trash, and mountains of leaves from a nearby community are recycled on the gardens each season. 

The chickens are the major recyclers of kitchen scraps and garden waste. 

It takes lots of imagination, storage space, and treasure piles here and there to hang on to items that "I'll use that someday".  You never know, that day just might be today!
