Theoretically any barrel used to transport any material must be well cleaned before it is to be allowed off the users premises to be recycled and that is why many companies simply do not allow that. If these barrels are coming from someplace that cleans barrels, around here DeWitt is one, they should have no residue of whatever was shipped in them. If the come directly from the end user they may still have some residue, even though before they alloow that barrel off premises to be used by someone not a licensed barrel recycler it must, by law, be cleaned.

I have question regarding all of this. Today, my father and I cleaned 20 years worth of built-up sediment runoff from my house gutters. The roof is asphalt shingle, from 1996 and I don't believe the gutters have ever been cleaned until today. We had buckets of tarry black sludge, water and rocks that had unlodged from the shingles. When I wasn't looking, my dad decided to empty a few buckets worth of the liquid portion to reduce the weight. He didn't strain the liquid, he just poured off the top, so it was black nasty tar-water. And guess where he dumped it? In his septuagenarian wisdom he dumped that black water into my veggie garden because it wouldn't be as visible, since the soil was also dark. I am pretty upset about it and felt he basically turned the center of my garden into a contaminated brownfield site. I stopped him from pouring the final bucket in there once I noticed what he was doing, but already several had gone in. I appreciate that he wants to help out, but I never wanted him here to do this job; he imposed on me, sort of telling me it needed to be done. Now I'm thinking about dismantling the garden, raking it out and seeding with grass and giving up entirely on the idea. I don't want to eat from it anymore. I'm also upset that I had just planted some things in there not too long ago. The smell was foul from the sludge and I had to wash my hands 5 times with various soaps and pummus to get the odour out. Surely the tar-sediment which built up from sitting for 20 years in gutters is carcinogenic and awful for anyone to ingest. Are my fears reasonable? Will that stuff wash away by summer, or will it be absorbed by the plants and maybe give me a tumour some 15 years down the road? I'll always look back to this episode if that does happen and I kept eating from that garden...

It is the most amazing thing if you get box you can open and see the babies or handle them each day to see the startling amount of growth/changes every single day! Our boxes are right under the power line and the parents will sit on the line and watch us and sometimes chirp, but they are a- ok with their babies being handled as long as you don't let them get chilled and are gentle. I learned the hard way to stop trying to hold them after 12 days when i made one batch fledge early. Kept trying to put them back in, but it was too late and the parents really got mad about that. I don't think we've ever had a nest that went much beyond 16 days though, so it's interesting that they are supposed to stay in 21 days. I don't even open the box after day 12. Yes, predators love blues (any baby bird). When you figure out where you want to put a house, make sure cats, coons or snakes can't get to it. Grease the pole or use a baffle or mount the box in such a way that nothing can get in. BTW, the big boxes sell very reasonably priced cedar blue houses- like $12 last i looked. You may very well get some competition from titmice or chickadees- they all like the same size, so you could get multiples and hang them (titmice are the fiercest mamas- they won't budge and will hunker down and hiss at you!). Blues happily nest close to the others but won't nest close to their own kind. And they love to have a choice of boxes. Some years i've had 3 out of my 4 boxes full. The only ones you may want to evict if the get into the box would be the alien house finches. Knock on wood, i've never had it be a problem, but have head from others that it can be.

The whiskey barrels came from a salvage place here in Shelby. Unfortunately and much to my dismay they came across them randomly and they won't be getting anymore. We called today to check and make for sure they hadn't tried to source them and no luck. Although we just put them together we have had them since spring and have had a lot of people ask about where to get them. We have called around some and found a few places that will sell them for $95 but nothing even remotely as nice as the first deal. We planned on making some as gifts for family/friends but not being able to get them as cheap makes the idea less tempting. For what it is worth you can still put together a rain barrel for less than you can buy a finished one at that price. The purple stuff is Tradescantia pallida aka spiderwort aka wandering Jew. They are super brittle. I break a limb or two every time I move one. The good news is, I just poke a hole in the pot and stick the broken piece in and they root very quick and spread like crazy. I have a few in the yard and they have returned every year.