Upcycling Materials

An amazing practice that turns discarded materials that would normally end up in landfills into new helpful and needed items is called upcycling. It’s a mindset that another person’s trash is another’s….chicken coop?

Well, yes, a chicken coop or anything else one can imagine. I hit on the topic of sustainability a lot in my writing, and for a good reason.

WASTE

We are a consumer-based economy, and with it comes waste from a single beer bottle or even a wooden pallet. Most of these items are recycled or discarded into landfills. But what if that wasn’t the final destination. What if it had a chance to take on a whole new path and become something that doesn’t have to be just another pile of trash. With this frame of thought, creativity and craftsmanship can bring a new life and purpose to what was bound for the dump. In this writeup, I want to focus on one material we use for many different farm projects: raised bed retaining walls for our cannabis gardens to construct our chicken coop and many others.

WOODEN PALLETS.

These are items that are widely used and quickly discarded. What you can do with these materials is really only limited to your skill, your resources, and your imagination. The first step is finding a source of the waste. We go to our local organic nursery and food markets which have a constant flow of incoming shipments. With that comes an excess of pallets. Some pallets are sent back to the distributor and continue their life in the distro game. But some are a little bit more beat up and end up getting set off to the side to be discarded into the landfill. Sometimes they have too many and need space. Whatever the situation is, this is where we come in with a five-minute hop, skip, and jump with our truck and trailer. We load up as much as we can fit and bring it back to our farm and stack them up to let them get weathered, allowing for anything that could have spilled on the pallets to be washed off by rain and snow during the winter season. So This year’s pallet collection will be next year’s project materials.

We do side jobs such as property clean-ups to keep income flowing during the offseason. This gives us other opportunities for upcycling materials to use. Some Other Items we salvage, such as tpost, metal cages, fencing, irrigation, lumber, panda plastic, and well, you get the idea, all come in handy. The thought process of “can I use that?” is constantly running through my mind. I’m also aware of the correlation of a hoarder to this process. That humor does not go unnoticed. Potato potato, as they say. We keep everything organized and don’t take more than we need or can use.

So we were working with an old garden setup of 25-500gallon smart pots in a 2500 sq ft garden. This setup was as per plant count laws of Mendocino county after the 9.31 zip tie program shut down. Moving forward with licensing, plant counts went out the window, and square footage became the new rule. So we wanted to maximize our canopy space without terracing the hillside with heavy equipment. So our goal became building retaining walls with the natural slope to allow our soil-raised beds to lean into. This creates the terraces for us to grow in without destroying the hill we intend to develop our ecosystem on. We scraped back all the grass and flipped our smart pots. After that, we collected our soil into a big pile to be amended and used later to fill our beds. Once the site was clear, we began to prep the supplies we needed to build the walls.

WORDS & PHOTOS KIRT ROHLACK & NOBLE HAYES

PREPARATION

We begin by cutting the pallets in half with a Sawzall long demo blade, making each half about the same size. This is a “do your best” situation as each pallet is made differently, and some have been repaired many times over. So, where one board is on a pallet, the others might not be. But don’t worry, as imperfections make the rustic farm look just that much cooler. After doing the math of the lengths of our walls and figuring out how many pallet halves are needed. We bring all our materials to the garden. The other materials required to do this job are listed here: -3.5in Box of screws -Drill -Rolls of erosion control Jute matting, 4x350ft -Staple gun and long staples -Tpost & Tpost pounder -Baling wire and snips

HOW TO

Now you can start by determining your line that the wall will follow and start laying the pallets flat in a row down that line. You can create a small cut line with a pick-ax to follow and help keep your wall as level as you can. Once your line is laid out, you can hammer the Tpost at each end and every couple of feet down the line for the connected pallets to lean into once standing. Once Tpost is in place, you start with two pallets creating a 90degree corner. You bump the two pallets together to the desired shape

and begin screwing together with drill & screws until you feel it has a strong connection. Secure the 90degree section with baling wire to the first Tpost to help keep standing while you connect your pallets together. Now you can begin connecting all the pallets standing one up at a time, and securing each pallet to the pallet before it with screws trying to keep your line level.

If building on a flat surface and you wanted to make a second wall to complete an entire rectangle raised bed, you could also do that. Just repeat the same steps.

Once your walls and end caps are in place and secure to the Tpost with baling wire, you can move on to the jute install. On the inside wall you have just created, you want to line the wall with a couple of layers of overlapping jute, creating a thick layer. We connect the jute to the inside of the pallet wall with the staple gun, creating a secure jute wall. The idea is the soil fills into the jute wall, and the soil doesn’t actually touch the pallets—only the jute. We recommend multiple layers of jute as it is a net, and soil can fall through the square holes. But overlapping many layers creates a thick secure barrier the soil can’t pass through. The netting itself acts as sort of a smart pot wall for comparison. This allows proper drainage and airflow for the soil. The jute wall is Porous and makes it easy to apply cover crop seed to such as alyssum. This creates a wall of living cover crops. The benefits of this from erosion protection of your soil, pollen from the flowers it creates for bees, and beneficial insects. Moisture retention and protection of topsoil layer from the sun. But most importantly, creating constant biomass to break down and become our new food source for our microbes and worms in our living soil beds.

Once the jute is secure to the pallets and the wall itself is secure to the Tpost. You can begin filling the beds with the soil of your choice for your specific cultivation needs. We fill our soil to the top level of the jute. After your beds are filled and amended, we use a thick layer of organic rice straw on the beds and surrounding exposed ground. At this point, you can install your Preferred irrigation system that works for your cultivation needs. Once completed, we spread alyssum seeds everywhere and soak them in. We use an array of beneficial companion plants and flowers to attract pollinators and keep constant food sources for our beneficial predators. Research which native plants do well in your microclimate and just keep planting!! Soon your garden will be a beautiful, thriving ecosystem made from upcycled materials.

HAPPY GARDENING!!!