There is a special plastic recycling collection for farmers in Snohomish county next weekend. Northwest Ag Plastic recycling will be collecting plastic nursery pots along with hay bale bags and twine. They will recycle these into black nursery items, pipes and truck liners. This is perfect for us because we have a lot of round plastic nursery pots that we have no plans on using and we don’t want to dump them into the garbage.

The closest collection site is up in Marysville. We also have some old chemicals, fluorescent light tubes, batteries and paint so we’ll make a stop in Everett on the way to drop off those items at theSnohomish Hazardous Waste drop off.

But the pots have to be sorted and loose dirt dusted off before they will be accepted. So that was my job this afternoon – sorting and dusting old gallon pots. It took me about 3 hours to go through all the pots. They had been sitting under the nursery benches in a dark corner. Not only were the pots dirty and dusty but they also had a fair amount of spider webs, eggs and live spiders. Fortunately, I’m not afraid of spiders but I did yell a couple of times when I came across a large wolf spider. A good stiff whisk broom cleaned them up and kept the critters at arms length.

By the end, I was hot, dusty and dirty. I couldn’t wait to finish and take a cool shower.