Kicking the Bucket
I don't know if this is just a rural Nebraska thing or what, but everyone knows the value of the inauspicious bucket. I am talking about everything from a 5-quart ice cream bucket to a 5-gallon bucket.
In days gone by, when we were first married and I began to realize what a valuable item the bucket was, the 5-gallon ones were usually metal. Various farm products came packaged in a 5-gallon bucket, oil, hydraulic fluid, and a whole lot of other farm fluids that I never knew what to do with. Once the bucket was empty it was used for all sorts of farm chores...carrying feed, holding used oil, carrying water here or there, or storing all sorts of shop items. No number of buckets was too many!
Eventually metal buckets were replaced with plastic buckets. They retained their shape better but tended to crack more easily, especially when they were used to hit a bull over the head in cold weather! So now it seems that we need more buckets because they are pretty useless when they are cracked up the side.
The bucket was such a valuable commodity that we have actually stopped along the road to pick up buckets that probably blew out of someone's pickup box. (And in the process helped keep America beautiful!) Seems that the 100 buckets we had weren't enough, we still needed another one.
Did you know you can actually purchase an empty 5-gallon bucket? Farm supply stores sell them, but you have to buy the lids separately. I purchased three of them, including lids, a year or so ago to store dog food in. 40 pounds of dog food fills 3 buckets. They are actually food-grade plastic and can store staples purchased in bulk such as flour or sugar, and keep it pest-free until you are ready to use it.
Recently, and unfortunately, two of my dog food buckets were empty, and it was chokecherry picking time! Without even asking, Mike took my buckets for picking chokecherries! Now I didn't make too much of a fuss because I was excited about getting chokecherries, and they weren't going to permanently store the chokecherries, but I watched those buckets until he got them emptied and immediately cleaned them up and poured dog food into them.
Ice cream used to come in handy 5-quart buckets. I still don't understand how 5 quarts became the standard measure for ice cream, but now they seem to be coming in 4 quart (1 gallon) buckets, which makes better sense. A family who is an avid ice cream eating family can accumulate a lot of ice cream buckets.
Ice cream buckets are even handier than 5-gallon buckets, or so it would seem. I never seem to have any of them because they are all out in the shop. Sometime ago, having no ice cream buckets in the house since we don't usually buy these large amounts of ice cream anymore, I put out a post on Facebook in search of ice cream buckets. I could have had literally hundreds of them, but settled for a dozen. And apparently I need to put out another call because they have all disappeared.
Along these same lines, and just as handy, is the coffee can. They used to be metal and had a plastic lid. They were handy both in the kitchen and the shop for, storing food supplies in the kitchen and all sorts of paraphernalia in the shop such as nuts, bolts, screws, and the never ending supply of "miscellaneous". In more recent years they are plastic with a snap-on lid. We collect them to be used at Mike's wood shop. He stores the many items involved in woodworking in them, and each one is neatly labeled with a marker as to what's in it. Who needs to invest in expensive storage solutions when you have coffee cans?
Much is made of recycling and repurposing these days, but rural Nebraska has been ahead of the game for years! We've been recycling used buckets and coffee cans for a century! Here's to recycling!
In days gone by, when we were first married and I began to realize what a valuable item the bucket was, the 5-gallon ones were usually metal. Various farm products came packaged in a 5-gallon bucket, oil, hydraulic fluid, and a whole lot of other farm fluids that I never knew what to do with. Once the bucket was empty it was used for all sorts of farm chores...carrying feed, holding used oil, carrying water here or there, or storing all sorts of shop items. No number of buckets was too many!
Eventually metal buckets were replaced with plastic buckets. They retained their shape better but tended to crack more easily, especially when they were used to hit a bull over the head in cold weather! So now it seems that we need more buckets because they are pretty useless when they are cracked up the side.
The bucket was such a valuable commodity that we have actually stopped along the road to pick up buckets that probably blew out of someone's pickup box. (And in the process helped keep America beautiful!) Seems that the 100 buckets we had weren't enough, we still needed another one.
Did you know you can actually purchase an empty 5-gallon bucket? Farm supply stores sell them, but you have to buy the lids separately. I purchased three of them, including lids, a year or so ago to store dog food in. 40 pounds of dog food fills 3 buckets. They are actually food-grade plastic and can store staples purchased in bulk such as flour or sugar, and keep it pest-free until you are ready to use it.
Recently, and unfortunately, two of my dog food buckets were empty, and it was chokecherry picking time! Without even asking, Mike took my buckets for picking chokecherries! Now I didn't make too much of a fuss because I was excited about getting chokecherries, and they weren't going to permanently store the chokecherries, but I watched those buckets until he got them emptied and immediately cleaned them up and poured dog food into them.
Ice cream used to come in handy 5-quart buckets. I still don't understand how 5 quarts became the standard measure for ice cream, but now they seem to be coming in 4 quart (1 gallon) buckets, which makes better sense. A family who is an avid ice cream eating family can accumulate a lot of ice cream buckets.
Ice cream buckets are even handier than 5-gallon buckets, or so it would seem. I never seem to have any of them because they are all out in the shop. Sometime ago, having no ice cream buckets in the house since we don't usually buy these large amounts of ice cream anymore, I put out a post on Facebook in search of ice cream buckets. I could have had literally hundreds of them, but settled for a dozen. And apparently I need to put out another call because they have all disappeared.
Along these same lines, and just as handy, is the coffee can. They used to be metal and had a plastic lid. They were handy both in the kitchen and the shop for, storing food supplies in the kitchen and all sorts of paraphernalia in the shop such as nuts, bolts, screws, and the never ending supply of "miscellaneous". In more recent years they are plastic with a snap-on lid. We collect them to be used at Mike's wood shop. He stores the many items involved in woodworking in them, and each one is neatly labeled with a marker as to what's in it. Who needs to invest in expensive storage solutions when you have coffee cans?
Much is made of recycling and repurposing these days, but rural Nebraska has been ahead of the game for years! We've been recycling used buckets and coffee cans for a century! Here's to recycling!
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