Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 8.38, it's FNLX Morning Thursday and we're Zooming with all-around multi-county floating cooperative extension guy, Ryan Stachok. Welcome back.
Ryan Staychock: Oh, good morning, Ted, and good morning to all the listeners. Ted, I'd like to start off today by underscoring the importance of sharing the road. Okay. This is something we talk about often, and I'd just like to bring a little personal story to that. Not only is it important to share the road with our farm tractors, our bicyclists, motorcyclists, horse carriages, and other people that share the road, but even those husbands that have to change tires and flat tires for their wives that got flat tires on the way to work. So I'd just like to thank everybody for sharing the road with everybody that needs to use the road. So we'll start off with that today. How are you today, Ted?
Paul Szmal: I'm doing well. And this may be the first guest I've ever had with a lug wrench in their hand. That's right.
Ryan Staychock: I'm doing good at it, and I'm proud that I can change a flat tire and put a donut on. But, man, it is embarrassing driving down the road when you're looking at your wife's car and she's driving with one of those donuts. It's a little bit embarrassing because it's a safety concern, too, right? You don't want to go over the speeds, and you want to make sure that we get it. But I'm zooming you from a parking lot where they are hopefully going to fix the tire and I can get it back on my wife's car so she can get to work safely.
Paul Szmal: All right. Well, that sounds good. Well, we're near the end of farmer's market season, and Cooperative Extension has been doing pumpkin days, a closing day for the Waterloo Rotary Farm Market. Is this Saturday from 9 to noon? Lots and lots of pumpkins. What will CCE be doing?
Ryan Staychock: Well, you know, one of the great things about CCE is we like to support the agricultural community. We're going to be out at the farmer's market giving away pumpkins. And now some of these pumpkins would be used for baking purposes. And so come on out, visit the Waterloo farmer's market before it closes. You never miss your water until the well runs dry. When all those fresh vegetables and fruits and goods that we get from our agricultural community go away, we end up missing them in the winter. So make sure you get out to your farmer's market, support your local farmer's markets as much as you can. This weekend, come get a free pumpkin. You're going to get recipes about what you can do and how you can bake with pumpkins. And then there may or may not be a couple pumpkins that the children can carve for pumpkins for the holiday season here with Halloween coming up. But come on out to the Waterloo's farmer's market, get a pumpkin, get some recipes, make some good bread. My son just last night baked some of the most delicious pumpkin bread. He puts chocolate chips in it, and it's very delightful.
Paul Szmal: Wow. Now I know you also have some of those Seneca Recycles reusable shopping bags with recycling information for the county for people who want those. And also you've got some recycling blue bins available to county residents.
Ryan Staychock: Yeah, if you come out to the Waterloo farmer's market, we're going to have a couple of those things available. If you need blue bins, you know, make sure that you can come out to get we may have people may snatch them up. Right. But if you if you don't find them there, you can certainly find them at the electronics recycling event that it's going to be happening at the end of this month. Right. The last weekend in October, I think it's October 26th. And if you have electronics that you'd like to recycle, if you have paper shredding that you want to recycle and you live in Seneca County, please make sure to get ready, get your stuff, start gathering it up together, bring your electronics, recycling to the Seneca County building and your paper shredding. We do this annually. You can also get blue bins there if you can't get them this weekend at the Waterloo farmer's market. You can get them at the Seneca County electronics recycling that's happening on October 26th. So start gathering your stuff up, put it in your pickup trucks, get your paper shredding ready that's for confidential documents only and bring that stuff and dispose of it in a responsible way on October 26th in Seneca County.
Paul Szmal: We want to get through some of our other events. If we have time after that, we'll go back and do a little discussion on how to recycle the proper way and some of the steps to do that. But let's get our events here next Sunday, a week from Sunday at the Seneca County Community Garden is a fall fun day. We're so excited to have Tricia Carvalho, who is our new master gardener coordinator, who took over for a long time, Patty Payne, who we miss so much, but she's enjoying retirement. Patricia has done a wonderful job as a Cornell climate steward, but then also as a master gardener coordinator. She is in her second successful year of the Seneca, town of Seneca Falls Community Garden, and they're going to have an open house. Right. So if you want to learn about what they're doing at your community garden, stop on out Sunday for a discussion. Come out and just ask questions. There's going to be you can if there's children that would like to help finish the wall, the mural there, bring bring your added your positive attitudes and ask a bunch of questions. Again, the community day, it's open to anybody. So if you're interested to learn how you can help to volunteer next year, how you can be active in your community and help garden in the community and spread the goodness of gardening, please come on out to the open house and meet the other volunteers.
And here's one of the activities is I should go to this because I know nothing about what to do here. And that's a putting your garden to bed workshop. The master gardeners will be there to explain everything you need to know to get your garden ready for the winter and for next year.
Ryan Staychock: Yeah, that's right. And, you know, so the master gardeners, they are volunteers that are trained through Cornell and they help people in the community learn how to garden. So here's a great example of how they can take their their knowledge and share it within the community. Come on out to the community days next Sunday and and and interact with the master gardeners. They have a wealth of knowledge. They're always willing to share. They're always helpful. They want to see you be successful gardening and come on out and ask them a whole bunch of questions and go to the Cooperative Extension website, too, because there's other things going on, mural painting and pine cone arts and some nutrition information there. That's all on Sunday, October 13th from 11 to 3.
Paul Szmal: We have a maple workshop production, a maple syrup production workshop on Wednesday, the 16th, 530 to 8. This is happening in Acuga County, but you got the best Cornell maple program people there to help you through the process.
Ryan Staychock: You know, I'm really excited to be presenting this is one of these workshops that I'm facilitating and I was able, you know, with our connection with Cornell University, the Cornell maple program, which is really the top of the top with the research and all the knowledge that they have about maple. They're going to I got Aaron Whiteman from the Cornell maple program from Ithaca. He's going to travel up to Cayuga County. We're going to have this particular maple how to make maple syrup program. It's it's geared to beginners, but it's also for amateurs that would like a little refresher. And maybe you have a couple of questions for Aaron you'd like to ask after the Q&A. It's it's at Cayuga Community College and it's going to be on Wednesday, October 16th. It's $13 to participate to cover the cost. Registration is required. Visit the either the CCE Cayuga website or the Seneca CCE.org website to register because you can register across the county lines for that. And it's going to be a great event. If you pay for registration, we're going to include some cheese pizza because it starts at 530. So if you want to come out early and you're worried about dinner, we're going to feed you some cheese pizza that's included in the registration fee. If you are a current Cayuga Community College student, we are going to waive the registration fee. So if there's if there's people that are enrolled in programming at Cayuga Community College, you are free because we're trying to we've got a cool partnership. They're letting us host the program there. They got nice parking lots. We're going to be in the student lounge. It's going to be if you want to come out and see the campus, come on out and support Cayuga Community College and Cornell Cooperative Extension at the same time. And also it's going to be a great Maple Workshop. As I said, for our more southern listeners, they're doing one in Montour Falls as well on October 23rd. So if somebody is listening down at the southern end of our area.
Paul Szmal: On Thursday, October 24th, we have the 4-H Open House. You're asked to RSVP online by the 21st. It's for kids age 5 to 19. If there's any kids out there that don't know about 4-H, they will after this.
Ryan Staychock: You know, it's a great opportunity. Rachel does a great job with our 4-H program. We have a really strong 4-H program in Seneca County. And this is an opportunity. Hey, if you have questions, what is 4-H? What you know, what do they do? What did the students do? What's the program about? This is an open house. Come see our new office. Ask Rachel some questions. There's going to be other 4-H staff there to answer questions. It's a fun opportunity for you to come in a very relaxed setting and learn about the program, ask questions, see the opportunities and see how we can help youth development in our county. It's a great program. We're very proud of 4-H, national program, great character building, confidence builders for young people. And we want to have an open house to welcome anyone to come and ask questions about that.
Paul Szmal: So let's circle back around. We were talking about recycling and some people may think they're doing it correctly and maybe they're not. So four steps to recycling the right way. Number one, of course, is to know the local guidelines. Those change from community to community and county to county.
Ryan Staychock: That's right, Ted. Yeah, thank you. So back to the general recycling conversation, we know we have the electronics recycling coming up. That's one way to get rid of what your electronics recycling in Seneca County. Thanks to Seneca Meadows. That's a great partnership between Seneca Meadows and the county and Cornell Cooperative Extension. But, you know, knowing before you throw. There's a term that we talk about in the recycling profession called wish cycling. That's where, hey, you hope that this thing might be recyclable because you want to do the right thing and you just toss it in that blue bin. Well, that can contaminate if those products that you throw in are not recyclable. They can contaminate your recycling and they and they cause issues. So we always want to encourage people know before you throw. So the way that we do that, we always want to encourage recyclers to know what your local guidelines are. It can change from community to community, like you said, Ted. And it's a very complex chain supply chain when it comes to recycling. So, for example, in Seneca County, Cardinal Disposal has the recycling contract for all of Seneca County. So if Cardinal Disposal, they determine what they will pick up for your recycling. So the guidelines that are set in Seneca County are set by Cardinal Disposal because they pick up the recycling and then they transport it to whatever those outlets are where they can get the product to market. So we always want to encourage people read your guidelines, know what you're supposed to be throwing in those recycling bins and never, never, never wish cycle. Yeah. Always know before you throw.
Paul Szmal: Number two is to prepare things properly. I mean, you can't just throw a spaghetti sauce can that's got a half an inch of sauce in the bottom.
Ryan Staychock: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you want to make sure that you prepare your recyclables so that they can be transported properly. If it's raining lightly out, don't sweat it. Things can get a little bit wet, but if it's pouring, you want to cover that recycling bins up, right? If it's snowing a lot, you got to kind of cover them up. If the materials are getting soggy and they're not transportable, then we have to make sure that we prepare those things properly. If you're throwing, yeah, you don't want to put any more pasta sauce, not only for the people picking them up, but also that you don't want to bring critters around and cause issues. So prepare your recyclables properly, put them in there, make sure you take care of them so that people can pick them up properly and transport them so that they can be reused.
Paul Szmal: Step three is protect them from bad weather. So obviously you don't want to leave cardboard and paper out in the rain and you don't want stuff blowing around out of the back of your truck if you're carrying it somewhere.
Ryan Staychock: Yeah, that's what, you know, gosh, I might have mixed that one up with number two. You know, it's a whole, it's a whole process here. Yeah, you want to protect these things from bad weather. If it starts to get windy, you got to make sure that you don't want to be littering around your neighborhood, protect them from wind, rain, snow, sleet, and ice. And the number four is to purchase products made from recycled material, because the more you do that, the more of a market there is. And that's what keeps the whole process healthy and working.
Paul Szmal: You know, that is one of the most important things, Ted. Many issues surround our entire economy around recycling right now. The number one issue is, oh, it always comes down to money, Ted. Things always come down to money and economy of scale.
Ryan Staychock: If you purchase items that are made from recycled products, that increases the demand for recyclable materials. So if we want to see our communities and our state and our country and recycling more, then we as consumers need to purchase more items that are made from recyclable feed stock, such as plastics, cardboard, whatever those items are, and glass. If we are creating a demand as consumers, then that's going to create the demand on manufacturers to purchase more materials that are made from recycled stock. So always, always, always make that part of your buying habits. It's going to be hard to do, but sometimes you just got to look at that tag and see what is the post-consumer recycled content that's being made with those products.
Paul Szmal: All right. Ryan Stachok's been with us, and make sure you stop by that Maple Workshop for the bonus tire changing seminar that will be held as part of that. Thanks for your time. I always appreciate it.
Ryan Staychock: Hey, you bet. Always contact CCE Seneca County if you need any help with anything.
