Sunday, March 15, 2009

Neighborhood cleanup and compost

Yesterday was neighborhood cleanup day in town. That means that in every neighborhood in town, the residents pick up their shovels, rakes, brooms and saws and clean up litter, clear out obstructions, and clean out ditches. Our neighborhood is in a rural area, so there are lots of tree limbs and leaves in the ditches, but I was also amazed at the amount of just plain junk that people come and dump in our area.

Several of the folks in the area have access to large trucks, and we loaded all form of junk on there, old rusty tanks and barrels, rain gutter, broken sliding glass doors, fiberglass tanks, a rusty bicycle or two, and furniture of various sorts. Since this is a rural area people come and dump their garbage instead of taking it to the dump and paying the fees. We sort it out into metal and plastic and take it to the dump and pay the fees.

I took advantage of the goldmine of leaves that got scooped out of ditches. After the cleanup I went around in my truck and picked up the piles of leaves that were lying around and took them to the compost pile. I was surprised that no one else was taking advantage of the opportunity. Our area is full of avid composters. The only other person I saw was a woman out digging for bamboo shoots. Guess it's that time of year.

Neighborhood clean and the compost pile full. Pretty satisfying.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great idea. Always good when you get free stuff to add to the Compost heap.

5330 said...

Sure is! Kind of surprised when no one else was loading up their truck. I was out today cutting grass and composting that. I made our compost pile bigger than I had first imagined, and thought it would never get full. It's nearly there, and Spring has just begun. We are compost rich!