When you’re nosy like me and you look into the yards of people, you’ll notice a number who make efforts to help plants in a couple of ways.
Rain Barrels
One of them is rain barrels. A number of people have hooked them up to their downspouts, and then dole out the water to their gardens as needed. In a lot of the city there are attached houses with tiny lawns, and water on roofs usually just goes straight to drain pipes. Rain barrels are a good way to filter water through the soil and cut down on pollutants hitting local waterways. And they’ll save a few bucks in water every year.
Many of the rain barrels are set up straight from the manufacturer.
But a surprising (to me, at least) number of people decorate their rain barrels.
Although when you think about it, why wouldn’t you decorate some big plastic thing sitting in your garden?
Compost
And then there are the compsters. We have a bin in our backyard. Peels, cores and leaves go in. Weirdly, it never seems to fill up. Maybe that has something to do with the hole some rodent(s) chewed in the top.
Other neighbors just throw their compost in a pile, like here.
One interesting development in the past few years is the launch of a compost pickup service. Compost bins take up valuable space for a lot of attached homes, and now there is an option to subscribe to a weekly pickup service. It’s a laBck-owned business which employs local teens, and has gotten good press. You’ll see bins of varying shapes and sizes in front of homes on pickup days.
And finally at our nearby farmers market there are dropoff bins for people who want to take their own leftover plant bits. For us, it’s easier to just toss it all in the never-full compost bin out back, but I can see why other people make use of other services. It’s definitely better than a landfill.
…some years back I remember being impressed by the way there was a whole bank of receptacles in a public park in paris where people could bring compostable waste
…never quite understood why more cities didn’t try to do that sort of thing but it probably has something to do with getting people not to contaminate the organic waste stuff that composts well with the stuff that would be better in anaerobic digesters…or vice versa
…or just throwing dog crap in there or whatever
…but…like “hot composting”…it seemed like a great idea if you could get it to work & keep up with the level of inputs needed to make it worthwhile?
I think staying on top of it so vermin are under control is the main thing. I think unless people are dumping stuff like motor oil, once it’s rotted it’s pretty easy to sift out the odd plastic fork or wrapper. But dealing with rats is probably hard in a municipal setting.
…I expect so…but I suppose the balance I had in mind was more orange peel vs newspaper quantities in terms of the mix…it’s what got me thinking about the hot composting thing since last time I tried to help someone set one of those up it seemed like the instructions called for a lot of things from the newspaper/cardboard type column & less from the clippings & orange peel one compared to what I’m used to thinking of as belonging on the compost heap…or in the bin, depending on how one rolls…& that paris effort seemed from what I took in at the time to ask people to dump “kitchen waste” or scraps in one bit & other kinds of biodegradable stuff in two or three other sections presumably so the people running the thing could feed the actual composter the right mix
…it was interesting to me on account of it seemed they’d found a way to sidestep a lot of the problems that seem to plague attempts to add organic waste as a distinct category for doorstep waste collection…which councils & the like don’t seem to handle as well as your example above
…rats…I have to imagine the municipal waste folks in paris have some experience with given they’ve been getting in on that act since notre dame was still in a quarry somewhere?
We have 2 rain barrels and 2 compost bins, and I’ve never thought of decorating them, lol. Maybe a future project, though. Maybe some peel-and-stick wallpaper for the barrels?