Soggy Leaves

Garbage and recycling in our area is collected on a Tuesday morning. All this is lovely. Here in Richmond they are very efficient and never miss a collection. Over last summer, green things grew. And grew, and grew. Soon our back yard was like a jungle and when the wisteria on the front wall started to climb into our bedroom, we decided that it was time to do something. Bwo found a gardener. Like all service people in this country, he (Henry?) came from Eastern Europe. He was good though and could really teach our 80% gardeners in Israel about real work (these Israeli gardeners are really around 40% actually). Not know the rules we let Henry? filled dozens and dozens of huge black garbage bags with green clippings, branches and leaves. He took a few hours, carrying these through the house, and stacked them 5 high outside the front door in place for the recycling people to take away. There were so many they blocked the sun.

Richmond council, of course, did not agree with this. After a few weeks went by and no one picked up our clippings we checked into the council webpage. We found out that either you buy the council approved recyclable yard waste bags or else drop some cash on an "official" yard waste bin. So we bought some bags. Absolute rubbish they were. They certainly were biodegradable, as they completely dissolved after a few days out in our wet weather. Moving the stuff from one bag to the other was also a giant pain. So the mountain of bags outside the door stayed and grew more and more rotten. Finally we broke down and bought the nice green bin you see in the picture above. Yard waste pick-up occurs only once every two weeks and once the bin is emptied I cram it completely full with some of the left over soggy, rotting clippings. The good news is that now, nearly six months after this joke started we are finally down to having only two huge bags left to have collected. That is assuming they emptied our heavily full bin this morning.