There are some more discoveries or observations that I have made this year. The largest I believe is that with 420 trees now approaching their 3rd fall here at the urban garden the number of leaves to be cleaned has quickly grown to a huge project. We are spending 3 hours of the day in leaf removal and have been on it for 2 weeks now and hopefully will only have a couple more weeks to go. When the trees were installed during the parking lot renovations a couple of years ago I think that administration was looking at the cost to meet the city ordinances but maybe not paying attention to the future maintenance cost these trees would entail. That is not an uncommon oversight. Some of the younger suburban communities over the last ten to twenty years have come to this realization. Many villages and towns have required the planting of parkway trees as condition of developing land into housing developments. Now forestry budgets and personnel have had to expand to keep up with the trimming of the trees the massive leaf clean up in the fall and storm damage.This is not to say that improving the quality of life for a town’s residences is not important it is just a fact that along with the quality of life there comes a price. In this case increased public works budgets.
Anyways back to the urban garden. It is important to get the leaves up as they clog the sewers. harbor insects and disease to the surrounding landscape, as well as making for slippery walking when they are wet. Speaking of wet this has been the 9th wettest October on record here at they urban garden with only 2 days of sunshine in the whole month. So hopefully we will get into a dryer period for the next week or two so that we can get the rest of the landscape cleaned up and get a good start on the holiday decorations.
