Our City’s top goal is “to be a city
that looks safe and is safe.” We have a
real public safety problem in Josephine County and Grants Pass, our county
seat. As our official top goal implies,
looking safe is the first step to being safe.
“Looking safe” means being clean, as
clean and neat as we can, considering our county’s current lack of money to
guard prisoners in the jail. Even in the
best of times with a fully funded jail, a clean city has less crime and general
nuisance behavior than one that is full of litter and weeds. Orderly surroundings invite orderly conduct;
disorderly surroundings encourage disorderly conduct. A lack of litter and weeds shows that someone
cares what happens on a property; their presence shows neglect and invites
trespass.
Littering is invited by the ugliness
of weeds, as people try to hide their ugly in ugliness. Ugly hedges also become repositories for
trash. Weeds make it harder to pick up
litter entangled in them, particularly star thistles and blackberries. The combination of litter and weeds calls in
disorderly vagrant campers, many of whom mark potential campsites with litter
to see if it gets picked up. Old litter
means that no one cares, and it is safe to camp.
This gardener recently started to
take direct action against litter, the easiest thing to fix. Litter only adds up; weeds multiply. You can see me occasionally in my bright
green advertising tunic, cleaning up litter from the most public and most
littered places. Private properties can
and should be cleaned up by their residents and owners; public places like
roadways and bridges get cleaned occasionally by governments, but they need a
lot of help, and that is my niche.
This gardener, after all, is getting
a bit old for doing the harder work of gardening, weeding, pruning and bed
building, full time. But litter cleaning
takes little bending with the help of a litter grabber and rarely requires a
wheelbarrow, except when one gets a wild hair and cleans up the tree litter and
moss on something like the Caveman Bridge, which you can read about in The
Litter Cleaner Blog at GPgardener.com.
The work is satisfying and gets a lot
of kudos, but it needs your help to continue over the long term. I’m working for gardening customers three
days a week and working for you, the public, for two. If I get enough donations for public litter
cleaning, I will not replace customers as they naturally drop out and will
increase my litter cleaning, eventually to full time.
Read The Litter Cleaner Blog and support
litter cleanup in Grants Pass at GPgardener.com.
Rycke Brown,
Natural Gardener 541-955-9040 rycke@gardener.com
Gardening
is easy, if you do it naturally.
