As we drove by the plush residential homes, some recently covered with a fresh coating of paint and with the variously landscaped yards displaying their beautiful spired shrubs, flowering gardens and well watered green lawns, it could not be helped but to notice the evenly placed lawn bags filled to the brim with yard waste, just waiting to be carried away by the scheduled garbage pickup. So much labor must have gone into neatly and carefully packing each one of them so they wouldn’t be torn open by a stiff twig or two. Each fall and spring a similar scene is reenacted by most of us who seasonally do our traditional yard cleanup.
Having been a fairly devout organic gardener in the 1980’s and traditionally would save every bit of waste clippings from our yard that would then go into a 4×4 foot by 4 feet high loosely constructed wooden bin for later processing and churning into a fine mulch, it was difficult to see virtually truckloads of “Organic Gold Plant Food” just waiting to be carted away to some landfill, or just possibly be used for fuel in some local utility supplier’s furnace. It is beyond my understanding how this...