A Beautiful Pile of Rubbish

Gardening can generate a lot of clippings and trimmings. Gardening in the tropics can generate ten times the volume of debris as many mainland locations. Gardening in the tropics on a half acre lot by a real gardener and landscaper can generate more rubbish than you can imagine. The non-stop growing season and gargantuan size many plants can reach in the tropics is not to be casually dismissed.

The county does not offer green waste pickup or recycling and garbage is picked up twice a week by an automated truck with a single regulation size can. One coconut frond does not fit into this garbage can unless you convince it. Imagine the poor landscape maintenance services trimmings dilemma when they come once a week to tidy up the jungle.

My long skinny curved driveway makes having a dumpster at home unworkable. I am fortunate to be able to have a green waste dumpster at another location. Still I find I need a staging area for the overflow rubbish and my own that won't fit in the largest dumpster a truck can lift that is emptied on a weekly basis.














There was some extra room in the dumpster this week. This morning I took a full load in my pickup truck from my staging area up to the green waste dumpster a few blocks away. My rubbish pile shrank in half. Then I started working in the garden and started piling stuff back on top of the pile. This is my Beautiful Pile of Rubbish at the end of the day.














Along the driveway side it is framed by the cheerful Crotalaria spectabilis that came up with the first winter rains. The fading spires of Aloe Vera blooms add a complimentary brown vertical element to the bottom layer of the rising and falling mound of debris. To the left a gigantic Aloe arborescens helps define the shape of the pile and often holds it in place. My Man in the Log has fallen and rests on the giant aloe. His bottom has thoroughly rotted and the piece of rebar jammed up there no longer holds him in place.

Every so often the rubbish pile completely disappears and this empty space emerges. It looks so forlorn like I should plant something there. Before this empty space gets too loud I know to wander into the garden and do a little trimming. If I don't feed it soon something else may try to move in and I have grown very accustomed to My Beautiful Pile of Rubbish.