Mosquitoes, Compost and Pizza
With mosquitos swarming 24/7, our back yard became a fairly useless place.
By Jeff Cann
I jammed the pizza box into the garbage bag and tossed it in the garage. The biodegradable pizza box from tonight’s dinner is made of cardboard. I stuck it in a plastic bag. The recycling people won’t take it. The grease stains somehow disrupt the recycling process. The waste management company won’t take anything unbagged. That pizza box, if I left it in the back yard, would disappear in three months. Protected by its mandatory plastic cover in a landfill, it might last a five hundred years. The bag itself doesn’t decompose. It disintegrates into microplastics which over time will make their way to the ocean. Fish food for the future.
Today, my wife took a vacation day. Instead of working, she gardened. Really, she ungardened. She filled bags after bag with groundcover torn from our beds. She eliminated a meadow. We’re planting a lawn. Seems today, were the opposite of environmental. We’re anti-environmentalists. I’ve read countless articles about how a varied plant environment better supports the natural world. Spiders spun their webs among our sprigs. Pollinators swarmed our wildflowers. Toads and snakes lurked beneath the tangle of ground creepers. The garden was alive. If things go well. By mid-summer…
