A man wanted to have some work done on his house and decided to check with the council. On the phone to the planning department he said “Can I have a skip outside my house?” After a pause, a rather bored council officer replied “Of course you can and have a little dance too if you are feeling energetic.”
That skip joke is no laughing matter and nor is the state of the ‘green’ skips that are located around the urbanisation for the disposal of residents’ ‘green’ waste such as garden pruning including trimmed tree branches etc. Over the last few years, volunteers have removed numerous items from the skips located on the Camposol lower B car park. One has to ask if the person who dumped parts of a wardrobe in a skip not long ago really thought that they came in the category of ‘garden waste’, or was it somebody just too lazy to dispose of their rubbish in a responsible manner?
Sadly all the ‘green’ skips across the development are now being targeted by fly-tippers and are becoming a real eyesore which must give visitors a bad impression of our area. Allowing contractors to use these skips for commercial waste is probably not helping, as one trailer load can virtually fill a container, preventing residents from getting rid of their garden waste safely and correctly. Perhaps the cost of disposal is deducted from the price of the job to make it more competitive, as it doesn’t seem reasonable to charge for disposal and then dump it for free. Surely nobody would be that dishonest!!
Moving onto more positive matters, the few stalwart members of B Clean’s working party are back out striving to improve the look of our sector. As always, more Volunteers are needed, so if you can help in some way, please come forward.
Now that Spring and Summer are behind us, (shame!!), many of our flowering plants are going into Autumn and Winter mode which means a little less colour around us. The Oleanders have given us good value this year, especially those coming along from the Social Centre, which have been an absolute picture. One of our ‘native’ plants that creates a good display is Lantana Camara, which not only last for a long time, but also has different coloured flowers on the same plant as can be seen in the pictures. I say ‘native’, but it is actually from the American tropics so probably brought back by Spanish explorers and conquistadors in the past. It can be a bit of a thug, so is best in a controlled location or out in the wild where it won’t damage anything tender. Being rather hardy it does benefit from a really hard prune as I found, having cut one back rather severely, which led to a huge display of colours rather than the dead plant I had expected! On the subject of pruning, it is just one of the numerous tasks undertaken by B Clean Volunteers (see photos), so if you have any secateurs or other garden tools that need some exercise, feel free to bring them along to one of the working parties! Contact us through Facebook page as usual please. Sorry to bang on, but we really need the help.
As always, enjoy being here and stay healthy.