To work in an urban garden sometimes is much different than working in an ordinary garden in the suburbs or country. In a crowded urban area you not only have the increased pressure of small spaces, heavy air pollution, and limited sunlight from tall buildings you face the added pressure of people. The biggest damage and the most work at the urban garden is created by people. Here are a couple of examples.
Everyday we spend between 4 and 5 man hours cleaning up and policing the grounds before we start any other work.The fast food bags and debris,the beer bottles, pop cans, and the plastic water bottles some how just arrive every day and are left every wheres not to mention newspapers and papers of all kinds. These are not just coming from the heavens these are people who just don’t care and so they drop there stuff and move on. The other problem is that all toss leftover fast food meals that people chuck out the window in the parking lots attract rats and other varmints.
The other are people who have no respect or concerns for other peoples property. There are large numbers who each day I see walk right through shrub hedges or trample through flowerbeds oblivious to the fact that they are destroying hours of hard work or other peoples property. I use to get angry and approach them and ask them why they would do it and they would look at me with no sense that they had done anything wrong and some would just stare blankly at you like they did not know what you were talking about. I gave that up a long time ago and have decided they were either not brought up properly or just could be so self centered and only concerned about themselves and their own stuff and did not care about others at all. What ever the reason people are one of the biggest problem groundskeepers face. I am not complaining for it is job security having to cleanup after all of them.
I think a lot of people do not realize what it would be like if there were no one to clean up all the messes. So the next time you drive down the expressway and see a crew picking litter or a guy walking along with a pickup stick cleaning up debris or a gal sweeping the gutters with a broom and shovel just think what it would look like if they weren’t there.
