Parks and City Streets

(It took me a good month before I decided I needed to start a litter blog.  The first four posts are delayed recaps.)

I teach 1-hour gardening classes in Greenwood and Schroeder dog parks and their vicinity, Saturdays at Greenwood and Sundays at Schroeder, weeding the parks when the weeds are flowering, the easiest time to kill them.  Join me at Schroeder, and earn your pass to all of Josephine County's parks for 8 hours of work.  At Greenwood you will learn about a greater variety of weeds. See details under "Gardening classes" at Garden Grants Pass.

There are few weeds to pull right now, so I mainly pick up litter, rocks, and fill holes inside the dog pens, and pick up litter in the area.  I must say, Jo Co Parks personnel have gotten much better about picking it up in Schroeder over the last year.  The same goes for Grants Pass Parks at the All-Sports Park.  Last week, when I walked down the pedestrian trail from the dog park and back up through the maintenance parking lot, I found very little litter until I got to the basketball court, where it was fresh.

I started out this venture in December with a tunic that was too wordy, too capitalized, and too block-letter for people to easily read it, and they didn’t.  3 weeks in, I was standing in front of a woman, talking to her at Schroeder Park, and she thought I worked for Jo Co Parks.  (I do, but not for pay; I serve on the advisory board and do volunteer work on the side.)  That’s when I became certain that I needed a new tunic ASAP, made a new one, and got it printed in 5 days.  Unfortunately, I didn’t save any of the old photos when I replaced the photo on my website, so you don’t get to see it now if you didn’t see it then.

But while I was still stuck with the old tunic, I reflected that it wouldn’t matter if people didn’t see me working in it if they wouldn’t read it, so I took a walk in Tussing Park, across the foot bridge from the Reinhart Volunteer Park (All-Sports Park).  I was impressed that the City had cut down a lot of brush and limbed up trees to where one can see campers, and I saw some blankets and trash from the bridge.  I was less impressed with the way the limbs and cut trees were left lying instead of being hauled out.  They will grow up into a tangled mass that will be uncleanable, while we will see the mess from the bridge, because the campers will move back in. 

I still hauled several grocery sacks of litter out of there, and reported some stuff too big for me to easily throw in the trash cans.  But the tables up in the improved area had much less litter around them than I’d ever seen before.  I still need to check out Baker Park, the other illegal camping park.  I haven’t been there since last summer.