In the Spring of 2011, the City of St. Catharines will no longer be collecting grass clippings as part of their organics collections services.
The move to ban grass clippings from the collections was brought on because of an unusually wet summer in 2008. This wet and cooler weather made for perfect growing conditions for lawns throughout the region and therefore higher collection yields come garbage collection day.
The high amounts of clippings made for a pungent smell coming from the Walker’s Bio-Solids facility during that summer and a long list of complaints about the smell from anyone living downwind of the location.
Because of this ban on clippings now, homeowners will have to either mulch the clippings back into the lawn as they cut or collect them and add them to a composter set up if they have one.
Choosing to mulch the clippings into the lawn is great for the health of the grass when possible but in the early Spring and the Fall, there is usually too much clippings for the lawn to handle at any one time, thus bringing up the need for every homeowner to have at least a small composter at hand.
I have a compost pile. And it trsated out just as that. A pile of veggie waste out in the woods, until Maggie decided that compost is yummy and trsated dragging it all over the yard and bringing it up on my door mat. Now it is enclosed in chicken wire. I turn it over with a pitch fork once every few weeks and call it good. But now there are onions and pumpkins growing in it and I dont want to turn it over and kill them. And Maggie sometimes stands at the new compost fence and barks at the compost. I am not sure why!