Big cleanup and homeless update

The Clean & Green Team

Today we had the hardworking Clean & Green Team come to PG, led by Paul, as well as a DPW packer truck to take away all the green waste and compost it.

They managed to completely remove a pile about 20' long, 10' wide and almost 5' high - tough work on a sunny and pretty warm morning!

Thank you Julia, Marissa, May, Paul and the crew - and Chris for moving all the debris up to that spot in the first place!

Before

While the team worked to move the huge pile down to the front by the truck, Matt and I investigated the homeless encampment in the back of the garden. There was nobody home, and it looks like all belongings were gone too, so we spent a couple hours dismantling the encampment, picking up all the trash, and cleaning the area.

We also cut back a lot of fennel and filled the hole in the far bottom fence with a large blue Agave americana - better than barbed wire!

Spiky fence

Now, I don't think this is a permanent solution - halfway through the job a homeless person came down and asked if there was a hole there to go through, and I said no... but I expect it will be back. Agaves, yuccas and opuntias do a fearsome job repelling humans, but only when they get established, which is hard to do when they get ripped out or clambered over.

Hope these ones make it - the opuntias we planted many years ago are gamely trying to form the impenetrable hedge I know they can, but they're a quarter the size they should be, with many broken branches.

After!

A whole lot of the 1 gallon pots of Agaves and Aloes growing on in that back area had been trashed by the homeless encampment, and I threw a number out. Matt planted a dozen pups in the "pup farm" along the off ramp street edge. They'll grow on and recover there, in relative safety, until we can transplant them to their final spots.