Home & Garden
Spring Cleaning Composting Begins This Week in West Roxbury
This environmentally friendly column is brought to you by West Roxbury Saves Energy, a community-based organization committed to spreading the word that individuals can make positive choices that save money as well as the planet.
If you do not have the time or space to compost on your own, Boston's city trucks will once again be coming to collect your spring yard clean-up waste beginning this week on your recycling and trash pickup day. West Roxbury Saves Energy urges you to participate in this composting program by placing your yard waste and leaves in appropriate containers on the curbside by 7 a.m. on your pickup day. The City composts the collected yard waste to fertilize the area parks.
Be sure to place leaves and other yard debris in large paper leaf bags or open barrels. Please do not place yard waste in plastic bags! Plastic bags cannot be composted or recycled (remember as well that you should never put any plastic bags in your big blue recycling bin, either). Avoid placing trash in your composting containers also, or they cannot be picked up by the trucks collecting yard waste.
Find out what's happening in West Roxburywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
It is helpful to label your open barrels of yard waste. You may request stickers that say "Yard Waste" for free (up to two stickers per household) by calling 617-635-4500.
You may also put out sticks and branches for composting. They need to be a maximum of three-feet in length and one-inch in diameter. The City asks that you do not put branches into barrels; please tie them together with string for easy removal.
Find out what's happening in West Roxburywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
A tip for your yard: do not blow away all of your leaves. Allow some to stay as ground cover for your industrious resident worms, which will munch on the leaves and turn them into nutrient-rich soil.
This spring leaf and yard waste pickup continues through May 29. Thank you for participating in this composting program in West Roxbury. If you want to learn more about composting and how you can make your own outdoor composting bin or where you can purchase bins for the back yard and also for kitchen scraps, click here.
Note about our West Roxbury Goes Solar program: As of this date we have scheduled 99 free solar visits with residents who are interested in pursuing putting solar panels on their viable roofs and 9 solar panel installation contracts have been signed. This is an outstanding start for this initiative, which began just six weeks ago! The program ends on July 15, so contact us now to see if your roof is good for solar.
