If What To Do With Grass Clippings Is Our Complaint, Niagara’s In Pretty Good Shape

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Good Lord Almighty, and I ain’t even all that religious.  Do we really need to be spending more time and money at Niagara, Ontario’s regional level of government talking about what the average homeowner should do with their grass clipping?!

Grass clippings, for God’s sake! Grass clippings!

From a Niagara regional government pamphlet, encouraging us to recycle grass clippings on our own lawns.

If that’s what residents on the Niagara, Ontario side of our greater region want their government to spend more time and money on – what to do with the grass clippings after we’ve cut our lawn – then why not get the regional government to spend even more time and money studying which rake is the best one to use to gather up grass clippings, or whether a rake is more environmentally friendly to use than one of those electric lawn vacuums?

If the question of what to do with our grass clippings is such a big concern in Niagara, then maybe we are doing pretty well here. Let’s face it, how many other people on this planet have the luxury of worrying about what to do with their grass clippings?
Apparently we do. In a region suffering from one of the highest unemployment rates in all of Canada, on a continent where people have recently been suffering and dying from killer tornadoes, floods, brush fires and droughts that have destroyed whole communities, we must be doing pretty good if Niagara, Ontario regional government’s ban on the curbside collection of grass clippings has residents doing cart wheels of fire. When you think of the loss of life and worldly possessions in places like the town in Alberta, where a good size of that community was incinerated over the past month in brush fires, and Joplin, Missouri, now the site of the deadliest tornado assault in North American history, what are a few grass clippings.

Apparently leaving grass clippings on the lawn, even though just about any horticultural expert in the country says they are good fertilizer for lawns and gardens, is a scourge along the lines of a flood for some people, including a majority of our regional councillors who voted in favour of Volpatti’s motion to review the ban on picking up lawn clippings at curbside.

Following the May 26 regional council meeting where her motion was passed, she came back to the press gallery and asked what some of us reporters thought. This one basically said what you’ve read above. At that point, she noted that she has a very nice looking lawn at her home and wants to keep it that way. And that is fine.

But isn’t it possible to manage lawn and gardens, and use the natural fertilizer in lawn clippings to your advantage in that effort, without people across the region collectively sending mountains of grass clippings to a compost facility where they may rot and ultimately go so septic in the springtime that you can smell the putrid odours for many miles around? We’ve had this at a now defunct regional compost facility in north Port Colborne and at the Walker Industries site on the border of Thorold and Niagara Falls. Apparently the ladder site wasn’t close enough to Volpatti’s site for her to enjoy the stench while looking out over her patio at her well-manicured lawn.

Maybe those who want their grass clippings picked up, should be the first to volunteer to live within a few miles radius of where they are going to be stacked. I know, from covering the compost site in Port Colborne some five years ago, that they might rather have someone spreading pig manure on lawns right across the fence from them. That is how septic this stuff can get during a wet summer season like the one we’ve just had.

Finally, I’ve often felt that maybe they ought to be teaching us some practical things about growing health lawns and gardens in schools to counter the marketing we’ve been bombarded with over the past 40 or so years from a lawn-care industry about those ‘perfect, Disney World lawns’ that look more like artificial turf than a natural environment we should want our children to play in. But the schools, with their curriculums dictated by provincial governments, have never been too interested in doing that. Works against the interests of a powerful lawn care/chemical industry.

Despite the failure of our schools, if you are interested in finding out more about why it makes sense to keep grass clippings on your lawn or (if they clump up) till them into our flower or veggie gardens, visit the Niagara region’s website at www.niagararegion.ca and type ‘grass clippings’ in the search engine.

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