HOMETOWN PRIDE
Building hometown pride is a unique way to give back to the community we love and cherish. Volunteer days with family and friends brings you closer and makes your part of town a nicer place to live. There are many ways to create this year long feeling.
Plant trees, flowers, and particularly sunflowers. Help your community bloom. Out public works departments need volunteers. Budget constraints, along with the sequester have curtailed a lot of what we've taken for granted. Offer to help plant flowers in parks or around municipal building. Rake up leaves into compost piles. Replace trees, plant more. Join the groups working to eliminate invasive species. By helping to make our public spaces much more attractive, we free up the maintenance crews to work on more pressing issues. Contact the city and/or county parks and recreation departments, Florida Trail, Appalachee Chapter, Native Plants group, Hairstreak chapter (Butterfly group).
Help remove graffiti. When vandals, who consider themselves "artists" deface a wall or a sidewalk, it costs local government and business owners lots of money to clean up the graffiti. It also acts as a deterrent to other businesses investing in the area. There is now an app for smart phones by which you can report such a problem. You can call, write or e-mail our public works department. Better yet, after reporting the problem, why not get a group of friends and help the city/county clean it up? You could also encourage some of very talented local artists to outline a mural on the wall, and have volunteers fill in the design.
Gather Trash. Put on a pair of protective work gloves, grab some of those annoying plastic grocery bags, and set out in one of your favorite places to walk. By picking up the trash you encounter, you're not only tiding up the area, you're making a visual display against littering. People tend to toss trash when they see one bit of trash on the ground. Picking up around town helps cut back the expense of having our city/county employees do so. Our countyr spends $11 and 1/2 billion dollars on litter cleanup each year. You can deposit your filled bags in a trash container, or take them home and add to your refuse continer.
Check storm drains. Everything we put on our yards helps to pollute our water supply. Debris that goes down the streets end up in the street gutters, and when they get clogged they can create a backup of water on your street. Keep the metal grates on your local streets clear by removing the leaves and litter. Once again, those plastic grocery bags come in handy.
Eliminate some of the lawn cuttings you put in those plastic bags. Make a compost pile. You can put leafy prunings, grass clippings, and household food scraps on or in the pile. Make sure you don't put bones, or meat scraps there. Turn the pile every so other which encourages decomposition. You basically make your own nutrient-rich fertilizer. What you may not realize, is that those bags full of leaves have to be opened, and sorted through, since folks put stuff other than yard leaves and branches in their bags. By composting you eliminate that expenditure by our city/county. And, you can buy good compost bins from the city/county that are relatively inexpensive. By composting you're keeping all those leaves out of the storm drains.
