Trailer loads free to any plot on the register, by the list at the office. And an honest note about the two bays we cannot keep up with.
The compost from the yard goes back to the growers this month and next, free, by the trailer load, which is the arrangement every year before planting.
How to get a load. Put your plot number on the list at the office. The tractor runs two loads a day on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, in list order. Last year thirty one of the forty plots being worked took at least one load and two growers who had been buying fertiliser for years took nothing else.
What goes in. Household green waste in its own bag on the Sunday and Wednesday round, and plot trimmings brought to the yard or collected by the tractor. No plastic, no glass, no bones, no oil and nothing from a household bin that has been mixed. One mixed bag costs more work than ten clean ones, because somebody stands there picking it out.
The honest part. Two of the eleven bays are permanently full of material nobody has turned. Turning the yard properly is an hour of two people's time every ten days and there are four staff on this council, one of whom drives the tractor and one of whom runs the office. We are not keeping up, and the result is that about a fifth of what comes in takes a year rather than four months.
The council has asked for a small mechanical turner in the next budget and has put the figure in the quarterly accounts on the noticeboard so that everybody can see what it would cost and what else it would displace. If it is refused, the alternative is fewer bays and turning less material properly, which is better than eleven bays half of which are a pile.
And the thing the yard did that nobody planned. There were eleven complaints about smoke the year before it opened, most of them from the houses near the school, and none at all since. The pit is closed and it stays closed. Nobody should be burning anything in a yard on this island, green or otherwise, and if you see it, tell the office.
