I am not entirely certain but I think that heap of dirt was arranged for by the mayor and for the use of the community garden project... my recollection...and remember I'm an old woman with swiss cheese for a brain...is that Campbell River has a very modern sewage treatment/waste composting integrated system which turns out near mountains of rich black soil weekly... and while this soil might not need much by way of manure or compost to begin with , it would be helpful if VIHA could do soil sample tests on it.

Some thirty years ago, perhaps more, Millwaukee produced a fertilizer "Milorganite", and, at the time, it was all things plus a bag of chips in the garden and nursery world. My brother-in-law ran Long Lake nurseries , near Nanaimo, and he said Milorganite would "grow roots on a varnished stick"... and all was well for a while, incredible crop yeilds, everybody happy, well I should say..and then the heavy metals content made itself known...and suddenly my garden was no longer producing food fit for human consumption. Well, it made for the greenest section of the enlarged lawn but Milorganite could only be used on golf courses, not even on playgrounds where small kids might roll and frolic on the heavy metal laden grass...

So with that horror show managing to survive in the wreck of my brain, I am a tad leery of the soil from the CR experiment...heavy metals might be present because storm drains wind up going through the same system, and storm drains get the heavy metals from road exhaust...plus people aren't always good about sending chemical crap down the drains or flushing who knows what down the toilets and ...soil sampling would be helpful...

There is, however, a LOT of soil out there and I think we can get more.

And we're looking for ways and means to increase our village composting, we have some ideas and it would be helpful if people could put forward some of their ideas...we have that recycling effort trying to go but one does wonder about ones overall "carbon footprint" when all the stuff needs to be trucked out to Campbell River...that's a lot of diesel fuel being burned...my suggestion has been to get a shredder/chipper and send our paper and cardboard through it, add it to the village compost, worms love the stuff and you never have too many worms...we could probably do the same kind of thing with glass and either use it in the landfill or barge it out to the trench, dump it and let it go back to what glass started out as, sand...

The real villain is plastic. Those white grocery bags do not add to the ambiance as they flap from the branches of the trees out near the dump.