My
wife thinks I am half crazy dragging bags of leaves, grass clippings and other
yard debris to an erosion gap in our creek. Maybe she is right, for I have just unloaded bag number 1,311 into
that hole. All of these bags were
collected since June of 2011.
That’s 108 bags per month I have saved from the Baton Rouge
landfill. Estimated to be 26,000
pounds of good organic material not wasted. See more pictures.
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| Adam Aucoin stand in the hole in June of 2011, since then 1. 311 bags of leaves have been put in. |
Why? It started on September 1, 2008 when
the winds of Hurricane Gustav knocked down a pine tree, 3 foot in diameter and
over 80 feet tall into the above mentioned gap. It extended into my creek. I was immediately sad to lose such a big tree and especially
so because that gap was my trail to the stream. I solved part of the problem by
trimming the limbs off the tree so I could walk down to the creek on top of it.
A little more than two years later this became dangerous as the tree
rotted. On May 29, 2011 my stepson
Adam and I sawed the pine log into four foot pieces and left them in the hole.
A few days later I started throwing nearby limbs and branches on the logs.
Brainstorm! I could see the
crevasse totally filled up, making a nice view point over the creek and
creating 720 square feet of usable land.
Branches would take a long time so another idea came to mind as I headed to my office and saw some garbage bags by the street full of grass clippings. I had collected leaf bags in the fall for years to make compost. I decided to start collecting bags of yard refuse and fill the crevasse. With a combination of grass, leaves, sticks and a little dirt every now and then, this concoction of materials will decompose faster than just the logs, limbs and branches. Furthermore, it has the added advantage of keeping those full bags of valuable vegetable matter out of the land fill. I made my first entry in my hole ledger on June 5, 2011. Twenty-one bags of grass went into the hole. I quickly found out who had the best bags of stuff in a six block radius of my office. So in just a few minutes each Monday on the way to work I could obtain 20 to 30 bags.
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| CC stands on the newly accreted land after many bags of leaves and grass clipping have been put in. |
Branches would take a long time so another idea came to mind as I headed to my office and saw some garbage bags by the street full of grass clippings. I had collected leaf bags in the fall for years to make compost. I decided to start collecting bags of yard refuse and fill the crevasse. With a combination of grass, leaves, sticks and a little dirt every now and then, this concoction of materials will decompose faster than just the logs, limbs and branches. Furthermore, it has the added advantage of keeping those full bags of valuable vegetable matter out of the land fill. I made my first entry in my hole ledger on June 5, 2011. Twenty-one bags of grass went into the hole. I quickly found out who had the best bags of stuff in a six block radius of my office. So in just a few minutes each Monday on the way to work I could obtain 20 to 30 bags.
So
working like a beaver, engineering with layers of leaves, grass clippings and
fallen limbs, I began filling that eroded crevasse. It was about 18 feet wide
and 40 feet long. It starts about
4 feet deep and reaches 15 feet deep by the creek. Today, I can walk out about
22 feet on solid ground and another 10 on a spongy surface of compacting
leaves. This leaves only 8 feet left
to reach the bluff above the creek.
That will be the hard part, developing a firm vertical bank.
I
know as it decomposes, it will sink, compact and subside just like the
Louisiana coast and I just like the Mississippi River will keep adding layers
until I reach the height and compaction I need. Unlike the Louisiana coast which always needs new sediment,
I think I will reach a point where I no longer have to add.
It's
a crying shame that we do not let the Mississippi River get its valuable
sediments from the heartland of America into our beautiful and valuable marshes
anymore and drag our feet in making that right.
It
took 6,000 years of Mississippi River sediments from the heartland of America
to build 8,000 square miles of coastal Louisiana. It will take me about a year and a half to make a 720 square
foot plaza above my creek and save the landfill about 2,000 bags of leaves and
grass. As I sit out on my newly
accreted land, I think maybe, just maybe this hole project be the inspiration to
getting the valuable sediment out of the Mississippi and back into the coastal wetlands.
Link to Baton Rouge Recycle
Link to Baton Rouge Recycle
