Do you have a specific area of your garden set aside where you keep your waste bins? How do you keep them separate from your garden? How do you keep anyone touring your garden from seeing them or noticing them?
Our waste bins are huge and therefore hard to miss. We have a gray bin for recyclables, and two big bright blue bins for yard waste, as well as a smaller green bin for trash. We used to put the trash out in bins without wheels, but a couple of years ago the company that handles our disposal service decided to give us a bin specially designed to be picked up by the hydraulic arm on the truck, which meant they no longer needed to employ two guys on the truck, one to drive it and another to tip the bins into the back. As a result I have a couple of extra waste bins that just kind of hang around in the bin area. Some day I'll do something with them but for now, they just take up space.
When you first approach the left hand (north side) of the house, you don't immediately see the plethora of bins. They're hidden behind a small section of fence with some large pots (and weeds) in front of it. This is in the same general area as the gravel garden which I profiled in a previous TtTT post, which you can read
here.
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| As you face these pots and section of fence, the gravel garden is directly to the left |
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| The pot currently contains a lot of hens and chicks and the rotted-off tall stalk from a Yucca aloifolia purpurea, which has sent up at least one offset. I need to do something with this pot, but maybe that's a question for another post |
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| Here's what you see beyond that section of fence -- bins, some trash that won't actually fit into our current trash bin and our enormous air conditioner/heat pump |
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| Another view of the area -- hard-to-ignore, ugly bins |
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| Beyond the heat pump is the gas meter, and then a pile of garden ornaments, which I'd like to some day put up on that enormous blank north side of the house in the probably vain hope that it might distract people from the view below |
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| What do you think? Would this big blank wall be more interesting if I hung some garden art on it? |
I plan to use the pile of bricks to finish the path I'm putting in the back garden. And the unused trellis might work to screen the heat pump from view in some way, hopefully without compromising its air flow. Once I get all that stuff off the ground and hanging on the house, I'd like to do something gardeny there. More big pots? Raised beds? It's dark territory, the north side of the house. I don't know if it ever sees the sun, even in summer.
There is room in that area beyond the section of fence for our two big blue yard waste bins, but they seldom live there. They're in use almost constantly, and get carted around the garden and often left in situ. Actually, right now, I'm trying to use them to keep deer from walking through a bed that I planted up in the fall.
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| Blue yard waste bins guarding the front foundation bed from deer |
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| Here's the same view from the other direction -- if you look closely beyond, you can see I still have snow banks lining my driveway |
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| Deer hoofprints |
The deer never seem to eat anything, they just use my front garden as a short-cut.
Do you hide your bins in some clever way? Do you have any advice for me? Do you have other ugliness to share with us today? Keep your garden coverage honest and tell us all about the horrors lurking in your garden.
