This weekend I did my fall garden clean up. I consider myself an avid composter, but this season was a horrific mess of fungus, mold, mildew, mosaic virus, aphids, miners, squash bugs, squash beetles, spider mites and white flies. I pulled up everything and threw it in the trash. I live in the city so we have 300 gallon dumpsters that sit in the alley.

So I have these new neighbors. They are very nice and I like them so I don't want to cause any drama between us but they are the kind of people that think doing any sort of home or lawn maintenance goes against some sort of diy/punk idealism (In their eyes, mowing my lawn is some sort of right wing conformity, fossil fuel guzzling act of oppressing mother nature.) The one gentleman asked me if I could please give him the refuse to compost and that it was a crime to throw it away..."Such a huge waste." He said.

I insisted that the plant matter was diseased and our yards are way to small for me to risk re-infecting my garden next year. I could see a look of horror come over his face when I told him about the eradication of poke weed in my yard because it was harboring mosaic virus.

I need advice. How do I talk to him about good cultural practices without sounding like yard-nazi? How do I let them know that my intentions are not to wage a war against trees, but that the 20 Chinese Trees of Heaven they have growing on the fence line and actually hurting the Ohio ecosystem and not helping it?

Every year we garden, we gain valuable experience that carries over to next year. This guys says he "Thinks about gardening... a lot."

oi.