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Litter in paradise. Who throws garbage on farmland?

August 9, 2019 by Teresa Murphy

Steve Bridger's garden
Steve Bridger’s garden

Steve Bridger can’t count the number of times he’s had litter thrown on his award-winning garden in the last month.

Yesterday, as he tells it, a gleaming BMW stopped at the side of the road, a passenger opened a door and tossed out fast food wrappers.

“They didn’t see me pruning. When I hollered at them, they sped off in a spray of gravel, leaving me to clean up their mess,” he said.

Steve Bridger’s garden and shed

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, pedestrians, joggers, cyclists, and visitors in vehicles admire and photograph Bridger’s peaceful plot, set on farmland on the winding, rural, Finn Road. The garden surrounds his 1912 cottage, spilling across the road alongside Woodward’s Slough in an agricultural  area of Richmond, a city 20 miles south of Vancouver.

Adrienne Moore, a local painter, has set up her easel. “What is that divine fragrance?” she asks, walking past beds of asters, hollyhocks, lilies, gardenias, honeysuckle, roses, and sweet William. “Oh, it’s the lavender,” Moore decides.

Bridger maneuvers his rake around clusters of violet lupines, unearthing soda cup lids and a child’s sock, mumbling about how he raked this last week, then using a gloved hand, wages war on cigarette butts permeating periwinkle ground cover.

In the three decades he has tended his garden, he’s seen littering escalate. When he first bought the place and started creating the beds, he’d pick up beer bottles and cans on Sunday mornings. “That was about it,” he said.

Over the years, candy bar wrappers and chip bags appeared. When a suburban mall was built a mile away, swathes of cardboard coffee cups and fast food containers materialized.

As fees at the local landfill have risen, so has dumping.

“We’ve seen couches, tables, chairs, televisions, mattresses and drywall dumped,” said Graham Price, a neighbor, pointing to the Woodward Slough, a much-needed habitat for frogs, bats, river otters and herons. “Anything that can be thrown out of a car or unloaded from a truck ends up here.”

Mattress dumped beside farmland

Bridger recently heard a car door slam on a quiet afternoon and looked out to see a woman hauling an old computer monitor and processor out of her trunk and dumping it in his flowerbed. He stormed outside and told the woman to take it away.

“She had the gall to tell me it was a gift,” he said. “I had to threaten to phone the police before she would drag it back to her car. I know she offloaded it down the road,” said Bridger.

Price says he’s seen drivers of expensive vehicles with children in baby seats throw garbage out of their windows.

Steve Bridger (right) picks up littler

“I’ve seen couples stop, get out and casually unload garbage bags with styrofoam beside the road and then accelerate away,” said Price.

The neighbors agree fines are the solution. “We need to take photos of license plates and email them to Richmond’s by-law enforcement department. Then the City has to issue tickets so that litterers don’t come back here and ruin paradise,” said Bridger.

Bridger garden

Filed Under: Farmland Tagged With: litter, Richmond Farmland

Finn Slough residents fight to keep homes that were never theirs

July 10, 2019 by Teresa Murphy

It's a late-autumn evening and Gus Jacobson maneuvers his pickup truck down Dyke Road, a single lane access, past the net lofts and fishing shacks of the Village of Finn Slough. Once the road ends just above the swirling eddies where the Fraser … [Continue reading] about Finn Slough residents fight to keep homes that were never theirs

Filed Under: Farmland

Against the odds. Small scale farming in Richmond

October 17, 2018 by Teresa Murphy

  On this autumn Saturday morning in 2019, while a hard wind howls off the Fraser River bringing stinging gusts of rain, there's a festive feel in a lineup of about two dozen foodies, holding onto umbrellas at the edge of a small shopping plaza. The … [Continue reading] about Against the odds. Small scale farming in Richmond

Filed Under: Farmland Tagged With: small scale farming, Sweet Digz Farm

Industrial land encroaches on farmland

June 23, 2016 by Teresa Murphy

                    Industry would love to build on Bill McKinney's long, straight rows of potatoes. They'd they'd love to build on Bob Wright's zucchini patch and they'd … [Continue reading] about Industrial land encroaches on farmland

Filed Under: Farmland Tagged With: Agricultural Land, Richmond Agricultural Land, Richmond Farmland

Spring in full swing south of Steveston Highway

April 15, 2016 by Teresa Murphy

Spring is in full swing south of Steveston Highway in Agricultural Land Reserve land. This is one of Richmond's oldest Transparent apple trees. David Dorrington, the area's historian, thinks it dates back to the turn of the … [Continue reading] about Spring in full swing south of Steveston Highway

Filed Under: Farmland, Uncategorized Tagged With: Agricultural Land, Richmond Agricultural Land

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