Cleanest City Contest

May 6, 2009

As I write this, we are nine and one half hours away from Cleanest City judging. This will be the 24th time since 1982 that the Village of Collinston has competed on the state level in the Louisiana Garden Club Federation Cleanest City Contest. If we out-score Pollock, La., it will be our 15th state title. Part of the contest requirements is that the towns keep a scrapbook of documenting efforts each year at keeping clean, and it is judged. All of our scrapbooks are kept in the local branch of the parish library. Thumbing through them, you can see we are on our third generation of trimmer and mower operators.

We had 5 inches of rain this morning, on top of the 4 or so inches that fell Sunday morning. Our ditches are running over and lots of yards are under water. I drove our UTV into town this afternoon, and picked up litter on both sides of the road from one end of town to the other. I reckon that was 5 miles out and 5 miles back. I wore my rubber knee boots and somewhere along the way, got fire ants in the top of one of them. I collected one 33 gallon bag of trash. Most of the items had washed out from under the culverts. Sometimes I pick up twice that much in the quarter mile stretch on either side of the driveway, and that’s from only one side of the road. Collinston is clean. The emphasis of the contest is on being trim, neat, and litter-free. The town is as trim as possible considering the amount of rain that has fallen. All but a couple of residents had cleaned up their yards on my last pass through town, riding my broom, so to speak. I had only knocked on one door to ask if the volunteer crew could mow his yard. He agreed. Others I prodded indirectly. We will see what daylight brings. I’ll have to clean out my car in the morning so I can drive the judges around the route. I will let you know how well we do.