Guerilla gardener Mark van Kaathoven

Compost your garden organic matter on site as a mulch to suppress weeds and the recycled nutrients will feed your plants & soil micro organisms.

Mark van Kaathoven is promoting what a lot of us have been quietly and intuitively doing for years in our gardens. Good on him! It’s time to reduce the recyclable compostable waste stream going to the landfill!

He’s brings his distinct spirited style to his environmentally sustainable methods of recycling. He’s also community minded and takes action in his local public park.

He explains his practices in this video.

This practice can be as simple as raking the leaves off your hard surfaces and spreading them as a mulch around your plants, instead of paying to dispose off site.

My only concern is if the loads of garden material being spread in parks is not closely managed there is the potential for spreading weeds such as Tradescantia fluminensis, Wild ginger (Hedychium gardnerianum), Woolly nightshade (Solanum mauritianum), and Palms including Chinese windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortune), Phoenix palm (Phoenix canariensis) and Bangalow palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana).

I’m noticing a number of weeds surreptitiously sprouting in some Auckland gardens and parks often amongst native plants such as Nīkau palms, where weed palms are difficult to differentiate.

We need more environmentally aware action takers like this guy!

Thanks for your work Mark van Kaathoven.

His website is https://www.urbanjungles.nz/