Mainstream

Portland is cold, yes, very cold, unseasonably/irredeemably cold, wetter-than-ezra, even the long-time-locals are grumpy.

But, aqui a Verde, our gear is good, our feet are dry, and we're out in it.

Recently, we finished a project for our good friends at Our United Villages, at their project-known-as The Rebuilding Center. Brothers and Sisters with us and others in the so reasonable as to be life-affirming idea (a.k.a. Shouldn't Poor Folk and People of Color Make Some of the Green Money?), their Rebuilding Center was recently remodeled, a remodel which included 4 new stormwater planters to slow and filter on-site stormwater runoff...

They reached out to us for a Corrective Action, fixing up their stormwater facilities after a period of deferred maintenance. This is a very common thing - stormwater facilities are still pretty new, and maintaining them is a new responsibility for many property owners, a responsibility the City of Portland expects them to meet.

2 things are especially cool here:

1. When we spoke with the Rebuilding Center about the City's expectations for stormwater facility maintenance, we found that everything the City was telling the Center, we'd learned about in our Weekly Classroom Training on Operations and Maintenance Plans, provided by Jason King from Greenworks, so we knew what the City wanted to see and what we needed to do. Hell Yes!
Operations & Maintenance Plan Training


2. Check out these very nice before and after photos, which provided good feelings to all concerned (Verde, Our United Villages, the City, Neighbors)


Ooh, look, sunshine...

Is It Like Today

not to go all John McCain on y'all, but these, my friends, are busy and interesting times. Not operatic in grandeur or significance, but certainly an ever-bigger load on the wagon - of course and then, onward thru the fog...

A good thing happened to us recently, something we planned on for a long time, longer than we've been alive-in-the-corporate-sense. Nestor Campos (that's him, with Denis Obrien from the City of Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services), Production & Facility Manager at the Verde Native Plant Nursery, passed Part 5 of the 5-part Landscape Contractor exam.















This is a big deal. To simplify things a bit, you ain't a landscape contractor unless you pass the exams. If you ain't a landscape contractor, you can't install more than a small number of plants. If you can't install more than a small number of plants - well, it's hard to pay good wages/make much money if you're just maintaining. I mean, think about it, what do you pay more for - somebody to install your lawn, or somebody to mow your lawn?

This is not an easy deal. Hell, I'm a lawyer, and a 38-year (give-or-take) speaker of English, and I get confused by the State's Landscape Contractor Laws and its Administrative Rules. Nestor, a Venezuelan newcomer to the English language, is therefore a bad-ass...

ok, dassall, pictures of outreach and education next time (who could wait for that!).