With everything in the country already shut down because of COVID-19, it hardly seems necessary to mention that the City of Greensboro is observing the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, May 25.
City hall is still closed except for residents paying water bills or signing up for water service; that office, at 300 W. Washington St., is normally open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and will be closed on Monday, May 25.
Gillespie Golf Course will be open on its normal schedule and city lakes will be open from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. City parks and greenways remain open, but most everything else is already closed due to COVID-19 restrictions.
However, even in this time of staying at home there are some folks who aren’t, such as the city employees who pick up your garbage, recycling and yard waste.
There will be no residential collections on Monday, May 25. People who normally have Monday trash collection will have it picked up Tuesday, May 26 and those who normally have Tuesday collection will have their pickup on Wednesday, May 27.
If your normal trash collection day is Thursday or Friday, that will not change.
Then there’s yard waste, which seems to have befuddled a lot of people.
If your garbage collection day is Monday, then technically you have missed this round of yard waste pickup. You were supposed to have your yard waste to the curb by 7 a.m. Monday, May 18.
But if your garbage collection day is Tuesday, then you should have your yard waste to the curb by 7 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26.
Those whose garbage collection day is Thursday should have their yard waste to the curb by 7 a.m. on Thursday, May 21.
And those with garbage collection on Friday should have their yard waste to the curb by 7 a.m. on Thursday, May 28.
People are asked to place no more than 10 bags, cans or bundles of yard waste at the curb at a time and cans and bags should weigh less than 50 pounds. Limbs should be no more than 5 feet in length.
The Field Operations original plan was to collect all the yard waste on each route in two to three days. However, there turned out to be a lot more yard waste than expected. The backlog was created when the city suspended yard waste collection for a month due to coronavirus issues. But added to that, because people are staying at home, many are using that time to catch up on yard work, which has created even more yard waste than usual. What all that means is that even if you get your yard waste out to the street by the appointed time, it might not be picked up in two or three days, but the city will collect it as soon as possible.
According to a reliable source, a chipper-shredder makes a wonderful Memorial Day gift for an avid gardener, allowing them to turn that yard waste into useful mulch.