Notes from the nursery, the clean-up roster and the community: updates and guides from our day-to-day work greening Donholm and Embakasi East.
Volunteers turned out early on a Saturday morning to clear blocked drainage channels along Donholm's main footpaths, hauling out sacks of plastic and silt before the next rains.
Ornamental trees look impressive in a nursery photo, but indigenous species are what actually survive Donholm's dry spells and do the most for local soil and water.
A practical walkthrough of what actually happens on a planting day, for anyone in Donholm who has been meaning to join us but is not sure what to bring or expect.
We followed a sack of sorted recyclables from a clean-up day through to the buyer, to understand whether our sorting effort was making an actual difference.
None of these changes need money or special equipment, just habits that add up once enough households in Donholm adopt them.
From seed collection to a hole in the ground, a seedling spends months in our care before it is strong enough to survive being planted along a Donholm street.
With five neighbourhoods in rotation and limited volunteer time, choosing where to send the next clean-up is more deliberate than it looks.
Not every household composting attempt succeeds on the first try. Here is what went wrong with one early pit and what we changed as a result.
A handful of residents have not missed a scheduled clean-up in over a year. We asked them what keeps them coming back.
Knowing who to actually contact, and what information to include, makes the difference between a dumping site that gets cleared and one that sits for months.
The single biggest factor in whether a newly planted tree survives its first year has turned out to be less about species and more about when it went into the ground.
Environmental volunteering is often seen as something you do for free on a Saturday. We have been making the case that it is also a set of skills worth taking seriously.
Fruit trees are usually reserved for private compounds. We have started arguing for a few carefully chosen public plantings too, and here is the reasoning.
One estate's residents' association WhatsApp group is now a direct line for scheduling clean-ups, reporting new dumping sites and coordinating volunteers.
Most young trees that die after planting show warning signs for weeks beforehand. Catching them early is usually the difference between saving a tree and replacing it.
A handful of informal household energy audits this year have turned up the same few culprits again and again, and none of the fixes require major spending.
A simple spreadsheet of location, species and planting date has quietly become one of the most useful tools we have for tracking what actually survives.
For residents thinking about starting an informal clean-up on their own street, here is what basic equipment actually costs and where corners can reasonably be cut.
Several of our best tree-planting locations started life as clean-up sites. Turning a cleared dumpsite into a planted green space is its own, separate piece of work.