 This is the Bitterford City of Bitterford's annual Earth Day recycling event. We're here as members of the Conservation Commission. We're promoting voluntary yard smart best management practices for people to use on their lawns and gardens. The city already does best management practices for all the public properties and we think it's a good fit for private property owners to start doing that on their own properties. We're members of the Conservation Collaborative. We advise the City Council and the Planning Board on environmental issues when everything comes before those two bodies. And we've been working with the Conservation Collaborative who they've done a lot of research for us. Working with them, we've put together some handouts. We have free soil sample kits for people to test their soils. We have some other information on just the ten simple steps to follow when you're maintaining your own properties and links to the information that's available on the state website as well. And we have the Solid Waste Commission who's selling composters for people to use as fertilizer instead of using chemical fertilizers. And it's also kind of a general waste disposal for things that you can't put in the waste stream but the city sets this up so that people can bring those things here today and have them properly disposed of. The soil test kits, you take samples in your yard from the lawn, from the garden and then send them to the lab in O'Reilly and they will analyze it and they'll tell you what your soil is composed of and then recommend if anything is needed to be added or subtracted they will give you some suggestions on how to go about correcting that for the proper balance and when possible to use organic materials rather than the synthetic chemical materials that all end up in the water supply and are affecting the drinking water and the fishery viability. Many properties don't need extra fertilizer or other chemicals. Also there's a real safety concern, a health concern with using pesticides and herbicides and insecticides. Those are not natural, there are natural ways to combat those type of pests but they're very expensive to use the chemical process so what we're asking people to do is just try and follow the nature's course of managing property to have a nice yard that they can go out and enjoy and feel safe in because these chemical insecticides and pesticides are known to have adverse health effects especially on children and pets. They're much more susceptible than adults are to exposure to these chemicals. The Conservation Collaborative is a wonderful organization. Most of the members of the Conservation Collaborative are Land Trust in New York County and Cumberland County. We're the only municipal organization that's a member. We're the first conservation commission to join them. We work closely with, we have local Land Trust here, Soco Valley Land Trust. Maine Audubon is very active in this area so we work closely with these other organizations looking at what we can do as a team. We all meet as a board every other month and there are a lot of things that come up during these meetings that I wouldn't know about just acting as the chair of the Bitterford Conservation Commission. They provide a lot of great information, help with disseminating information to the public. It's an umbrella organization focused on conservation. If people want to know more, they can go to the Conservation Collaborative website. They're on Commercial Street in Portland, 217 Commercial Street. Their phone number is 207-699-2989. I call them often.