One of the things I learned from my father1 was how to be a good scrounge. Scrounging or scavenging gets a bad rap in our culture; it’s seen as a sign that you’re poor or desperate or lack the dignity to go to the store on Black Friday and club other shoppers over the head with truncheons like everyone else does. I disagree. Baseball bats are cheaper than truncheons. Also, I see scavenging as a mark of intelligence and resourcefulness. Why pay retail for something you can scavenge for free? Certainly there are exceptions to that rule (condoms and dirty underwear come to mind), but there are 3 big benefits to scavenging, two personal and one environmental:
- You can save lots of money.
- Figuring out how to get stuff without spending (much) money or how to reuse stuff no one else wants stimulates creativity and ingenuity. My parents, especially my dad, grew up during the Great Depression. My dad’s family were Okies who lost everything in the Dust Bowl years and migrated to California, Grapes-of-Wrath style. They were dirt poor, so they learned to make do with the little bit they had in order to survive. That sucked, and I don’t intend to romanticize that kind of poverty (The only people who romanticize poverty are those who’ve never experienced it). But it did have one benefit: learning to make do, being creative about solving problems with what they had.
- Scavenging is good for the environment. You can keep stuff out of the landfill by reusing it. And if you’re scavenging for your garden, you’re reusing stuff to help you grow stuff, which should make your local insufferable-patchouli-coated-locavore-who-composts-his-own-poop bow in your general direction. Just make sure you stay upwind of his compost pile.
It’s easy to find uses for stuff when you’re a gardener. Here are just a few examples of stuff I’ve scavenged:
Plants. Lots of ‘em. Probably my favorite example is the three salvias that my husband found discarded at the curb on trash pickup day in Southern California. He’s also a veteran scrounge, so he brought them home. They looked mostly dead, but remember what Miracle Max said about being mostly dead? I watered them, and they came back. I planted them, and they flourished. I didn’t even need a Miracle Pill. That's them in the foreground of this pic:
We’ve also dug up plants from old housing sites and natural sites that were being bulldozed (all with permission of course). I naturescaped a creek bank in Portland with trilliums and other woodland plants salvaged from a forested site that was being bulldozed to build a school. Those plants would have cost a fortune at the nursery; meanwhile the ones on site would have been destroyed. And of course I’m not shy about asking for cuttings from people’s yards.
Organic matter. When I have new beds to build, or I need inexpensive organic mulch, I ask people for grass clippings (if the grass hasn’t been treated with herbicides). I’m on a pile of bagged leaves at the curb like jawas on a burned-out village on Tatooine. Pine needles are plentiful here, so I grab those too. I answer ads on Craigslist for free manure2. I offer to haul away people’s straw bales after Thanksgiving. Just last weekend, we bought some hay for our goats, and the feed store person offered us a big broken bale for free. The goats got some, and my compost bin got the rest. My husband was hauling a load of trash to the dump (no, we don’t reuse everything). He saw a guy there with a load of spoiled straw bales. The guy agreed to deliver them to our house instead, and I’ve been using them for mulch for the last 2 years. There are still about 6 left.
Landscape material. The free ads on Craigslist are a gardener’s gold mine. People give away rocks, soil, landscape timbers, railroad ties, fencing, and just about anything else you might want to put in a yard. I use cardboard as a sheet mulch, so I scavenge cardboard sheets from my local Sam’s Club. I’m not sure why they find it necessary to put a thin piece of cardboard between those 55-gallon drums of mayonnaise, but I’m glad they do.
Seeds. I’ve been known to ask people if I can collect seed from plants in their yards, and I’ve also been known to carry envelopes in the car for exactly that purpose (Girl Scout motto: Be Prepared). I got a huge white pumpkin for almost free at Home Depot on Halloween, not because I needed the pumpkin, but because I wanted the seeds. I don’t know if they’ll come true from seed--that monster might be a hybrid, or possibly the product of a nuclear accident--but I’ll take a chance and see. That's it on the far left in the photo below. I'll be butchering it this weekend for its seeds, because I'm ruthless like that.
I saw a cool warty pumpkin in a bin at Safeway just before Halloween that had rotted into a slimy mess. I asked the produce manager if I could have it. He seemed glad to be rid of it; I can’t imagine why (But the look on his face when I asked for it was priceless. That’s another benefit of scavenging: free entertainment.). I’m pretty sure it’s an heirloom, so it should grow true from seed. Digging the seeds out of the slime was a nasty job--thank goodness for latex gloves--but it’ll be fun growing some new pumpkins next summer from seed I didn't have to buy.
Crops. I canned 13 quarts of apple pie filling a few weeks ago, all made from apples we picked from a local dentist’s office. They have several trees on the property and don’t use the apples, though I'm sure they'd be horrified at the amount of sugar I dumped into the pie filling. You know, they're dentists. We’ve gotten permission to pick fruit from people’s yards a few times too.
So ignore the snobs and the stigma and get busy scrounging! You’ll have a bigger, better garden, the thrill of the hunt, and the satisfaction of getting something useful for free while doing your bit for the planet.
---------------
- Besides the First Law of Thermodadnamics: “Close the damn door! I’m not paying to heat the whole outside!” Dad would have loved global warming.
- “Happier than a gardener in shit” is one of my favorite expressions. And of course, shoveling manure is a shitty job, but someone has to do it. Manure jokes: even shittier than Dad jokes. Sorry if my language offends; we gardeners are an earthy lot. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
No comments:
Post a Comment