Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The first frost




Salvaging the Plants, or One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure

Last night must have been the first frost of the year, because as I walked the Peanut this morning I saw several hanging baskets of plants left along the street for the garbage pickup. One looked as though the plant had been hit by the frost; others looked well. One was dumped under other trash, but several were undamaged.

My daughter has recently taken up the growing of indoor plants, and invested considerable time and money in potting, growing, cultivating her plants. It is her new hobby. The waste represented by these hanging plants seemed too much to bear.

I headed home with the dog. Alice was cleaning Jalapena peppers for muffins. I explained about the hanging baskets, and she put down her gloves and we headed out. “I can't believe people spend forty dollars just for a month!” We trooped back to the house with the two best baskets, and I went upstairs to spray them with soap while she went back to her muffins. The I found a place in the sun for the plants to recover, in isolation from our other plants in case of aphids or spider mites.

As I was picking off dead foliage and getting ready to move the plants from the bath to the sun, my husband called from outside; “Why are we taking other people's baskets of plants and throwing out our own?”

“What?”

I went outside and by our garbage and recycling there was another hanging basket. Not ours. One of our neighbours must have seen us coming back with the salvaged baskets and decided to add theirs to our collection!

We brought it in and started the process again. Now there are three baskets of plants recovering on the bureau. The third has the prettiest flowers.