Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 137135 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137135 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
My new flowerbed.
My new bed full of flowers.
Full of flowers that were blooming their little asses off as the sun shined on their now perky stems, unfurled leaves, and wide-open petals.
Just about as wide-open as my eyes must’ve been, standing there and staring at the very first of what I now lovingly call my dumpster babies.
In just a matter of hours, they’d gone from the bottom of the trash, on their way to a landfill, looking like someone had peed in their Cheerios—if plants ate Cheerios—to making my front yard look like someone actually gave two shits about my curb appeal. So bright and colorful and smile-inducing…
That it pissed me right the fuck off.
Why the hell had I found… $1.98 per plant, at eighteen plants per flat, and a total of sixteen flats…?
I don’t fucking math.
But that seems like a lot of freaking money thrown in the goddamn dumpster.
Why just throw perfectly good plants away?
So with indignation-filled movements, I gathered up all the pots and flats, stacked them all neatly together—something tells me to keep them instead of throwing them away—set them in my garage, and went inside to… you guessed it… Google why the fuck live plants got chucked.
I quickly learned I was not the only one concerned by this flabbergasting waste. Articles, forums, Facebook Groups, you name it, tons of people aware and pissed off over the fact that that particular home improvement store just throws away perfectly good plants.
Actually, to be perfectly clear, it’s not the store itself that does the tossing of the plant babies. From what I can discern, they rent space to plant vendors—basically the brand selling the plants in bulk—and those vendors go into each store once a week, look for anything that doesn’t look quite perfect, and stack them all up in a shopping cart to get rid of.
Because they have to make room for their new incoming inventory.
Yeah.
They pluck the ones that aren’t exactly “right” off the tables to just throw in the dumpster so some fresh, new “perfect” ones can take their place.
That was the first time I ever felt totally connected with the plants I started rescuing like my life depended on it. With the mind I was born with, I deep-dove into this connection I felt, and the deeper I went, the more indignant I became.
Yes, those new perfect flowers would replace the ones that didn’t make the cut, but soon, those once perfect babies would become the ones being tossed if someone didn’t buy them in time.
Right now, they felt like they ruled the world. They were full of hope and trust, thinking surely someone would take them home and love them, keep them forever through their entire lifecycle. Because after all, they were beautiful, and sparked joy, and brought happiness to the ones who saw them.
But with one dreary, overcast day, or one move of the sprinkler that didn’t quite reach their pot, leaving them unwatered, or even one super-sunny day after a taller plant had been moved, taking away its shade and exposing it directly to the burning rays…
And there they’d go, becoming the ones taken off the table and put into the cart to be tossed in the dumpster and replaced by something that was literally them not that long ago.
Fucking depressing.
But not as depressing as the Reddit I found with people talking about how some orange-apron stores had even started resorting to pouring paint all over the plants to deter people from dumpster diving to rescue them.
When I pulled myself out of that sickening rabbit hole, I read a lot of plant enthusiasts boycott stores that practice that particular atrocity and instead only purchase from to the “blue” home improvement store, because at least they put their imperfect babies on a clearance rack. And people brave enough to try bringing them back from the brink of death are rewarded by only having to pay half-price.
Fucking noted.
But that was the day I discovered I don’t have the “black thumb” I always thought I had. Because since that first rescue mission, I’ve managed to bring back and keep alive almost every single plant I’ve found.
I say almost, because some were either too far gone, or I accidentally killed them by giving them too much love. Some plant babies literally thrive on neglect, and I’m really, really bad at neglecting people and things I love.
One of those neglect-thriving plants being the one I’m presently lifting with just the tippy-tips of my thumb and pointer finger by the very edge of its black plastic pot, trying my damnedest not to get stabbed once again by the golden barrel cactus’s thorns. Which is quite a feat, because this big boy is heavy as shit. But I’ll be damned if I leave him and his twin brother to be hauled off to a landfill. Not on my watch!