It’s true that there are certain words in the English vocabulary that evoke a very predictable response. In the case of gardeners, it’s the F- word.
Don’t panic. This is not going to be an R-rated column and I have no intention of using the queen mother of cuss words throughout this text. But there is a four-letter word that starts with ‘F’ that sends gardeners into a whirling fit of ecstasy.
That word of course is FREE.
Photo: Steve Smith
We love free stuff. We will go to the ends of the earth to get free compost, free plants, free bricks, or free anything that we think might be able to be used in our gardens. And we will spend hours of back breaking labor, gallons of gasoline, and even buy new tools and equipment to obtain and transport this free stuff to our gardens.
Let me give you an example.
The gardener’s downfall – ‘free’ manure
Back in the early 70’s in my earth muffin days I lived on an Army base in Virginia. I was very much into the organic gardening movement and after a little research discovered that they had an old tertiary treatment plant where the sewage sludge was pumped out into filter beds and allowed to dry.
Oh boy, free natural fertilizer. After jumping through the appropriate hoops, I was given permission to “harvest” as much sludge as I liked, so I borrowed a trailer and gleefully drove up to the beds. The sludge had apparently been drying for several years and it was like trying to remove overcooked brownies from the bottom of a 9 x 15 pan. The sludge would have put a well-aged cow pat to shame. But I managed to get the trailer full.
Photo: Steve Smith
Or should I say overfull? Before I made it back home I had blown a tire and bent the axle. I’m sure you can figure out the rest of the story. The free poop wasn’t so free after all, but that didn’t prevent me from committing future acts of stupidity.
Several years later when we had moved to California and I was still an avid organic gardener I found myself in need of some organic materials to amend some horrible clay soil. There was a horse stable down the road that offered FREE MANURE.
Or something like it. Actually, it was rice hulls that been used for bedding in the stalls and it was saturated with urine and poop. Hot and stinky. I was much wiser now and knew better then to borrow a trailer so I drove on down to the stable with my 1966 VW Microbus with the seats removed, rolled back the canvas sunroof, and told the tractor operator to “fill her up”.
By the time I got home I could hardly breathe and my eyes were watering so badly I could barely see the road. Six months later and 5 gallons of Lysol, the VW still smelled like horse puckey. I finally had to sell the car since no one would ride in it anymore.
I’m not alone. Gardeners love that F-word. Just recently a nursery customer told me that the local reformatory was offering free poop for the hauling. She was so pleased about it I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there’s no such thing. Even if she was smart enough not to borrow her friend’s trailer or fill up the family mini-van, she would still have to pay for at least five chiropractic adjustments and no less than 10 tubes of Ben-Gay before the whole ordeal would be over.
Photo: Steve Smith
But it’s not just free poop…
Free wood is another cause for twitterpation amongst gardeners. Again, back in my gardening youth when I didn’t know the difference between maples or poplars, I was offered a huge pile of free cottonwood. Not knowing any better, I started sawing it up and bringing it home to split.
Splitting cottonwood is like trying to split a giant sponge. You can bury several iron wedges into a block of cottonwood with little or no effect on the log. Furthermore, cottonwood has the uncanny ability to start growing again instead of drying out like any other self-respecting piece of wood. You can stack a pile of cottonwood in the spring and it will turn into a hedge by fall. And if by some act of God, it does get dry enough to burn it will miraculously produce a pile of ash that exceeds the original mass of the log.
But it was free and I got to buy some cool tools in the process so it wasn’t a total loss. The ashes went into the garden and what wood didn’t dry out turned into compost soon thereafter.
Gardeners will forever be lured by the F-word. We are a gullible lot. So, in parting I offer you free advice. If you get free poop from a military base put it on your vegetable garden. The plants will stay in straight rows and always be in formation. If on the other hand you receive poop from a reformatory, use it in the flower beds where a little unruly behavior won’t create an insurrection.
Photo: Steve Smith
Never trust free plants. If a gardener has enough to give away, they are usually thugs.The plants, not the gardener. All very pretty but need constant controlling or they will take over your world.
So true! When I give away free thugs from my garden, I offer them with a warning. I’ve only offered hellebores and hardy begonias, though, nothing too dangerous.
I moved into a house with boring, uninspired plantings clearly put in only to get the place sold. They were not thugs, just … blah. So when I finally got around to reworking the planting beds, I yanked those dullards out and offered them for free in a local neighborhood group. Apparently “boring” and “uninspired” were something else as I had people begging me to wait a couple hours so they could pick the up. Maybe the caution in those f-word plants was ‘you’ll fall asleep looking at them’?
Laughed so hard I spit my tea! You’ve struck a chord with all of us. My free manure came with a borrowed dump truck. Oh boy I can fill this thing to the top and then just push the button… Ended up thigh deep trying to pitch it off the truck. Agree with the free plants as well. Great way to infest your garden with one pest or another. Hope to see your writings here regularly.
been there, done that. It’s good that we can laugh at ourselves. Thanks for the encouragement
Our “free” firewood on the side of the road ended up being an $800 medical bill for the worse case of poison ivy all over my husband!!!!
Oh my, Steve, I started laughing out loud after the first paragraph, even before the examples! I had to close my office door. Thank you! You helped me get through working on a Saturday on a day with wind chills so low, I am questioning why I live here (once more). I agree with a comment above that I hope you become a regular Garden Ranter!
so glad i put a smile on your face.
love it. been there done that. Let’s see the free coleus plants about $25 for rooting powder, growing medium; then there were the free houseplants which of course required purchase of nice cast iron stands so they could drape properly. And let’s not forget speeding to the curbside posting to find the freebies already gone or mis-labelled (“star lilies” rather than ordinary orange daylilies) , and my favorite: scrap carpeting from curbside to smother grass to create new flower beds. By the time it’s pulled up, of course its nice and heavy from countless rains and it has to be cut, rolled and tied so the garbage company will take it. If not, there is a hefty surcharge for picking it up, making it very pricey indeed. But on the other hand I would rather get my exercise outdoors wrestling not-so-free yard stuff instead of mindless, repetitive machines at some gym.
Let’s see, I think the expression is “You get what you pay for” or “Advice is usually worth what you pay for it”. Still, the experience is priceless and as you have stated, the exercise is a “free” bonus.
So true. Thanks for the daily chuckle. My ‘freebie’ turned out to be rocks unearthed from road construction. I’d pick some up on the way home from work every night until there was enough to outline a garden bed. Free rocks but a fortune in physiotherapy for the strained elbows.
In my region we have had a lot of downed trees this Winter due to a series of vicious storms coupling prolonged rain with high winds. The tree removal companies have been busy cutting and chipping those trees. And a lot of homeowners have realized that there is a site at which you can avail yourself of those arborists’ woodchips for free (might be ’cause I and a few others mentioned it in some social media posts). What many of them don’t realize is how much 4 yards of wood chips is, much less the 20 yards that is possible to receive.
Chip Drop is a good site for free arbor chips which sounds like you already know. You do get some ‘trash’ with the chips but it is usually manageable. Yes, most home owners have no concept of how much a truck load of chips really is. Hopefully, they can create a site to stockpile them and let them compost down. But, hey, they are FREE
Be especially careful of “free” sludge. Here in Maine we are dealing with PFAS – “forever chemicals” that were in sludge spread on agricultural land more than 2 decades ago. Farmers can’t sell milk from cows that have grazed or had hay from those lands, they can’t sell the land, their water is sometimes contaminated. Free sounds good but sometimes is too bad to be truly free in the long run.