Angie = I'm a newbie to gw and I too lost everything (ours was to Hurricane Katrina). No matter how you lose your garden, you lose something very important to you and I can relate. I have found many generous people on gw which I call garden fairies. Since I have received some free seeds either through sase or the kindness and generosity of others, I would love to send you some of mine. please email me and give me an address. I should be able to help you out a little. take care. jane (ladybug)

I guess someone dissaproved who was on here and reported that i was "soliciting" All I was trying to do was start from from losing all, my old post was removed but its ok, Im sure I have some friends on here who dont feel solicited. Thanks hun, you are one of those fairies.

Angie,

I too am new to gw. I lost most of my plants to the flood of Allison a few years ago and I so appreciated people who were generous enough to give me a few plants.

I only have mother in laws tongue and liriope to share but you are welcome to contact me at printexpert@excite.com.

These are free and I consider them unsolicited.

Tiny

Email me

Gina

Hi Angie,

I just checked your page have a few of your wants- spearmint, black eyed susan vine (few), and yellow trumpet vine- tacoma stans. Would you like to do sase? You can email me, I also have another post of sase for mix packs I just posted if you want to look at those.

Take care and Have Fun
:) Firegurl
Danielle

hello
I don't know if you are the one I sent seeds to but I think asking for seeds from "friends" is fine and I'm glad to help any time I can. I think it should be aloud but always look for SASBE posts and there will be people to help.
michelle

The rules of the exchange forums state that you cannot ask for seeds or plants for free, donation or postage. I believe the rules say something to the effect of: "If you have nothing to trade at this time, please wait until you do." The exchange is for the purpose of trading. It's a good idea to read the rules and the FAQs of each forum before you post in the forums. Each forum has its own set of rules and FAQs.

Altho it is against the rules to post a request for "freebies", it is acceptable for gardeners with an abundance to post an offer of freebies, which you can respond to. Just watch for posts that say: "HAVE: This and That for SASE". Those type of posts are more abundant on the Seed Exchange, so you might check there as well. Many plants are super easy from seeds and you can see blooms the first season.

Also, y'all check for clearance items at Lowe's and Walmart. Our Lowe's almost always has a clearance rack. Just recently I got a whole rack full of plants for $20. 2/3 of the rack was perennials, which generally sell for $4 a pot. The rest were annuals which I gave away to friends. Our Walmart currently has all their bulbs 75% off. And at the end of June, they usually clearance all the plants they stocked for the growing season. I've gotten roses and shrubs for $1 each! So in some cases, you can get a bunch of nicely growing plants cheaper than you could pay postage for them.

And don't forget to look around your house to see if you have any non-plant items you could trade. Most of us here will barter for anything we can use--DVDs, books, magazines, crafts, chemicals, tools, etc. My gardens are so full now that I actually prefer non-plant items in trade. Recently, I've been trading for manure, Roundup, Preen, and Miracle Grow.

Do you have any special skills? Some of us will trade for garden signs, decor, paintings, homemade soaps, etc. Some folks here trade their website-making abilities for plants.

And if you live near enough to an experienced gardener, you may just trade your labor for plants. The possibilities are endless! (And if any of you live near me, NE Ark, about an hour from Memphis, I have a bunch of free plants if you come and dig 'em.)

A likely reason that requests for free plants or request for plants for postage is disallowed is that if it weren't....then the trading forum could easily turn into 80% or more requests of this nature and not much actual trading.

Then the people who have the plants to trade or give away would run out of plants (unlikely), patience, and/or disappear from the site. It isn't the kind of rule that is made to be mean, it's a kind of administrative thing that is necessary for a forum like this to work. So those traders who want to offer plants for postage can post that, and anyone needing that offer can jump aboard. It takes a little time on the part of someone looking for SASEs, but it keeps the forum in existance (which then means traders can continue to offer freebees). I guess the nutshell of this is that when we don't have anything to trade at all, we trade our time looking for SASE offers...and any other way could become exploitative of traders' generousity, and then no one would get anything.

I know I didn't have much, and spent last summer collecting seeds from the few flowers that I had growing (and one type from a friend's place), so I could start a little there instead of just looking for postage offers, or run out of the 3 kinds of bulbs I had to trade. It helped alot, and traders here are often generous with their trades.

Anyway, I hope that this might help paint the broader picture of "why" so that it doesn't feel so bad. Another thing you can try-- there are often local plant swaps where new people who have no trade plants are totally welcome (often they bring a food item or something like that). Not sure where you are, but check the main trading page, there are local pages (like for me, the Mid-Atlantic forum) where things like this get posted.

Best wishes always,
Tina

So now I know what happened to my missing post. I had posted one asking for wild violets but I guess it has been removed. I didn't get a notification about it though. You know I did read the rules and when I saw that I figured it must be worded wrong. In my plant world ignorance I thought wild violets are weeds in the real gardner's world, no one is going to know that I need violets unless I ask for them. So I went ahead and posted it anyway. A lady responded that I had not put my email to show and after doing so I could no longer find my post.

Now that I've read what happened to you I figure that's what happened to me. As the people have advised you to do I will too, watch out for sase offers but the truth is violets are not something someone has surplus of, its something growing wild away from the person's garden in the hills. Am I right?

learning, if you want/need more violets, email me...can send some for postage.

One man's flower is another man's weed.

Lots of us grow butterfly weed.
or numerous varieties if goldenrods,
or collect violets...and yes, the common violet ones are in abundance if a person has them.

I guess it is just maybe easiest for GW to not have to determine what is a useless weed (or of no value to most)and what isn't.

I think I put you on to 'showing' your email addy.

I'll bet you were sick about loosing your variegated virginia creeper. I'm not familiar with it...but will have to Google it.

Sue