- You've ever asked friends to save their compost for you. Bonus if you've ever asked strangers.

- You can't remember ever having bought a planting pot or container even though you have 50.

- Youve ever planted plants in egg cartons, tin cans, yogurt containers, shoes, broken TV's, plastic bags or whatever else would hold dirt

- You've ever grown your own kitchen sponge.

- You have a garden tool you made yourself from scrap.
Any more?

You dumpster dive for leftover plants, when businesses clean out their planters (even if perennials) for the season

You ask ALL your friends for their leftover mini-blinds (for labeling plants)

- You pick up other people's bagged yard debris for your compost pile - and search through it for fragments of perennials that might still live or cuttings that might still root.

- Your idea of a perfect weekend day is to shovel free horse manure into your pickup. Bonus points if you do this in the rain.

- You volunteer to do yard work to get plants/cuttings.

- You drive around on yard trash day and dig through the piles in front of people's houses.

- You ask the local golf course if you can have their grass clippings.

- The people at the county site where you get free compost and mulch know you by name, and have your phone number so they can call you when a fresh batch comes in.

I've also asked the people at my vets office if I could get the seed pods and volunteers from their Rose of Sharon bushes.

My husband had to stop me from weeding the planting area in front of our local aquarium. I actually have weeded in front of the store where he works......

*You yell at DH for throwing away the ziplock baggies, then dig them out of the trash and rinse them again

*Your dumpster diving habits rub off on DH, and he brings home a sliding glass door (then builds a deck to go with it,) a 50 year old furnace that still works, a busted cabinet, and 3' wide bamboo hoops ("Can you use these? They were throwing them out.")

*You dig through the back of DH's pickup before he takes a load to the dumpster at work, just in case =)

*You dig seed pods, clear clam-shell containers, and coffee grounds out of the trash at work

*DH brings home a busted cabinet from a jobsite and fixes it up for a laundry counter, you turn it into a potting bench

*You take your kids for walks for healthy excersize, quality bonding time, and seed snatching (not necessarily in that order)

*Your friends and coworkers bring you old windows in exchange for seedlings

*Your plastic meat tray collection would make the local butcher envious

*You consider plumbing fixtures to be garden art

*You save the subscription cards from gardening magazines (that you picked up in the freebie bin at the library) for compost, then procede to cut out every useful side bar in the magazines for your garden journal and the color photos to make seed packets. After the magazines are little more than bound confetti, you still refuse to throw them out because "I might need them for something."

*"I might need them for something" is your most often used phrase

*"Don't throw that away!" is your second most used phrase

*"I think I can use that" is a close third

~*GW*~

*You plan your pay-day errands around the yard-sale route.

*When the Public Works dept. cuts down trees around your powerlines, you beg them to dump the wood chips on your lawn.

*You make friends with ppl who work at transfer sites.

saving styrofoam peanuts to use instead of gravel in the bottoms of plant pots

By the way, can you tell me good uses for:

1) foam meat trays? We don't eat that much meat but I hate throwing them out when we do.

2) metal screw-on lids from jars? (and why don't recycle centers take them)

1) Planting in them (yes, I belong to Garden Junk)
2) Cutting out the back and making new "garden" shoes
3) Re-using perfectly good thick shoelaces (that's a given)

FOAM MEAT TRAYS
I only keep a few (like the pink or black ones as they look so nice).

I put my coffee filter with tomato seeds on trays to dry in my back room

I use them to water little seedling pots/plants that I want to keep grouped together, but don't want water going every which way inside the house

METAL SCREW-ON LIDS
I keep a few that have interesting art. Glad I did, companies no longer in business or they've gone plastic

Might be fun to use the interesting looking lids in a mosaic project (with tile or broken dishes). Embed into something? Pots, stepping stones?

Metal lids, if you mean the kind that come on mayo or pickle jars, are great to use as saucers for small pots. If you don't like the way they look, a little acrylic paint works wonders!