Just a reminder, lots of public libraries have seed exchanges! A little library of seeds free to be taken and encouraged to be dropped off!
Innocence in this world often surprises me. Consider the sort of person who would post that sign and how they think the world works.
“I bet if people knew this was theft they wouldn’t do it. I shall rush to inform them! I’ll even make it nice by saying ‘please’!”
There are many that don’t know it’s theft, and others will argue with you that it isn’t even theft to begin with once informed. So yeah this sign probably does stop some theft.
It will stop some theft, but it will also cause some theft.
The equilibrium must be maintained.
Lmao I’ve done that. Walking your dog is a good way to find succulents to propagate too
Don’t feed starving kids for free! A business somewhere might profit from their hunger and you are depriving them that opportunity!
It’s called “ProfLifting” because you are STEALING the businesses opportunity to potentially profit.
Profiting by checks notes taking dead leaves off the floor.
I am a serial prop lifter and I will never stop.
You monster! 😱
what an ingenius way to make sure people propagate more plants
My friends wife is into plants. I gave her some cut ZZ Raven leaves to grow because the tag said not to do propagate. They haven’t grow much but are still alive months later. Fuck your intangible ownership over life.
My wife had one like this too. It has been in water for months, not dying but not growing either. Then finally a tiny root is now shooting off - slowly!
I think I had to keep it in water for about 2 months months to get a tiny hair of a root and a bit of a bulby rhizome bit at the bottom. I moved it to soil after that. Its not a fast process.
That’s the fucking government for you. They want to control who has sex with who, right down to asexual plants.
That’s the type of control you exert over animals and people you want broken and under your thumb. Like a horse. Or a slave.
Yeah, sure, stabilizing a mutation of a plant takes a long time, and an asexual plant even more. But it’s not original work. It’s life. Patenting reproduction is one of the most absurd things I’d ever heard of. Life…uh…finds a way.
so buy one, propagate the hell out of it, and give it all away. make the stores seek greed satisfaction elsewhere
Never would’ve quite considered that the software open source movement, and gardener groups, would have such a fight in common.
Oh man, you have no idea. There is SO much in the gardening world about copyrighted seeds and cultivars.
I have cloned indeterminate tomato plants using my fingers. Snap off a sucker and stick it in some wet dirt, you’ll have a whole new tomato plant.
FREE OPEN SOURCE PLANTS!!! (FOSP)
Stripping them off plants, yeah thats just damaging the plant itself and is shitty behaviour.
Off the ground? Now its crossing from damage into being pedantic about stuff that would go into a mulcher.
And I highly doubt that those with the patience and skill to propogate make up any significant margin whatsoever.
That’s the same sort of business owners who would throw away uneaten food in restaurants and not allow employees to take it home.
so major ones
The amount of perfectly OK cheesecake that looks barely damaged but can’t sell but can’t take home is very high. But my small town bakery, I can take the store home with me if there’s product leftover.
That’s different because it’s a liability thing. Some asshole would sue over bad food which means nobody gets the food.
It’s not a liability thing there’s laws to protect businesses donating food in good faith. They would literally just throw it away than give it away because how dare anyone get anything for free.
this… people were gaslit to believe it’s a liability thing.
Americans would rather chuck perfectly good food into a dumpster than entertain the possibility of summoning the collective fucking will to fix a VERY straightforward problem. The idea that they could just legislate some reasonable liability protections and make sure edible food gets to hungry people apparently requires a level of imagination and civic competence beyond anyone’s wildest dream. So much easier to blame “some asshole” for creating what is surely an insurmountable legal paradox. The food rots, needy people go hungry, and the US gets to pretend the problem is some unavoidable fact of life rather than admit they just couldn’t be arsed to try.
Most stabilized countries have laws in place for food and protections for donations.
I’m guessing there’s rules behind this one but in the US:
The Food Donation Improvement Act: This act expands those protections. It allows qualified businesses (like restaurants, supermarkets, and schools) to donate food directly to individuals in need rather than having to route it through a registered 501©(3) nonprofit intermediary. It also allows nonprofits to charge a nominal “Good Samaritan” fee just to cover the logistics and handling costs of distributing the food.
I don’t know the specifics of that one though.
Easier & cheaper to just throw it away, so most businesses probably don’t bother. We would need to mandate and/or subsidize this behavior if we wanted people to actually do it.
13% of food waste is redistributed the rest is used as compost or sent to a landfill.
Does that include food left on the vine so it can fertilize the soil or just the stuff left on because it couldn’t sell
Don’t you have to pay for waste disposal?
Sure, but they have stuff to throw away other than food, too, so they’re paying for it regardless. Some places in the US make property owners pay for waste disposal separately, but even then it could be a flat fee so the business wouldn’t gain anything by throwing less stuff away. Some places just include it in property taxes, in which case, again, the business wouldn’t gain anything.
No, actually, most Americans are not happy about it, but you probably don’t care about nuance and just want to throw a fit
Because the US is only a small handful of people with the same worldview…
Maybe only one of you has internet access and is frantically posting across media platforms.
You sure do always seem to post the same responses
? I don’t think that is the case. My fault for posting. Bye
They could donate the food to a food bank and be completely shielded from liability by Good Samaritan Act
They don’t want to because it means that poor people can eat for free (gasp) which might slightly impact the restaurant industry and indirectly reduce their profit margin by 0.1%
You are disregarding the storage and transportation of food that has a very limited shelf life along with requiring strict temperature control. It’s not as simple as tossing it all into a bag at the end of the night. It’s a significant logistical overhead.
Looks like that act covers donations to places that aren’t going to be open at the end of the evening shift.
That’s the excuse, yes
the alternative is the trash that will never sue you ever.
The dumpster would also never place an order, not pick it up, then ask for said order for free since it’s going into the trash anyway.
Couldn’t you just sign a waiver to say you accept the risks?
unfortunately not really, there is a limit to how much liability you can waive and it’s not knowable before it’s tried in court.
The skill involved for many plants is sticking it in the ground and leaving it to do its thing.
Ask the 5 kale plants on my bathroom window. Got to transfer them to individual pots at some point. Then see if I can get a few more cuttings to make some more. Not sure how many to grow, 10-20 probably but I still need to put up bird netting in the area I plan to put them.
In my limited experience (I found a succulent leaf on the street) the only skill one would need is to remind themselves to water it, like once a week maybe. All you have to do is drop it into a pot with some soil and water it every now and then. Maybe some succulents are more finicky though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
*Also, it’s pretty cool to watch. Like the original leaf slowly shrinks and dries out as the new leaves are formed.
I have succulents on my balcony that outgrow their pots. I break off chunks long enough to have a few root-hairs attached and drop them into the scruffy area at the side of the building. They can’t really root themselves there unless we get a bunch of rain, but I’ve seen a few people take one and it always makes me happy.
Yeah, I’ve got a couple succulents, and leaves will fall off and propagate on their own in the pot pretty often. All they really have to do is fall stem-side down into the dirt and it’ll grow roots and form a new plant. I just gave my buddy a small jade plant that grew from my larger plant that was originally itself a small auto-propagation from my dad’s plant.
Jade plants rock. My wife likes plants, we probably have 10-15 jade plants in the house 😂
To add on to this: a lot of customers are probably people who have the patience and skill to propogate. (As others have said, propagation isn’t really that hard, so it’s more about patience and time.) At the same time, if you have the patience and skill to propogate a plant and are still at a greenhouse buying plants, it’s probably because you’re specifically looking to buy a plant where someone has already done that work for you. You’re not going to proplift a plant instead of buying it, because you’re there specifically to buy something instead of doing that work.
Propagating plants and growing them from seeds is a longer process that’s prone to failure and can take time. It’s very common for gardeners to propogate/grow from seed some plants while also buying others that are already more mature in order to eliminate that process or because all their tomatoes this year died and they need new ones.
Sure, maybe every now and again you get someone who’s there to buy something else, sees a dropping from a plant they want that they might have otherwise bought, and grabs it, but as you said, that’s really not common enough to cut into their margins. You’re consistently paying for the saved time and effort when buying plants at greenhouses.
Now, if the greenhouse itself makes a habit of taking fallen plant bits to propogate new ones, that does change things a little bit, because you’re taking something they were going to use. But if it’s just going into the mulcher, who the fuck cares.
Idk my neighbor has four different kinds of lemon tree. They spend a lot at the nursery
We got free water at Lowe’s outdoor lawn and garden so I’d stuff plants I found throughout my shit in one.
I hope this is a typo.
They found plants in their shit and tossed them in their water what’s unclear
Funny enough though if they’re snipping a cutting off of the plant to propagate, the plant must be healthy enough to purchase…
Don’t tell anyone but I once took a seed of a palm tree off the ground in public park and planted it. It’s been growing in a pot for a couple of years now.
It feels like magic yet it is entirely natural
FBI, it’s this one right here!
You THIEF
I told everyone and they did the same. I think you just sparked a revolution.
You grew it in pot you druggie. Get him feds!
There used to be a really cool project called Free seed ring earth, that distributed seeds for the cost of shipping, with seeds aquired through donations. Not sure if it’s still active, but I loved participating some 15-20 years ago.
We had one locally. Mostly heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables. Some would even meet up to share cuttings they just got going. Some asshole Karen complained that they could, in theory, be sharing weed seeds. The owner of the site and its less than 100 members just decided to shut down. Im pretty sure they just got each other phone numbers, but I wasn’t cool enough to get on the list. (T_T) I still got that rose bush.
my city has a native plant association that will ship you seeds for free, and has multiple free plant giveaways each year
it’s a wonderful thing. I’ve bought from them for the past few years
I saw a plant with a label on it saying not to propagate. Now I have about 10 of them.
If you didn’t want me to do it you shouldn’t have given it such a cool name.
… leafwanking?
