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I also discovered during my Google search that other people were bitten by the creativity bug when they saw a cable spool, and they made tables and different pieces out of them, that they then sold on Etsy for hundreds and even thousands of dollars.
But no way was I going to sell my very first cherry-poppin’ dumpster treasure find.
Within a day, I had it sanded, stained, and sprayed in weather-proofing stuff—all found in the shit Art left in the garage when he moved out. Which was exciting in itself, seeing what I already owned that I could use on my little project—no diving or spending required.
When it was finished, I stood back, my hands on my hips, the biggest smile on my face in over a year, as I took in what I had created out of literal trash. It now sits dead-center of my adorable potting shed I built with my own two hands, and it acts as my potting bench when I want to sit in the dirt for some much-needed grounding—something else that’s 100 percent new to my life.
Right along with the need for a potting bench inside a potting shed, seeing as nine months ago, I couldn’t even keep a cactus alive—one of the reasons I never had kids.
Because not long after my first great discovery and the DIY masterpiece I created out of it, I dove into the very dumpster inside which I now squat. And that’s when I learned that the orange-aproned big-box home improvement store just… tosses out perfectly healthy plants.
That first night inside this dumpster, I truly couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Stacks upon stacks of flats of slightly-wilted petunias. I didn’t know what the hell they were at the time, but there were enough of the little flower labels to fill an entire novel. I was so confused by finding the pretty, colorful, little flowers at the bottom of the trash that my mind just couldn’t wrap around what I was seeing. I tugged a flat upward until I could hold it in the light, turning it this way and that, checking for… I didn’t even know. Bugs? Maybe some spots that could be a weird plant disease?
Could plants get diseases?
I didn’t know at that point. All I knew was if you watered a cactus too much, it would melt. Literally. It would just turn into this slimy goo substance practically overnight that would never return to its former solidified state.
But this was not a cactus. And it had definitely not been overwatered. They were beautiful flowers that were just a little sad-looking, and after reading the label, and after googling once I brought all fourteen flats of petunias and two flats of daisies home, it seemed the little fellas just needed a good soaking and some sunshine. So as soon as the sun came up—I hadn’t even gone to sleep yet, researching the two species of plants I’d found as that night’s bounty—I planted them in the ever-empty space around a tree in my front yard. The tree was in the center of a circle of bricks that at one point held some red mulch back from spilling into the grass.
I did my best, remembering from some point in my childhood when my dad taught me you’re supposed to loosen the dirt a little when you pull the plant out of its bucket so the roots could… I don’t know, move around more easily once they were in the ground? I just recall thinking the roots could wiggle and dig like worms once you couldn’t see them beneath the dirt.
I watered them with the garden hose I had to actually search the perimeter of my house for, since I never used it in all the years I’ve lived here, once I got all sixteen flats planted around the tree. The poor little wilted things looked even unhappier as the water hit them, seeming to buckle under the weight of the droplets, so I turned the nozzle to Mist instead of Shower, which seemed to at least keep the leaves and petals from breaking off.
I wound the hose back up and trudged inside, finally passing out on my couch at about 8:00 a.m., feeling a little extra depressed that all my dive-and-rescue efforts the past eight hours had most likely been for nothing. Because those petunias and daisies looked like mud-covered sadness by the time I finished forcing my “love” on them.
Yet when I woke up after six hours of uninterrupted sleep for the first time in ages and I walked outside to clean up the rest of the mess in my front yard—having just tossed all the little black pots and plastic flats all around the tree as I got in the rhythm of freeing each flower, then sticking it in the ground—I stopped dead in my tracks halfway between my front porch and my new flowerbed.
