Permaculture, Homesteading, and Community Building // How I Sourced My Plants for Free (Part 2)

Hi friends! This post is a continuation of my previous post on how I’ve sourced a lot of my plants for free, that you can read here. Creating a homestead can be expensive and the prices of plants in a nursery can be a huge barrier. I’ve been as creative as possible in obtaining plants. I’ve done this for two reasons: the first being to save money. The second reason is very important to me. I believe in the gift economy and in abundance rather than scarcity, and I believe that sharing creates community. I also believe that food sovereignty should be accessible to all people, and not just to the privileged elite. Food sovereignty has been defined by La Via Campesina as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”

Anyways, how else did I source all of my goodies?

1) Mushroom Party!

I was invited to a mushroom farm's annual fungi party. This mushroom farm, located in Santa Cruz, offers its used mushroom blocks to the community for free. For those of you who are new to how mushrooms are grown, they are often grown in logs or in blocks made up of various materials such as rice hulls, straw, woodchips, sawdust, ect. The mushrooms will grow, and once they are harvested the first time, they will continue to produce more mushrooms. However, the productivity level decreases after the first harvest, and it is not economically efficient for the mushroom farm to keep these blocks that still have plenty of potential mushrooms babies in them. So, this mushroom farm offers these blocks to the community in the hopes of making mushrooms more accessible to all. Pretty cool, huh?

I was so excited when I found out about this farm. On the mushroom party day, my friends and I spent a couple of hours digging through their large pile of used mushroom blocks. I picked out the blocks that were not contaminated by mold and were still moist and heavy. I took home around 150 blocks and have been getting shiitake, oyster, and king trumpet mushrooms nonstop from my backyard ever since. While you may not all live close to the farm that I visited, it is worth a shot calling up your local mushroom farm and asking them if they have old blocks or logs already inoculated with mushrooms that they are willing to give away for free.

2) Junk Piles of Nurseries

Nurseries often have plants that are neglected and under watered. These plants will end up in the "reject pile" that will soon be thrown away. I've had nursery workers come up to me before and offer me free vegetable seedlings that they were about to toss in the trash, just because they had a few brown leaves on them. I happily took them and watered them back to green, happy plants. I've also seen many nurseries fill their trash bins with plants, and have even found 20 beautiful, alive orchids in the dumpster of a popular grocery store chain. In most cases, dumpster diving is legal because once the item is in "public space" such as in a dumpster on the side of the road, anyone can take it. However, local laws vary, so definitely read up on your city ordinances before engaging in dumpster diving. Another option is to just ask the workers at the nurseries if they have any plants heavily discounted because they are under watered or under kept. Often, they will. I've gotten fruit trees for a few bucks each that were originally $40+ each just because they weren't properly cared for.

3) Seed Saving

I've already touched on seed exchanges in my previous post. However, I do not want to become dependent on seed exchanges for my seeds. I want to be able to source my own seeds from my own garden. And that is easy! I just need to let my plants go to seed rather than pull them out of the ground before they reproduce. I don't have to do this with all of my plants. If I have 30 basil plants, I'll let around 3 go to seed and collect those seeds for next year's planting. Once you start to save your own seeds, you can encourage your friends to save their seeds and have your own small swaps!

I recently visited the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library, which is a library of seeds that community members have brought in to share with their fellow neighbors. I "checked out" some sage and pumpkin seeds the other day with the pledge to try and save seeds from those plants in the future and bring them back, or just bring back some extra seeds from other plants that I am growing. I love this model of a seed library and I think that every community could benefit from one. Happy planting everyone!