A helpful note I read on a simplicity / frugality mailing list recently: “the coffee bar chain Starbucks gives away their used coffee grounds — excellent stuff for garden compost. This time of year, if any of you have a winter garden (I’m west of Atlanta), Starbucks is really piling up with extra grounds. I carried home more than a dozen bags of the stuff on Friday. The employees there say it really piles up this time of year, because fewer people are gardening.”
How you can resist funding the government → other tax resistance strategies → frugality / simple living / self-sufficiency → frugal gardening
A group calling itself “Free Range Activism” has put on-line some good, practical guides on everything from using rechargeable batteries and low-energy light bulbs, to setting up bulk purchasing co-ops, to growing your own food and baking your own bread, to the legal ramifications of protesting in the United Kingdom.
I noted some of the ways the government gets in the way of people who are trying to practice environmentally-sustainable living techniques. Here’s another example.
You can enrich the soil in your garden by composting kitchen scraps and such. Lots of people do. And it has many advantages: you send less potentially-useful organic material to be wasted at the landfill, you spend less on soil additives, you frugally regain nutrients in the food you grow yourself, and so forth. And that much is legal… probably… so far, anyway.
Some people supplement their compost piles with scraps from local restaurants — the Starbucks coffee chain, for instance, has a policy of making its used coffee grounds available to gardeners. However, in California anyway, once a single coffee ground from outside of your own kitchen hits your compost pile, you’d better have a solid waste facility permit or the State might shut you down.
