They build walls and chimneys, provide paving materials for sidewalks and roads, and will get you to the Emerald City if they happen to be yellow. Thrown through a window, they make robbing the store a whole lot easier. All these things are possible for a remarkably low price and a lot of hard work.
I’ve built a few things with old bricks I found in my backyard; I’ve done the same for the library learning garden with orphan bricks from projects completed long ago. Friday, I used up all but a couple of those library bricks to build a small garden bed. It’s off the broad side of the storage shed, and it’s for the groundhog who lives under it. Two hours of digging, putting bricks in place, and spreading garden soil, manure, and compost brought it into being. What was just a patch of scraggly grass in sandy soil is now a place that will feed the groundhog and his squirrel and rabbit neighbors.
Without those discarded, forgotten bricks, the garden bed wouldn’t survive the first Spring rainfall. Small and discarded no more, they make a life giving garden possible.
…such wonderful possibilities to come from finding what was lost…
photos by Jared Fredrickson, March 2019
The marble table top on our deck had been a throw away that Carl found once in the back of the neighbor’s yard after he had moved! Carl simply added 4 wooden legs to it. The marble table top has some defects but marble is marble and we will take it.
The first shrub we planted after moving into our new house 33 years ago was a discard along side the road, also found by Carl!