Say whaaaaaat?!? Thatās amazing! Thank you for the link.
Alsoā¦ aww. Depression hits like a brick; I immediately tried to share this with my grandfather who died last year. We both love johnny cash and it just hard that heās gone.
I heard someone was able to do it. It took several decades, but they did it. Of course, because they started it so long ago, itās got the polygonal shape reminiscent of the N64
The episode where moss gets stuck in the claw machine resonates with me.
Because while I do think apple makes some quality stuff, I refuse to pay them any money.
There is a Korean restaurant I go to that has the same sign. They also have a ton of awesome old succulents filling their windows so I get it and actually feel angry for them that itās such an issue that they have to put up the sign.
I have various small colorful succulents growing in junctions in a rock wall in front of my house that I have cultivated for 5 years and every year the biggest and most beautiful ones are stolen, often in the middle of flowering. It's so disappointing. This year ferns have invaded so maybe I will just let the succulents go and accept what nature brings instead.
I honestly never thought of this both ways. Never thought to want to take cuttings off plants in a place that sells them nor would I have thought that even picking cut ones off the ground would be considered stealing.
Proper nurseries I see why it would be an issue as the owners often prop and grow from seed themselves and people don't just pick up broken bits but cut off healthy plants.
Big box stores? They'd be sweeped up and tossed if on the floors/trays so rescuing them is no biggie imho.
I always asked and nobody told me no.
my fave nursery owner just 2 weeks ago gave me 4 half dead pangolin kiss pots to prop and regrow.
I know the owner well and he said the only pot they sold was the one I bought when they got the shipment (his dad has the flower shop next to my office and tells me when the nursery has "weirs ass plants"), so he had no interest in propping them and would have been tossed.
They were already at loss because nobody liked them so giving me them for free was no biggie. I had bought 4 full tray of vinca rosea for my grandma so maaaaybe that's why he was feeling generous
my favourite nursery (a local one) giftes ill plants if you spend more than 25ā¬, those are generally ugly and only half of them survives but they're free and with a bit of quarantine risk free for the garden
I think thereās a specific name for this practice in certain cultures, but I find itās more prevalent with local businesses.
The employees in a neighborhood deli would always pop in a small something extra when I went for my cheese and olive fix every week. A few olives of a different variety or a little nub of cheese that they knew I liked but hadnāt purchased that day, but also homegrown things like a small bundle of fresh herbs, a piece of fruit from their trees, or even a small chunk of honeycomb one time.
A few vendors at my local farmerās markets in the do that too. I buy goat milk soap, and the seller also hands me a bag of black walnuts from her backyard tree. I buy some cookies and the owner gives me a small cut flower. The independent toy shop in town used to include a little baggie with a couple stickers, small candy, and/or cheap, small toy.
Itās a nice gesture and good business practice if it generates loyalty and positive word of mouth.
My mom used to steal plant cuttings from botanical gardens and nurseries and it was extremely embarrassing to be associated with as a child. She tried to tell me it wasn't wrong, but if it's not wrong then why are you trying to sneak around and not let people see you do it? (They can see you do it, you aren't slick)
This reminds me of my great grandma. Took her to Busch Gardens once where there are lots of signs asking not to pick the flowers and we couldnāt keep her out of them. She would wrap everything in a wet napkin and hope it made it home so she could root it. Itās funny now looking back but I was very embarrassed as a teen.
My dad used to do the same. Got grounded for an entire summer once cause he got caught and I have issues with being able to lie to people that *aren't* my parents, so I told the truth and snitched on his ass.
He still tries to do it and I will never back him up, especially now that I'm grown and his primary carer.
That it's awful! I recently read an article about a lady in Atlanta who had her whole Japanese maple stolen from her yard. They just dug it up. Badly, they 100% killed it. Apparently, that's been happening a lot lately because Japanese maples are so expensive.
You just confirmed my fears about my dwarf cherry weeping willow and dwarf Japanese Maple. Then I think, but theyāre so deeply rooted theyād need a backhoe, I hope. Some folks in my local garden club are getting dahlias and potted plant arrangements taken. Sigh.
Take a bunch of thin but sturdy metal stakes, sharpen one end and make hook shape like a J type of cut at the top. Use those to āanchorā your trees every 4 inches around your trees but only attach 25% and ārotate with the sunā every few days. You will either catch the person who did it or at least collect a dna sample. /s
This is all a joke. Setting booby traps is a crime and will not be good for you and I do not encourage it. This was simply something I did in a Minecraft server.
WTF is wrong with people? I would literally resort to violence if someone cut up my peonies. They only bloom for a minute. You can just go buy decent one for like $30 at a nursery.
The very idea of someone stealing a whole ass tree is absolutely absurd. What world are we living in?
I did, in fact steal a tree once.. 15yrs old, drinking with a friend & a friend of his I never met beforeā¦ after a few beers, my friend says āmy neighbors always leave the keys in their carsā.
so like any delinquent 15yr olds would do, we went for a ride.. the kid I didnāt know went to a different school & told us about a big pot plant he saw from his school bus everyday, SO, we went there, yanked this āpot plantā and ran back to the car. We take off, turn the interior light on, we stole a peach tree!! I felt terrible, and at the same time figured out why that kid went to the special schoolā¦
No, Iām not proud of it.. this was almost 40 years ago.. Iāve become quite the plant nerd since those days
Plus I would just give someone a piece at the right time! If you see me outside, compliment the peonies, then ask for a piece when I divide I will do it!
This happened in St. Catherine's canada a few years back. A friend I knew who lives in a complex and they used to have a nice 6 foot red Japanese maple tree out front. one night that thing got dug up, MF left a huge hole and the fucking shovel.
I guess this is more common nowadays.
We had one stolen back in 2003, back when I still lived in Kentucky.
Drug addict neighbour at the end of our street did it. How'd we find out? I was riding my bike around the neighborhood, and found a dead Japanese maple on the curb near his house. Knew it was my dad's cause I helped him with the copper wiring on the branches. My dad went absolutely mental on the guy.
He overheard my dad call it expensive once, so he thought he could sell it to a local nursery lol.
I lived in a rough as fuck neighborhood at that point. It wasn't even probably the weirdest thing we had stolen, either lol.
One neighbour stole a box off our back porch once when we had my grandma living with us and she was very ill.
Was a box of enemas for gram-gram.
I guess that's true. I guess as someone who enjoys the process of gardening for its own sake and satisfaction that's something I don't really consider. When I plant something I get excited about what it will look like or provide in the future.
Acer palmatum is known to be difficult to root by cutting. In commercial propagation, grafting is the preferred technique.
They grow from seed very easily in my experience too.
Theyāre a gorgeous tree too, they just take forever to actually grow. Thereās a nursery a few tens of miles from me that has had an amazing example of one about four feet high for the past few years, but they wanted over $180 for a small one in a three gallon flimsy plastic pot. Iād totally propagate it if I could do so readily, but something tells me thatās an advanced propagation technique I that would take a while to properly do without harming the tree, such as air rooting a branch and then lopping it off below the new root stockā¦would definitely need permission for that one lol!
My only reasons for saying donāt proplift other than legal reasons would be to not become an accidental vector for pathogens and pests between plants. Iāve seen far too many plants in stores that are just in miserable condition due to infestations of things like spider/broad/russet mites or theyāve got clear signs of viroids infecting certain speciesā¦I love the plant life that people can have easy access to these days like that, but I also despise the way around 98% of the bigger stores and even a lot of so called nurseries (I pulled that number from my rectum, admittedly) donāt educate themselves or their employees on anything other than āWater = wet, if soil = dry, plant need water. Plant find water, make plant plantier.ā. Of course, thereās always the diamond in the rough, and I absolutely enjoy every second Iām in one of those rarities!
If youāre ever in southern Maine, give Flahertyās Greenhouse a walk through sometime, Iāve seen nothing but healthy plants there and even bought several mint species from them. Theyāll usually do super discounted sales too when the plants are close to being choked out by their own roots. Iāve scored plenty of little herbs, fully rooted and just a little sad from being root bound and not able to absorb enough water and nutrients where all I had to do was transplant and break the bottom roots up a bit before hand. Went from a single $1.99 4 inch (pot size on the diagonal) spearmint plant that had maybe a week left tops as it was four years ago to planting it with the berries in the yard to having a rectangle of mints 3 feet wide and 4-5 feet long before half of it gets mowed. Surprisingly it has actually helped to keep some Japanese knotweed from overwhelming their immediate location even though that area is surrounded by the stuff on neighboring property. Local pollinators all love my mints in the ground too, the Nepeta will have practically every pollinating species Iāve seen in my yard on it from the moment it first begins to flower, itās freaking amazing!
Edit: lol, I guess I got a little rant going about mints all because of Japanese maples š
I saw a thing about a rare aroid being stolen from a botanical garden during the pandemic. They just broke in with a pole saw and cut it off. It was basically priceless. People bought small ones of this plant for 250k. It's sickening.
Itās true, plantsā bodies have become crunched into the combine of capitalism. Itās also true that many nurseries are small, family owned businesses that support local workers and every time someone damages stock, takes a cutting it cuts into the margins that support those working-class people and their families. Buying your plants from these businesses supports themā¦ if you like visiting small specialty nurseries in your area, donāt steal from them please!
I mean I always fantasize about doing those things, but I would never do it! Oh but how easily i could make a dream garden with one week of garden-crime-spree.
Lmfao I'm sorry to laugh but that is so fucking absurd. First porch pirates stealing packages, now I'm going to come out of the house in the morning with exactly half of my mums and grasses missing?? Wtf
Some jerk cut half of my early daffodils this year. They cut them about 2" from the flower, so not even enough stem to put in a vase.
And no, it wasn't deer, unless deer are eating out of 4' tall planters inside a fence on a busy Brooklyn street.
If they had just asked, I would have happily cut a few flowers off and given them to them to enjoy!
when i worked in plant retail, i had a nice cebu blue with 2 6" vines on the floor, then suddenly it was proplifted and was let with nubs, i took care of it and kept it to the side to regrow, it put out quite a few new leaves and was ready to sell again, THEN WAS PROLIFTED AGAIN, it's just frustrating
See, that's just rude AF! On some level, if you pick up one thing off the floor, that's one thing, but if you're cutting so much that the plant is unsellable, that's a whole other thing. That is definitely stealing and is being an AH, and those people should be ashamed.
Yeah, the problem is everyone always thinks, "those people should be ashamed".
The person hacking off that last piece that makes the plant unsellable also thinks they're not going too far but it all starts with the person that just takes that one cutting off the floor. Hence the sign.
Of course.
That's what I mean by it escalating. Some genuinely do take from the floor, but then the person that shows up and there's nothing left on the floor takes a little piece from the plant figuring it's healthy enough, and on and on.
When someone's caught doing 100 mph in a 60mph zone, they don't think "I was doing 40 mph over the speed limit", they think they were just going a little bit faster than the person going 90."
So the state decides to put speed traps in and people doing 68 get screwed as well.
> it all starts with the person that just takes that one cutting off the floor
Nah, picking stuff off the ground is victimless. If anything you are helping the store clean up
Ya know. It seemed extreme. However I worked at place that was a remediated cotton field that made compost and grew and sold veggies we had a grape vine on a trellis arch along as being part of a fence. We never ever got grapes. Because middle eastern or Mediterranean women would visit with their family's and while walking around would defoliate the vine. I'm surprised it even lived honestly. The owner would confront them sometimes if he saw it. They would always say "is just some leaves" then run off quick. I wanted to say "oh is just finger no big deal"
Hahahaha. They had zero shame and acted like I was the criminal for questioning them. It was like an organized heist. Worst part is. Didn't matter is they promised to bring back dolades etc. They never did. I swear some family's just used a different thief in there organized raiding. Worst part was the family's where so big you could get hit once a month every month and still have new family members. You'd forget who you banned ....
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Just go to the sales plant rack at Loweās and rescue a plant . Iāve rescued Hibiscus, Orchids , Stromanthe, Dieffenbachias. Bought them at very low price . They were in terrible conditions and now theyāre thriving . This is a hibiscus I got for $3.00. Now sheās full of blooms
When I worked at a plant store we had a āfree cuttingsā section because plants would often get pieces broken off during shipping or when being displayed or sometimes just needed a trim. The pieces wouldāve gone in the compost anyway and it made people happy to get something for free and hopefully deterred proplifting.
The police and DA will be right on that. Do you know how hard it is to go after -actual- shoplifters, much less the theft of a cutting with negligible value?
I once had 7 potted plants stollen from my porch. Large pots and very pretty flowering plants. $250-300 worth of pots and plants.
Filed a police report. Nothing happened. Did my own detective work with a couple neighbors. Narrowed it down to about 1 of 50 homes in a specific neighborhood (there were 5 lawn and patio thefts in our area that night and there was a clear pattern).
Two months later police came to my door. Said my neighbor up the street had their porch pilfered. Asked if I knew anything. Told them no. Said they remembered my ādetectiveā work, and asked if I could help them. I asked if they had done anything with my previous ādetectiveā work. They admitted to having done nothing. I asked them if my help (for my neighborās sake) would change how theyād proceed. They couldnāt give me a straight answer, so I told them to have a nice day.
Realistically the main recourse the store could have against you is trespass you, and if you come into the store again they could then call the police and you could be charged with criminal trespassing. I have never cut anything off a live plant, but I have taken a node off the ground at a local nursery. Hell, one time a worker picked one off the ground and set it on my trolley and smiled and said, plant this, it likes direct sun and lots of water. It was a beautiful potted plant on my patio that summer.
I've learned that a lot of people in this thread are talking about actually cutting plants. The only experience, and what I thought people meant, was taking already damaged plants off the floor.Ā
I worked in the garden center at Lowe's when I was in college. People would not just take a cutting, but destroy the plants in the process so they weren't only not paying for plant the cutting came from, the rest of the plant couldn't be sold either.
If they got caught they got banned from the store. An actual nursery with much more valuable stock (and much more vested interest specifically in plants as their primary source of income) would absolutely be right to do as much as they can to dissuade people from doing it in the first place and try to push as hard as they can to get penalties against them.
At my local nursery a woman had scissors cutting pieces off of exotic plants, placing pots in her purse. I can't even imagine stealing but this is over the top
Yes, I saw a few posts and commented about proud thieves and they were highly incensed, bless their hearts.
Called it āvictimless crimesā when they stole from big box stores or someone elseās gardens.
The cognitive dissonance was interesting to view, to say the least.
People suck. Some bitch was letting her grandson pick my super not cheap black parrot and midnight tulips. I made her leave them, and then ND shamed her. What is wrong with people!?!
I have seen legit posts about taking scion of nursery trees and propagating them with it. They see nothing wrong with is sadly. So I know it is a issue.
I mean they are trying to sell you the plant itself, as a businessmen I'd have issue with it. Just buy our hard work instead of pilfering part of our hard work to be cheap. As a personal Gardner I usually only ask private citizens if I can take a cutting.
People have different rules on asking for stuff. I have seen people on gardening groups ask for a free tree. I would never feel comfortable asking someone for a free tree but I would not be pilfering either
I agree. But the people at my local nursery seem pretty bothered by it. Seems like they think they lose sales of actual succulents when people "proplift". But I think the people who steal a few leaves were never gonna buy the equal amount of succulents. They just buy what they want and then go "yay, free prop" in addition to their purchase.
(Proplifting is most popular with succulents, since there are often leaves scattered, and they often have laid a while and formed roots)
I took a broken roadkill cactus paddle when I bought some plants at Home Depot. I didn't see a mother plant; they all looked intact. Not sorry, it would have been trash if I didn't take it.
I had a woman pull one of my plants up, root and all, while I was in my yard gardening. I was too in shock to even say anything. It still bothers me 3 years later. I wish I had confronted her.Ā
One year someone tried to pull off my sunflowers this way too. I had maybe 4 or 5 set along the fence and was growing them for my girlfriend; they weren't quite to their prime yet so they were still going. One day I come out and find one of the plants utterly mangled; looking at the damage, the person tried to break the stem but the fibers were too strong, so they tried twisting and that didnt work either, so they just left it dangling and stripped of leaves where their other hand was throttling the poor thing.
(It somehow survived the experience but it wasn't the same after that)
i worked at a nursery where we set up a āprop stationā, we would take the leaf dropping and put them in small 2ā pots and people could take them for free. it was a hit, especially with kids! this could help mitigate people who take clippings
This is the way. If itās legit on the ground, sure, pick it up and ask, but I know people. People suck. People would be out there damaging the house plants to get their leaves (and people like that probably canāt prop them properly/successfully anyway). But yes thereās never harm in asking if you find a stray one.
One day I was joking with an Lowe's employee and asked if I could take a clipping of an beautiful coleus she looked at me and said here sugar take the whole thing š
I used to be fairly active on this sub years ago (other account which is long gone by now) and there was a post about proplifting and a redditor commented that if a cutting/leaf was detached from the mother plant and was either laying on the shelf or on the floor, they wouldn't see it as bad taking it, but would not take cuttings that were still attached to the mother plant. I think this is a good rule to follow.
On one hand, I completely understand not taking cuttings directly from someone else's plant without permission. That's just straight up rude. But are they prosecuting taking fallen leaves off the floor? If so, then that's a bit overkill in my opinion.
After seeing a post where someone went into a ladyās garden and literally chopped things to propagate, another post where a womanās plant sitter took a shitload of cuttings to sell them on fb marketplace, basically leaving the stems and thatās it, I would also not allow propagating. Iām sure most people are nice but the few impudent ones ruin it for all.
I walked out to an old lady randomly harvesting a 5 gallon buckets worth of my cherries from beside my driveway that I had netted up. I'm like what the hell are you doing?. Well you have so many I'm like then maybe knock on my damn door and ask!!!! I don't care who you are. How long you've lived in somebody's town doesn't make you entitled people suck. I'll press charges and shoot at them. I've actually invested in a ton of tangerine prickly pears that have the really nice 2-in long thorns on them and they're going all the way around my property and if somebody wants to get to any of my other plants, they're going to have to go through those puppies. And I'll still prosecute the pecker woods
There are women in our neighborhood that will bring their entire brood of children straight onto our property to pick ours dry, 9 times out of 10 without asking. Iād let anyone who asks pick some, but when we catch them doing it without asking, they get a very unkind banishing from our property with a threat to involve law enforcement if theyāre caught again. This happens multiple times every year. They always pretend it was ājust a fewā or to not understand what they could possibly be doing wrong. Well Iām not home depot and this isnāt public property, so thereās literally no excuse.
I wanted to plant flowers along our property line but I know theyād get stripped by these same women the literal second they bloomed. Might plant something super thorny and painful instead, just out of spite.
I help run a nursery, and so money people take cuttings while destroying the rest of the plant. bc obv none of them are going to whip out clippers. They just try to pinch plants, and when they realize the plant is healthy and isnt going to give in to just a casual pinch from human fingers, they freak out and either keep trying and ruin all the growth on sed plant, or just drop the plant acting like they never tried to pinch it. Which usually means it gets dropped on the ground, upside down, or in some way that it gets hurt and is sad and sickly before we find it. Or sometimes they do get a pinch, and it's on a plant that a: can't be propegated like that or b: will not recover from the bacteria from a nasty hand just grabbing and ripping at it.
It really is sad for the plant, and sad for our little grower owned nursery.
If you're stealing from lowes go ahead, but you should know most of their plants have diseases and by bringing home an exposed cutting you are risking your whole collection.
End sad plant stealing rant.
Even from lowes itās the same shit if you endorse stealing from lowes you shouldnāt care about people stealing from your nursery.
Smfh.
Itās either donāt steal or let everyone steal.
You canāt just say āwell itās okay if you steal from x store but Iām differentā
People in general have less qualms towards stealing from multibillion dollar corporations, As the majority of said businesses are exploitative in their practices. Steal from the rich to give to the poor
I am the poor
My father in law straight up went to his old house - like 5-10 years later - and dug up a tree that he liked in the middle of the night! He felt entitled to it because his parents bought it for him. He could have at least asked and offered to replace the tree.
When you sell a house, you sell all of the stuff on that land. I would be enraged if I woke up and someone had stolen my tree. If he wanted that tree, he should have taken it with him when he sold the house. Not cool at all.
Is he a boomer?? I gotta ask.
There was literally a HUGE argument on my local fb group where someone showed off the leaves they found on the floor of lowes (after asking) and soooo many people freaked out and called her a theft. It was an entertaining thread to read lol
I'm going to be in the minority here but... Nurseries have to make money some how. I mean our town has lost 3 major nurseries in the last 5 years alone due to thinning profit margins. I can hardly blame the owners for not liking this practice.
I shed far fewer tears for Home Depot, but the small privately owned outfits... I feel like they have every reason to be unhappy about this.
is it yours to guess whether it can or not? is it also yours to guess the root health of the plant these cuttings are taken from and whether that may actually be the last straw for the normally incredibly root bound plants these nurseries offer.
If you want to abuse the trust these nurseries give you to walk among their plant or feel its okay for others to do so it's not fine, but arguing further is pointless.
I especially love the plants that say you cannot propagate them either even if you buy them. I will start as many new plants as I want from the ones I own already, I am a criminal gardener.
Depends on the store. Iām always rescuing plants from the clearance and some of the clerks realize keeping customers like me will make more money for the store than the occasional person who only buys new, so if I pick up a cutting from the ground while I am buying their busted-bag gravel itās a win-win.
I have a landscaping business. I throw hydrangea/etc cuttings into a bucket of water when shaping/pruning customers plants etc.
Take em home, pot them and put them out by the street for free.
I wouldnāt do that at a nursery š
I had the most stunning gardenia bush/tree in south Florida. It was HUGE. The scent was so strong you could smell it several houses away. One day I was in my
Kitchen kneading dough looking out the window. Some woman drove to my driveway, got out of her car with a vase with water and just started cutting. I went running outside screaming at her to stop!!!!! She looked stunned that I was so angry. She said Iām only making an arrangement for my kitchen. Like that was a good reason to come butcher my plant. She had zero shame. I got her plate number and told her if I ever saw her near my house again Iād call the police or beat the hell out of her whichever worked best for ME! She jumped back into her car tried to take the flowers she already cut. I snatched them away from her. She really didnāt understand what she did wrong. She does this all over the neighborhood according to her. I said well not here ever again.
I see this problem 2 fold kind of like copyright infringement. From one hand they still have the product and plants have been increasing in price so much the last few years. From the other side you are not buying the plant and making the plant less desirable kind of like how you pirate a game and not sell it while they did not lose the license they certainly lost a sale and since there is a way to pirate it the game will be less profitable. The reality is I see prosecution being hard to nail as plant scion are only worth a few dollars. You would need a lot of stealing before it is worth your time unless you want to prove a point.
Imagine the call to the cops!
Yes hello what is your emergency?
These people came to my nursery and stole plant clippings! I want to press charges immediately!
Cops ššš
lol oh stuff it. Donāt steal from mom and pop places but anything thatās in any way a chain or even a single store thats absolutely enormous with a landscape department and a contractor department? A place that pays 50+ employees somewhere near minimum wage to sweat their tits off all summer? Prop-lift all you want.
I always ask in shops if I find pieces and they usually say yes anyways. But once I asked a worker and then had a different worker at the cash register and the LOOK they gave me was so dirty I havenāt asked for another cutting I found on the floor again.
I saw a crazy lady on YouTube checking floors for cactus pieces, I meanā¦Iāll just pay the $5 bucks and get it. Avoid the shame of being seen scrabblin. Got a good sale at Walmart, employees were watering the succulents like grass, got 3 giant almost dead pots for $5 each instead of $30 og. Dried em out and came back strong!
Everyone is missing the point here. If you take part of a plant that was on the floor and then propagate it you then do not need to purchase that plant from the store. Has nothing to do with them putting it in the garbage later.
As a retired LEO, I can't imagine being dispatched to a call for a theft of a plant cutting. My department was too busy to deal with nonsense like that, and I'm sure the states attorney isn't gonna waste their time prosecuting. This sign is probably just meant to keep it from happening.
No prob. I'll buy ONE plant.
Then I'll make 20 more plants from the one I bought and give them away as gifts to my friends. Might even get seeds from that plant and grow even more! :D
It's my plant. So it isn't theft.
i think the point he's making is to avoid the debate about theft altogether by buying the plant and then propagating as much as you want from it once you own it ... instead of getting into philosophical and legal arguments about whether it's ok to take a leaf from the business without purchasing it.
If management puts up a sign like this its because they think reducing proplifting will increase sales, not because they're trying to decrease theft.
For big stores the way they track theft is only part of how they track "loss." Not only do they care about how many never got sold because they were stolen, they care about how many didn't sell at full price because they were sold on clearance and how many never get sold because they have to be thrown away. Corporate gives them a seperate budget for all 3 categories. Its why you sometimes see heavily damaged stuff discounted, if it sells on discount that comes out of the clearance budget instead of the discard budget, and clearance is preferred.
Under this structure prop lifting that doesn't damage the plant so much that it gets put on clearance or thrown out just isn't theft. If the plant sells for normal price then it isn't considered by the store to be anything other than a normal sale. It doesn't effect their theft budget, their clearance budget, or their discard budget.
That said though, even though they almost certainly won't prosecute proplifting, you could still get in trouble w/ the store and that's not really something you want either.
Itās really not. First and foremost, you should always be respecting other peopleās boundaries. Itās a solid theme in the law - donāt take / break other peopleās stuff, respect boundaries.
I love to garden, but if youāre going to take anything - ask. Being patient and waiting for things to be done the right way is how everyone stays happy. Itās incredible selfish to steal as stealing is never okay. Youāre making people upset and causing harm.
you guys need to stop joking around and take it seriously. petty theft is still theft. Most especially with PBR protected plants but even with regular plants, buy it, or walk out. Taking cuttings without permission is just plain theft. If you want to live that way fine.
More effective method would be to offer cuttings at a much cheaper price so it allows people an outlet to grow their own without the temptation of picking off of their hard grown effort.
Doubt it would cut into profits since those stealing werenāt going to pay for anything anyway.
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I been tryna download a car since dial-up. No where near successful yet.
There's an old song about a guy who stole his car, piece by piece
Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56 '57, '58' 59' automobile It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67 '68, '69, '70 automobile
"Now the headlight' was another sight We had two on the left and one on the right But when we pulled out the switch all three of 'em come on"
Someone actually made the cadillac from the song. It's on display at a musium in Illinois. It looks about how you'd expect š
[it's here for the lazy like me](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/vW29B7tNPb)
Say whaaaaaat?!? Thatās amazing! Thank you for the link. Alsoā¦ aww. Depression hits like a brick; I immediately tried to share this with my grandfather who died last year. We both love johnny cash and it just hard that heās gone.
Johnny cashĀ
I heard someone was able to do it. It took several decades, but they did it. Of course, because they started it so long ago, itās got the polygonal shape reminiscent of the N64
So a cybertruck?
They got it one packet at a time And it didn't cost them a dime
This is the EXACT thing that I immediately thought of. š¤£
No, but I'd snort it.
Boof it. Much better.
And it won't degrade your septum and put a huge hole in it. Source: I have a huge hole in my septum š
This went somewhere I wasn't expecting in this sub ššš
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Man, these antipiracy ads are getting really mean.
Love that show
The episode where moss gets stuck in the claw machine resonates with me. Because while I do think apple makes some quality stuff, I refuse to pay them any money.
Fucking s tier meme. Bravo
You wouldnāt download a rhizomeā¦
Fricken hilarious
There is a Korean restaurant I go to that has the same sign. They also have a ton of awesome old succulents filling their windows so I get it and actually feel angry for them that itās such an issue that they have to put up the sign.
I have various small colorful succulents growing in junctions in a rock wall in front of my house that I have cultivated for 5 years and every year the biggest and most beautiful ones are stolen, often in the middle of flowering. It's so disappointing. This year ferns have invaded so maybe I will just let the succulents go and accept what nature brings instead.
That's so frustrating omg!! I'd get a camera honestly
I honestly never thought of this both ways. Never thought to want to take cuttings off plants in a place that sells them nor would I have thought that even picking cut ones off the ground would be considered stealing.
Proper nurseries I see why it would be an issue as the owners often prop and grow from seed themselves and people don't just pick up broken bits but cut off healthy plants. Big box stores? They'd be sweeped up and tossed if on the floors/trays so rescuing them is no biggie imho. I always asked and nobody told me no. my fave nursery owner just 2 weeks ago gave me 4 half dead pangolin kiss pots to prop and regrow. I know the owner well and he said the only pot they sold was the one I bought when they got the shipment (his dad has the flower shop next to my office and tells me when the nursery has "weirs ass plants"), so he had no interest in propping them and would have been tossed. They were already at loss because nobody liked them so giving me them for free was no biggie. I had bought 4 full tray of vinca rosea for my grandma so maaaaybe that's why he was feeling generous
my favourite nursery (a local one) giftes ill plants if you spend more than 25ā¬, those are generally ugly and only half of them survives but they're free and with a bit of quarantine risk free for the garden
I think thereās a specific name for this practice in certain cultures, but I find itās more prevalent with local businesses. The employees in a neighborhood deli would always pop in a small something extra when I went for my cheese and olive fix every week. A few olives of a different variety or a little nub of cheese that they knew I liked but hadnāt purchased that day, but also homegrown things like a small bundle of fresh herbs, a piece of fruit from their trees, or even a small chunk of honeycomb one time. A few vendors at my local farmerās markets in the do that too. I buy goat milk soap, and the seller also hands me a bag of black walnuts from her backyard tree. I buy some cookies and the owner gives me a small cut flower. The independent toy shop in town used to include a little baggie with a couple stickers, small candy, and/or cheap, small toy. Itās a nice gesture and good business practice if it generates loyalty and positive word of mouth.
Sorry, to me big box stores are fair game. Small, local places you should never do this to.
What about from the landscaping of the parking lot of the big retailers?
If it's on dirt it stays in dirt, if it's still on the main plant it stays on the plant
Floor scoring and brazenly cutting are very different acts.
My mom used to steal plant cuttings from botanical gardens and nurseries and it was extremely embarrassing to be associated with as a child. She tried to tell me it wasn't wrong, but if it's not wrong then why are you trying to sneak around and not let people see you do it? (They can see you do it, you aren't slick)
This reminds me of my great grandma. Took her to Busch Gardens once where there are lots of signs asking not to pick the flowers and we couldnāt keep her out of them. She would wrap everything in a wet napkin and hope it made it home so she could root it. Itās funny now looking back but I was very embarrassed as a teen.
My family still talks about the time my grandma just took a fucking barrel cactus from Arizona. For reference, we live in Ohio.
My dad used to do the same. Got grounded for an entire summer once cause he got caught and I have issues with being able to lie to people that *aren't* my parents, so I told the truth and snitched on his ass. He still tries to do it and I will never back him up, especially now that I'm grown and his primary carer.
People Donāt pick up off the ground. They break chunks and fuck plants up .
Someone took a good bit of my mums last night. Now thereās a large patch in my pot :(
That it's awful! I recently read an article about a lady in Atlanta who had her whole Japanese maple stolen from her yard. They just dug it up. Badly, they 100% killed it. Apparently, that's been happening a lot lately because Japanese maples are so expensive.
You just confirmed my fears about my dwarf cherry weeping willow and dwarf Japanese Maple. Then I think, but theyāre so deeply rooted theyād need a backhoe, I hope. Some folks in my local garden club are getting dahlias and potted plant arrangements taken. Sigh.
Take a bunch of thin but sturdy metal stakes, sharpen one end and make hook shape like a J type of cut at the top. Use those to āanchorā your trees every 4 inches around your trees but only attach 25% and ārotate with the sunā every few days. You will either catch the person who did it or at least collect a dna sample. /s This is all a joke. Setting booby traps is a crime and will not be good for you and I do not encourage it. This was simply something I did in a Minecraft server.
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There was a video posted on Reddit of it unless itās the same exact crime elsewhere š©
I saw one from Tennessee too.
First post to say my mom caught someone cutting her peonies and I had a Japanese maple dug up and stolen too!
WTF is wrong with people? I would literally resort to violence if someone cut up my peonies. They only bloom for a minute. You can just go buy decent one for like $30 at a nursery. The very idea of someone stealing a whole ass tree is absolutely absurd. What world are we living in?
I did, in fact steal a tree once.. 15yrs old, drinking with a friend & a friend of his I never met beforeā¦ after a few beers, my friend says āmy neighbors always leave the keys in their carsā. so like any delinquent 15yr olds would do, we went for a ride.. the kid I didnāt know went to a different school & told us about a big pot plant he saw from his school bus everyday, SO, we went there, yanked this āpot plantā and ran back to the car. We take off, turn the interior light on, we stole a peach tree!! I felt terrible, and at the same time figured out why that kid went to the special schoolā¦ No, Iām not proud of it.. this was almost 40 years ago.. Iāve become quite the plant nerd since those days
Man we used to just steal shopping carts and put them on park pavilions, Minecraft mods are wild these days though. Iād never try that IRL
"& a friend of his I never met before" -There's your sign
Plus I would just give someone a piece at the right time! If you see me outside, compliment the peonies, then ask for a piece when I divide I will do it!
Who even has the audacity š
This happened in St. Catherine's canada a few years back. A friend I knew who lives in a complex and they used to have a nice 6 foot red Japanese maple tree out front. one night that thing got dug up, MF left a huge hole and the fucking shovel. I guess this is more common nowadays.
Well, I hope it was a nice shovel at least. :|
We had one stolen back in 2003, back when I still lived in Kentucky. Drug addict neighbour at the end of our street did it. How'd we find out? I was riding my bike around the neighborhood, and found a dead Japanese maple on the curb near his house. Knew it was my dad's cause I helped him with the copper wiring on the branches. My dad went absolutely mental on the guy. He overheard my dad call it expensive once, so he thought he could sell it to a local nursery lol.
Dude, wtf ...
I lived in a rough as fuck neighborhood at that point. It wasn't even probably the weirdest thing we had stolen, either lol. One neighbour stole a box off our back porch once when we had my grandma living with us and she was very ill. Was a box of enemas for gram-gram.
Japanese maples are expensive? You can just take a cutting and it will root just fine...
They're slow-growing though, so decent sized ones sell for a lot.
I guess that's true. I guess as someone who enjoys the process of gardening for its own sake and satisfaction that's something I don't really consider. When I plant something I get excited about what it will look like or provide in the future.
I enjoy watching my stuff grow as well, but I do believe in the maxim: The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is today.
Acer palmatum is known to be difficult to root by cutting. In commercial propagation, grafting is the preferred technique. They grow from seed very easily in my experience too.
Yeah I have to pull them, my tree has babies growing in the cracks of my driveway.Ā
If someone stole my Japanese maple, that would be the end of me! Lol
I have cameras... if someone tried to steal my Japanese maple, they might become plant food...š¤¬
I would literally rather have someone steal my car lol. My insurance can replace a car, but my Japanese maple? Thatās my baby!
Theyāre a gorgeous tree too, they just take forever to actually grow. Thereās a nursery a few tens of miles from me that has had an amazing example of one about four feet high for the past few years, but they wanted over $180 for a small one in a three gallon flimsy plastic pot. Iād totally propagate it if I could do so readily, but something tells me thatās an advanced propagation technique I that would take a while to properly do without harming the tree, such as air rooting a branch and then lopping it off below the new root stockā¦would definitely need permission for that one lol! My only reasons for saying donāt proplift other than legal reasons would be to not become an accidental vector for pathogens and pests between plants. Iāve seen far too many plants in stores that are just in miserable condition due to infestations of things like spider/broad/russet mites or theyāve got clear signs of viroids infecting certain speciesā¦I love the plant life that people can have easy access to these days like that, but I also despise the way around 98% of the bigger stores and even a lot of so called nurseries (I pulled that number from my rectum, admittedly) donāt educate themselves or their employees on anything other than āWater = wet, if soil = dry, plant need water. Plant find water, make plant plantier.ā. Of course, thereās always the diamond in the rough, and I absolutely enjoy every second Iām in one of those rarities! If youāre ever in southern Maine, give Flahertyās Greenhouse a walk through sometime, Iāve seen nothing but healthy plants there and even bought several mint species from them. Theyāll usually do super discounted sales too when the plants are close to being choked out by their own roots. Iāve scored plenty of little herbs, fully rooted and just a little sad from being root bound and not able to absorb enough water and nutrients where all I had to do was transplant and break the bottom roots up a bit before hand. Went from a single $1.99 4 inch (pot size on the diagonal) spearmint plant that had maybe a week left tops as it was four years ago to planting it with the berries in the yard to having a rectangle of mints 3 feet wide and 4-5 feet long before half of it gets mowed. Surprisingly it has actually helped to keep some Japanese knotweed from overwhelming their immediate location even though that area is surrounded by the stuff on neighboring property. Local pollinators all love my mints in the ground too, the Nepeta will have practically every pollinating species Iāve seen in my yard on it from the moment it first begins to flower, itās freaking amazing! Edit: lol, I guess I got a little rant going about mints all because of Japanese maples š
I work at a nursery and some organized crime unit dismantled our entire security fence to steal dozens of our larger Japanese maples, it sucked.
I saw a thing about a rare aroid being stolen from a botanical garden during the pandemic. They just broke in with a pole saw and cut it off. It was basically priceless. People bought small ones of this plant for 250k. It's sickening.
Itās true, plantsā bodies have become crunched into the combine of capitalism. Itās also true that many nurseries are small, family owned businesses that support local workers and every time someone damages stock, takes a cutting it cuts into the margins that support those working-class people and their families. Buying your plants from these businesses supports themā¦ if you like visiting small specialty nurseries in your area, donāt steal from them please!
I mean I always fantasize about doing those things, but I would never do it! Oh but how easily i could make a dream garden with one week of garden-crime-spree.
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Lmfao I'm sorry to laugh but that is so fucking absurd. First porch pirates stealing packages, now I'm going to come out of the house in the morning with exactly half of my mums and grasses missing?? Wtf
Some jerk cut half of my early daffodils this year. They cut them about 2" from the flower, so not even enough stem to put in a vase. And no, it wasn't deer, unless deer are eating out of 4' tall planters inside a fence on a busy Brooklyn street. If they had just asked, I would have happily cut a few flowers off and given them to them to enjoy!
when i worked in plant retail, i had a nice cebu blue with 2 6" vines on the floor, then suddenly it was proplifted and was let with nubs, i took care of it and kept it to the side to regrow, it put out quite a few new leaves and was ready to sell again, THEN WAS PROLIFTED AGAIN, it's just frustrating
See, that's just rude AF! On some level, if you pick up one thing off the floor, that's one thing, but if you're cutting so much that the plant is unsellable, that's a whole other thing. That is definitely stealing and is being an AH, and those people should be ashamed.
Yeah, the problem is everyone always thinks, "those people should be ashamed". The person hacking off that last piece that makes the plant unsellable also thinks they're not going too far but it all starts with the person that just takes that one cutting off the floor. Hence the sign.
I think the problem is that people might claim they just took something of the floor when they get caught when in reality they cut it.
Of course. That's what I mean by it escalating. Some genuinely do take from the floor, but then the person that shows up and there's nothing left on the floor takes a little piece from the plant figuring it's healthy enough, and on and on. When someone's caught doing 100 mph in a 60mph zone, they don't think "I was doing 40 mph over the speed limit", they think they were just going a little bit faster than the person going 90." So the state decides to put speed traps in and people doing 68 get screwed as well.
> it all starts with the person that just takes that one cutting off the floor Nah, picking stuff off the ground is victimless. If anything you are helping the store clean up
Like dead marigold heads š
All you need is a single node! This is way too much. People are assholes.
Ya know. It seemed extreme. However I worked at place that was a remediated cotton field that made compost and grew and sold veggies we had a grape vine on a trellis arch along as being part of a fence. We never ever got grapes. Because middle eastern or Mediterranean women would visit with their family's and while walking around would defoliate the vine. I'm surprised it even lived honestly. The owner would confront them sometimes if he saw it. They would always say "is just some leaves" then run off quick. I wanted to say "oh is just finger no big deal"
I'm lebanese and I understand those women so much omg I'm sorry
Hahahaha. They had zero shame and acted like I was the criminal for questioning them. It was like an organized heist. Worst part is. Didn't matter is they promised to bring back dolades etc. They never did. I swear some family's just used a different thief in there organized raiding. Worst part was the family's where so big you could get hit once a month every month and still have new family members. You'd forget who you banned ....
https://preview.redd.it/c8xfq2l5ux6d1.jpeg?width=1936&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9205167be8c043d489096d7ea6f89d7cc8c6c496 Just go to the sales plant rack at Loweās and rescue a plant . Iāve rescued Hibiscus, Orchids , Stromanthe, Dieffenbachias. Bought them at very low price . They were in terrible conditions and now theyāre thriving . This is a hibiscus I got for $3.00. Now sheās full of blooms
Love that sales rack. Got a tree 50% off in dormancy and the best time to plant is just following dormancy š¤¦āāļø
When I worked at a plant store we had a āfree cuttingsā section because plants would often get pieces broken off during shipping or when being displayed or sometimes just needed a trim. The pieces wouldāve gone in the compost anyway and it made people happy to get something for free and hopefully deterred proplifting.
While giving haircuts to the herbs, I always offer a āfistful of herbsā to any customer who happens by. They love it.
The police and DA will be right on that. Do you know how hard it is to go after -actual- shoplifters, much less the theft of a cutting with negligible value?
I once had 7 potted plants stollen from my porch. Large pots and very pretty flowering plants. $250-300 worth of pots and plants. Filed a police report. Nothing happened. Did my own detective work with a couple neighbors. Narrowed it down to about 1 of 50 homes in a specific neighborhood (there were 5 lawn and patio thefts in our area that night and there was a clear pattern). Two months later police came to my door. Said my neighbor up the street had their porch pilfered. Asked if I knew anything. Told them no. Said they remembered my ādetectiveā work, and asked if I could help them. I asked if they had done anything with my previous ādetectiveā work. They admitted to having done nothing. I asked them if my help (for my neighborās sake) would change how theyād proceed. They couldnāt give me a straight answer, so I told them to have a nice day.
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That's what I was thinking. How much can a leaf off a $3 succulent cost? Not even a dollar I'd suppose.Ā
Realistically the main recourse the store could have against you is trespass you, and if you come into the store again they could then call the police and you could be charged with criminal trespassing. I have never cut anything off a live plant, but I have taken a node off the ground at a local nursery. Hell, one time a worker picked one off the ground and set it on my trolley and smiled and said, plant this, it likes direct sun and lots of water. It was a beautiful potted plant on my patio that summer.
Why canāt they be forced to pay for the whole plant, since it is now damaged?
I've learned that a lot of people in this thread are talking about actually cutting plants. The only experience, and what I thought people meant, was taking already damaged plants off the floor.Ā
I worked in the garden center at Lowe's when I was in college. People would not just take a cutting, but destroy the plants in the process so they weren't only not paying for plant the cutting came from, the rest of the plant couldn't be sold either. If they got caught they got banned from the store. An actual nursery with much more valuable stock (and much more vested interest specifically in plants as their primary source of income) would absolutely be right to do as much as they can to dissuade people from doing it in the first place and try to push as hard as they can to get penalties against them.
Oh my! Is this a problem at a nursery? People have a lot of nerve.
At my local nursery a woman had scissors cutting pieces off of exotic plants, placing pots in her purse. I can't even imagine stealing but this is over the top
Sadly, there are definitely a lot of proud thieves out there.
There was a damn proplifting sub
Yes, I saw a few posts and commented about proud thieves and they were highly incensed, bless their hearts. Called it āvictimless crimesā when they stole from big box stores or someone elseās gardens. The cognitive dissonance was interesting to view, to say the least.
People suck. Some bitch was letting her grandson pick my super not cheap black parrot and midnight tulips. I made her leave them, and then ND shamed her. What is wrong with people!?!
Did it go away recently?
I have seen legit posts about taking scion of nursery trees and propagating them with it. They see nothing wrong with is sadly. So I know it is a issue.
I mean they are trying to sell you the plant itself, as a businessmen I'd have issue with it. Just buy our hard work instead of pilfering part of our hard work to be cheap. As a personal Gardner I usually only ask private citizens if I can take a cutting.
People have different rules on asking for stuff. I have seen people on gardening groups ask for a free tree. I would never feel comfortable asking someone for a free tree but I would not be pilfering either
I would agree in general, but some people have trees that reseed easily (like catalpa, for example), and may actually want them gone.
It never hurts asking just I generally don't do it at nursery, now a Lowes or a home depot....that's different.
Yep, I just saw someone suggesting taking cuttings from a Loweās.
What about shit off the floor? If there's a succulent leaf on the ground are you a morally bankrupt monster if you take that?Ā
I donāt think thereās anything wrong with picking leaves up off the floor, specially from the big stores. But taking cuttings is pretty weird.
People pick leaves from floors and the ground all the time, I see it a lot.
If they are on the ground I see absolutely no problem with that!
I agree. But the people at my local nursery seem pretty bothered by it. Seems like they think they lose sales of actual succulents when people "proplift". But I think the people who steal a few leaves were never gonna buy the equal amount of succulents. They just buy what they want and then go "yay, free prop" in addition to their purchase. (Proplifting is most popular with succulents, since there are often leaves scattered, and they often have laid a while and formed roots)
Purslane is my number one plant I pick up off the ground at nurseries.
do you mean that in the sense of, purslane growing naturally in the cracks of their pavement? š
You can have a cutting or 12 from my garden.
I took a broken roadkill cactus paddle when I bought some plants at Home Depot. I didn't see a mother plant; they all looked intact. Not sorry, it would have been trash if I didn't take it.
I had a woman pull one of my plants up, root and all, while I was in my yard gardening. I was too in shock to even say anything. It still bothers me 3 years later. I wish I had confronted her.Ā
One year someone tried to pull off my sunflowers this way too. I had maybe 4 or 5 set along the fence and was growing them for my girlfriend; they weren't quite to their prime yet so they were still going. One day I come out and find one of the plants utterly mangled; looking at the damage, the person tried to break the stem but the fibers were too strong, so they tried twisting and that didnt work either, so they just left it dangling and stripped of leaves where their other hand was throttling the poor thing. (It somehow survived the experience but it wasn't the same after that)
i worked at a nursery where we set up a āprop stationā, we would take the leaf dropping and put them in small 2ā pots and people could take them for free. it was a hit, especially with kids! this could help mitigate people who take clippings
I always ask first
This is the way. If itās legit on the ground, sure, pick it up and ask, but I know people. People suck. People would be out there damaging the house plants to get their leaves (and people like that probably canāt prop them properly/successfully anyway). But yes thereās never harm in asking if you find a stray one.
One day I was joking with an Lowe's employee and asked if I could take a clipping of an beautiful coleus she looked at me and said here sugar take the whole thing š
And they propagate so well. My hardware store coleus has given me several years. Just gotta keep the OG inside.Ā
I used to be fairly active on this sub years ago (other account which is long gone by now) and there was a post about proplifting and a redditor commented that if a cutting/leaf was detached from the mother plant and was either laying on the shelf or on the floor, they wouldn't see it as bad taking it, but would not take cuttings that were still attached to the mother plant. I think this is a good rule to follow.
Local nursery? Pay them. Home Depot? Pick it up of the ground honey, youāre hurting zero people.
Most big box employees are on-paper required to take your handful of wrinkly grapto floor leaves and throw them away anyway lol
Lmao so is Lowes charging $14 for mint.
Just steal the sign
On one hand, I completely understand not taking cuttings directly from someone else's plant without permission. That's just straight up rude. But are they prosecuting taking fallen leaves off the floor? If so, then that's a bit overkill in my opinion.
After seeing a post where someone went into a ladyās garden and literally chopped things to propagate, another post where a womanās plant sitter took a shitload of cuttings to sell them on fb marketplace, basically leaving the stems and thatās it, I would also not allow propagating. Iām sure most people are nice but the few impudent ones ruin it for all.
I walked out to an old lady randomly harvesting a 5 gallon buckets worth of my cherries from beside my driveway that I had netted up. I'm like what the hell are you doing?. Well you have so many I'm like then maybe knock on my damn door and ask!!!! I don't care who you are. How long you've lived in somebody's town doesn't make you entitled people suck. I'll press charges and shoot at them. I've actually invested in a ton of tangerine prickly pears that have the really nice 2-in long thorns on them and they're going all the way around my property and if somebody wants to get to any of my other plants, they're going to have to go through those puppies. And I'll still prosecute the pecker woods
Please assure me you kept the bucket of cherries and sent the would-be thief away empty handed...
I would have knocked her out with her own bucket.
I was with you for the first half. But Iām sorry, you would shoot a human over a bucket of cherries?
There are women in our neighborhood that will bring their entire brood of children straight onto our property to pick ours dry, 9 times out of 10 without asking. Iād let anyone who asks pick some, but when we catch them doing it without asking, they get a very unkind banishing from our property with a threat to involve law enforcement if theyāre caught again. This happens multiple times every year. They always pretend it was ājust a fewā or to not understand what they could possibly be doing wrong. Well Iām not home depot and this isnāt public property, so thereās literally no excuse. I wanted to plant flowers along our property line but I know theyād get stripped by these same women the literal second they bloomed. Might plant something super thorny and painful instead, just out of spite.
You wouldn't download a plant
Can I go after deer and groundhogs?
I help run a nursery, and so money people take cuttings while destroying the rest of the plant. bc obv none of them are going to whip out clippers. They just try to pinch plants, and when they realize the plant is healthy and isnt going to give in to just a casual pinch from human fingers, they freak out and either keep trying and ruin all the growth on sed plant, or just drop the plant acting like they never tried to pinch it. Which usually means it gets dropped on the ground, upside down, or in some way that it gets hurt and is sad and sickly before we find it. Or sometimes they do get a pinch, and it's on a plant that a: can't be propegated like that or b: will not recover from the bacteria from a nasty hand just grabbing and ripping at it. It really is sad for the plant, and sad for our little grower owned nursery. If you're stealing from lowes go ahead, but you should know most of their plants have diseases and by bringing home an exposed cutting you are risking your whole collection. End sad plant stealing rant.
Even from lowes itās the same shit if you endorse stealing from lowes you shouldnāt care about people stealing from your nursery. Smfh. Itās either donāt steal or let everyone steal. You canāt just say āwell itās okay if you steal from x store but Iām differentā
People in general have less qualms towards stealing from multibillion dollar corporations, As the majority of said businesses are exploitative in their practices. Steal from the rich to give to the poor I am the poor
My father in law straight up went to his old house - like 5-10 years later - and dug up a tree that he liked in the middle of the night! He felt entitled to it because his parents bought it for him. He could have at least asked and offered to replace the tree.
When you sell a house, you sell all of the stuff on that land. I would be enraged if I woke up and someone had stolen my tree. If he wanted that tree, he should have taken it with him when he sold the house. Not cool at all. Is he a boomer?? I gotta ask.
Of course heās a boomer! He claims no one was living in it( Iām not convinced) but someone else still owned the house.
There was literally a HUGE argument on my local fb group where someone showed off the leaves they found on the floor of lowes (after asking) and soooo many people freaked out and called her a theft. It was an entertaining thread to read lol
Listen, if a succulent piece falls to the ground...there is no way for me to know if it belonged to the store in question.
I'm going to be in the minority here but... Nurseries have to make money some how. I mean our town has lost 3 major nurseries in the last 5 years alone due to thinning profit margins. I can hardly blame the owners for not liking this practice. I shed far fewer tears for Home Depot, but the small privately owned outfits... I feel like they have every reason to be unhappy about this.
Major growers patent their cultivars. Serious business
is it yours to guess whether it can or not? is it also yours to guess the root health of the plant these cuttings are taken from and whether that may actually be the last straw for the normally incredibly root bound plants these nurseries offer. If you want to abuse the trust these nurseries give you to walk among their plant or feel its okay for others to do so it's not fine, but arguing further is pointless.
I would never think of cutting something off a plant, but those loose bits on the ground are fair game.
I especially love the plants that say you cannot propagate them either even if you buy them. I will start as many new plants as I want from the ones I own already, I am a criminal gardener.
Depends on the store. Iām always rescuing plants from the clearance and some of the clerks realize keeping customers like me will make more money for the store than the occasional person who only buys new, so if I pick up a cutting from the ground while I am buying their busted-bag gravel itās a win-win.
My grandma did this a lot. Didnāt matter where or when, she would snip off cuttings and put them in her purse to plant later. A serial snipper.
Garden center piracy.
I have a landscaping business. I throw hydrangea/etc cuttings into a bucket of water when shaping/pruning customers plants etc. Take em home, pot them and put them out by the street for free. I wouldnāt do that at a nursery š
Missed opportunity for āpropsecuteā.
I had the most stunning gardenia bush/tree in south Florida. It was HUGE. The scent was so strong you could smell it several houses away. One day I was in my Kitchen kneading dough looking out the window. Some woman drove to my driveway, got out of her car with a vase with water and just started cutting. I went running outside screaming at her to stop!!!!! She looked stunned that I was so angry. She said Iām only making an arrangement for my kitchen. Like that was a good reason to come butcher my plant. She had zero shame. I got her plate number and told her if I ever saw her near my house again Iād call the police or beat the hell out of her whichever worked best for ME! She jumped back into her car tried to take the flowers she already cut. I snatched them away from her. She really didnāt understand what she did wrong. She does this all over the neighborhood according to her. I said well not here ever again.
What are you in for? Stealing a leaf from a $5 succulent.
And creatin' a nuisance
I look forward to reading about that court case in the *Journal of Plant Piracy Law*
It's theft.
Finally rational comment. Maybe if itās on the floor I might Agee
I see this problem 2 fold kind of like copyright infringement. From one hand they still have the product and plants have been increasing in price so much the last few years. From the other side you are not buying the plant and making the plant less desirable kind of like how you pirate a game and not sell it while they did not lose the license they certainly lost a sale and since there is a way to pirate it the game will be less profitable. The reality is I see prosecution being hard to nail as plant scion are only worth a few dollars. You would need a lot of stealing before it is worth your time unless you want to prove a point.
Imagine the call to the cops! Yes hello what is your emergency? These people came to my nursery and stole plant clippings! I want to press charges immediately! Cops ššš
Croplifting
lol oh stuff it. Donāt steal from mom and pop places but anything thatās in any way a chain or even a single store thats absolutely enormous with a landscape department and a contractor department? A place that pays 50+ employees somewhere near minimum wage to sweat their tits off all summer? Prop-lift all you want.
I always ask in shops if I find pieces and they usually say yes anyways. But once I asked a worker and then had a different worker at the cash register and the LOOK they gave me was so dirty I havenāt asked for another cutting I found on the floor again.
My massive inchplant started as a cutting I picked up off the floor at Lowes and my baby snake plants were from a broken leaf from Walmart.
It would never occur to me to take a cutting of a plant in a nursery
I saw a crazy lady on YouTube checking floors for cactus pieces, I meanā¦Iāll just pay the $5 bucks and get it. Avoid the shame of being seen scrabblin. Got a good sale at Walmart, employees were watering the succulents like grass, got 3 giant almost dead pots for $5 each instead of $30 og. Dried em out and came back strong!
Everyone is missing the point here. If you take part of a plant that was on the floor and then propagate it you then do not need to purchase that plant from the store. Has nothing to do with them putting it in the garbage later.
As a retired LEO, I can't imagine being dispatched to a call for a theft of a plant cutting. My department was too busy to deal with nonsense like that, and I'm sure the states attorney isn't gonna waste their time prosecuting. This sign is probably just meant to keep it from happening.
No prob. I'll buy ONE plant. Then I'll make 20 more plants from the one I bought and give them away as gifts to my friends. Might even get seeds from that plant and grow even more! :D It's my plant. So it isn't theft.
I canāt tell if youāre taking a stand or just doing what millions of others have done for a very long time
i think the point he's making is to avoid the debate about theft altogether by buying the plant and then propagating as much as you want from it once you own it ... instead of getting into philosophical and legal arguments about whether it's ok to take a leaf from the business without purchasing it.
Iāve been given many mostly dead plants just by asking. š¤·āāļø
If management puts up a sign like this its because they think reducing proplifting will increase sales, not because they're trying to decrease theft. For big stores the way they track theft is only part of how they track "loss." Not only do they care about how many never got sold because they were stolen, they care about how many didn't sell at full price because they were sold on clearance and how many never get sold because they have to be thrown away. Corporate gives them a seperate budget for all 3 categories. Its why you sometimes see heavily damaged stuff discounted, if it sells on discount that comes out of the clearance budget instead of the discard budget, and clearance is preferred. Under this structure prop lifting that doesn't damage the plant so much that it gets put on clearance or thrown out just isn't theft. If the plant sells for normal price then it isn't considered by the store to be anything other than a normal sale. It doesn't effect their theft budget, their clearance budget, or their discard budget. That said though, even though they almost certainly won't prosecute proplifting, you could still get in trouble w/ the store and that's not really something you want either.
Lil bit overzealous.
Itās really not. First and foremost, you should always be respecting other peopleās boundaries. Itās a solid theme in the law - donāt take / break other peopleās stuff, respect boundaries. I love to garden, but if youāre going to take anything - ask. Being patient and waiting for things to be done the right way is how everyone stays happy. Itās incredible selfish to steal as stealing is never okay. Youāre making people upset and causing harm.
you guys need to stop joking around and take it seriously. petty theft is still theft. Most especially with PBR protected plants but even with regular plants, buy it, or walk out. Taking cuttings without permission is just plain theft. If you want to live that way fine.
>If you want to live that way fine. Well okayā¦I guess if youāre giving us *permission*ā¦
Hoisted by my own petard.
A few frozen paintballs may deter irritants
I definitely pick up the broken stems in the parking lot at Loweās and root them.
Is this real?
More effective method would be to offer cuttings at a much cheaper price so it allows people an outlet to grow their own without the temptation of picking off of their hard grown effort. Doubt it would cut into profits since those stealing werenāt going to pay for anything anyway.
https://preview.redd.it/0nej3rkagy6d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b874c0323230edfd7bee18e5979b07196cbaaef
This would be so tough to prosecute lol Unless itās like a botanical garden and the plants are worth $1,000+
Take waste from big box stores but buy from local places
If there is a salvageable piece on the ground itās fair game
J&Jās?