My first Freecycle

Well, after listening to Cheryl go on and on :-) about all her great freecycle "things" --I looked and found a Chattanooga freecycle. I just knew with the great items Cheryl was picking up that I must be missing some really good stuff. So, I joined a while back --but hadn't really needed anything that was offered (or was to late seeing it to get it). As of today though, I have finally gotten my first item--I am an almost official freecycler (official will be when I have something to offer I believe). Actually it is more than one thing--it is 80 things. Since posting about the canning I decided that with as big as a garden as I was aspiring to----I would probably need more canning jars than I currently own. So I put a "wanted" ad on freecycle. Well my first reply (only one so far) netted me 76 canning jars and 4 fig tree cuttings. Yes, the man was very nice---and with my interest in his figs, gave me four cuttings. So, since figs do generally root fairly easily---hopefully this next year will see me with 4 new trees. I love figs! My favorite way is with homemade focaccia with marscapone/mascarpone cheese and dried figs stuck down in the cheese and cooked. Yum.
AND lucky me I had a bed area all prepped for them. It was where I thought I wanted my asparagus to go this next year so I had dumped manure on it earlier this fall. Then put leaves on it when I received so many from the city drop off. Now those figs have a lovely lovely spot to reside in (and the asparagus has a new different lovely spot) and I have my fingers crossed they will like it A LOT.
Figs are suppose to grow here in my area, but the two small rooted cuttings I brought from my last house barely did anything and ended up dying on me. I have to admit----I didn't plant them in the best soil. Of course I didn't know it was some of the worst soil we have when we moved here. It is only after most everything planted in that area struggled to die (yes---struggled to die) that we realized it was. We are working on that problem but I felt the figs would be better in the prepped area than in the "other, less nice" area even if the "other, less nice area" gets more heat and sun (exactly what figs like--heat and sun).
I don't know what variety these figs are but I will hedge a guess that they are probably brown turkey. A very cold hardy and proliferate fig that is commonly grown in this area---and a lot of other areas around the country.
The original owner of this house had a fig right off our back porch to shade the sliding doors during the summer. With the south face and brick wall supposedly it was almost as tall as our two story house! And almost as wide. Now I would have loved to see that BUT the summer before we bought the house it was ripped out since it had been planted on top of the septic leach field and it plugged up the lines. No wonder it grew so big!! I did see the massive amounts of canned figs they had when we were looking at the house so obviously they were using it to it's fullest extent.
Well, in regards to my original freecycle quest: hopefully I will get more canning jars. And every so often I think I will re ask. Better to do it now than this summer when everyone else will want them too. The early bird gets the worm they always say. Now I just have to figure out where to store all of these new jars.