Free plants at Curbside -- Mailing

I've had quite a few people email me requesting that I mail them plants.

As part of ongoing garden maintenance, some plants need to be "divided" occasionally (like Irises), and some just throw up whole new plants ("volunteers") almost as if they were weeds (like Chives). Most people just chuck these scraps into the compost heap and be done with it -- I take the trouble to drop them in an old leftover pot and put it on the street and put a photo on my webpage.

Now, please, think for a moment about what you're asking when you ask me to mail you some of them. Remember that I'm just another computer programmer with a day gig that happens to take his garden seriously and has a complete inability to discard anything that's still good <grin!>...

• I am not a licensed nursery business -- it's almost certainly illegal for me to ship plant material across state lines
• I don't just happen to have a stack of boxes in my basement that are just right for shipping plants -- I'd have to go to a store that sells boxes and buy them
• The UPS/Fedex truck doesn't just happen by my door every day -- I'd have to go wait in line at the Post Office for you
• Wet dirt is heavy -- it's expensive to ship
• Plants shipped in normal garden soil like these leftovers are sure to dry up and die in shipping -- the pros grow their plants for mail-order in special stuff like indoor potting soil
• All of these plants' parents were purchased from normal old nurseries in the Seattle area -- very few of them are at all rare
• Few of those parent plants had a price more than a buck or two -- it would cost far more than that to ship them to you