Freecycle 2024

If you don’t have a formal freecycling network in your area, you’re still probably engaged in the giving or receiving of goods with no monetary exchange or trade. I love checking out the free section of online classifieds or local Facebook community bulletin boards. Even better are the free piles at yard sales where I have picked up all kinds of things I would have been happy to pay for.

My mum was frugal and loved getting a bargain. When she came to visit and later, during the six years she lived with my partner and me, we spent every Saturday hunting down treasures at garage sales and our local recycling centre and Re-Store. When my mum saw how much free stuff I hauled home (I used to have a pickup truck) she encouraged me to keep a list. I’ve been doing that since 2013. The first few years were kind of slow, but in 2016 things took off: I started picking up unsold produce at our local food recovery program and from a grocery store in the town where I work, and I was more proactive on the trail of freebies.

For me, it’s a combination of upcycling things that might otherwise be destined for the landfill, cutting my budget and the thrill of the hunt. There’s something of a rush when you find just what you are looking for, and for free. If I end up not using it I pass it along to someone else – for free.

I’m also a habitual list maker. Even as a kid I had a written catalogue of all my Halloween candy and would carefully amend the numbers as I munched through my stash. This post is a mashup of those two pursuits. If you’ve followed my year-end freecycle posts you’ll notice that I’ve made lots of small scores but also some big ones like a microscope complete with supplies to do fecal float testing, car canopy shelters or best of all, chickens.

Keeping poultry is relatively inexpensive, but the costs can add up: birds, housing, feed, shavings, equipment, first aid supplies and vet bills. There are some things that you can’t eliminate, but there are ways to trim your spending.

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Here are some of my chicken-related scores from the past year:

For years I’ve been able to get beautiful dry planer shavings from the local Timberframe Building School. Sadly, the owner retired last year and I thought my steady supply of coop bedding might dry up. This year I’ve been lucky as they are preparing their timber for sale, which requires planing the beams. I went over to the place several times (luckily they are located around the corner from my house). They have a large lightweight shovel perfectly suited for the job so I was able to load up in a short time and since the shavings were light it wasn’t an arduous job on a hot summer day.  Total bags = 89 

• 89 bags of planer shavings
• 16 buckets ashes (dust bath)
• An endless supply of egg cartons
• 2 auto coop doors, 2 rubber stamps, nest box pads, nest box herbs, egg candler
• Box elastic bands (for egg cartons)
• 2 garden gates
• 180 totes of unsold produce through my island’s food recovery program

• 86 packages of veggie burgers/hotdogs and falafels and 26 packages tofu (protein and calcium)
• 26 containers of yoghurt, cottage cheese, kefir (calcium)
• 11 bags bulk nuts/seeds
• 2 cases of sunflower seeds in shell; 13 lbs of shelled sunflower seeds
• 18 lbs peanuts in shell
• 1 bag mixed nuts
• 140 cans and 15 bags of dog and cat food (donated by my local vet)

Samples of cat food from a local pet store. I donated most of them to a cat rescue group but kept these one made from black soldier flies for my flock.

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In the summer of 2023, I was approached by a manufacturer of automatic coop doors and asked if they could send me one of their doors to test. As it turned out it wasn’t a quality product and I was unable to write a positive review. It did, however, spark my interest in asking various companies to see if they would be willing to send me some of their products in exchange for an honest review. Many companies didn’t bother to respond or just said, ‘No, thanks’, but some did and I am most appreciative to have received automatic coop doors from Omlet and Run-Chicken, rubber stamps for eggs and egg cartons, My Favourite Chicken nest box pads and herbs, and a Brinsea Egg Candler. 

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Technically these may not count as freecycle finds as they are gifts, but I wanted to include the T-shirt I received for my 30th anniversary at work.

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This one is a bit of trade, though an unexpected one. I got a call from a community member asking if I could do a consultation with him regarding his coop and set up and maybe give him some flock management tips. I happily do those things for free so I was surprised when he offered me ‘payment’ in return. He owns the local cannabis shop and put together some products for me to sample. I was curious to use those with CBD for pain. It turns out the LoFi drops are great for sleep and have been taking them for months. I have written a post on cannabis use in chickens, and would have to do a bit more research about the dosage amounts for managing pain.

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Here’s a good example of both giving and receiving:  In 2020 I rescued Tarek as a young cockerel to save him from the soup pot. A year ago, I gave him to my friends Tracy and Keith as they had just lost their rooster of six years (also originally one of mine). He was a great boy but I was looking to change up the genetics in my flock. I kept a cockerel, Hank, that I had hatched from another friend, Carol’s eggs. He carries both blue and dark brown egg genes (Isbar X Black Copper Marans). He, too, was a good rooster but a bit too big for my small standard size hens. Hank went off to live with Romela on seven acres with a flock of his own. Tracy and Keith had one hatch this year and having lots on their plate at the time I offered to help from homes for their four surplus cockerels. As it happens, one of them was a spitting image of his dad, Tarek, so I ended up adopting him. He doesn’t carry the blue egg gene but he’s gentle and on the small side so I think he’ll fit in well with my flock of 30 hens.  

Tarek (left) and his as-yet unnamed son (right)

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The next best thing to being given chickens is hatching eggs. I was gifted a couple of dozen from three different friends as well as two chicks to offer one hen whose eggs didn’t hatch after sitting diligently for over three weeks.

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If you have a freecycle story you’d like to share drop me a line using the ‘contact’ button on my homepage.