Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 13, 2020

I have an addiction.

I grew up in quite an anti-waste kind of household. I mean, we never made our own toilet paper or anything, but we tried to be sustainable before being sustainable was cool. My parents are just pretty practical people who just don’t see the point of chucking something into the rubbish when it can be re-used as something else.

Our veggie scraps fed the chooks. Our empty cardboard boxes went to either Treasure Island* or the Early Education Centre** for the youngsters to use in crafts. Beer bottles went to the Scout Hut. And all our old jars were kept under the sink to be taken up to the hospital to be filled with fundraising jam.

* The local pirate-themed childcare centre

** That’s what they called the Prep classroom in my old primary school when Prep was still a whizbang new idea. I think the school got some kind go grant to go in early with that whole prep thing, which meant we were able to turn the weird concrete-heavy storage room under the school from a vague music room to practice our Stations of the Cross arena spectaculars into a legit classroom with actual floor covering. It was a pretty big deal at the time. 

It became habit to save reusable things and it’s something that I haven’t let go as I blossom into my Late Twenties Era.

This is a time when you’re still young and hip enough to end up at da clubz on a night out (well, it’s really only just da one club I end up at and that’s da club that plays the chart topping hits that are at least a decade old…) but mature enough to make your own bread and get the weekend newspapers delivered.

I appointed myself House Sustainability Convenor when I moved in and have introduced a more regimented recycling program. My cooperative housemates have embraced this change, but not to the same extent of me. You see, they put their jars in the recycling box/green bag/whatever receptacle we can fit under the sink ready to be emptied into the wheelie bin with the yellow lid.

But I fish out the old jars, clean them in the dishwasher and save them for other uses. I just can’t leave them there.

It’s like they call to me and I can’t silence their glassy siren calls in my head until I’ve collected them from the recycling. It’s a bit like Frozen 2, except less mysterious and with a shocking lack of ice-inspired diva dresses.

It drives my anti-clutter housemate nuts. She’s big into keeping things neat, tidy and hassle free, so having a bunch of empty jars sitting around the house doesn’t sit will with her. And I mean, we live in a cosy little house with very limited storage. She has a point.

So I make sure to use what I have as quick as I can.

I have a collection of nuts, flours and dried fruits – which I use to make decadent fruit bread because I’m in my late twenties – that I keep in the jars. I have spare jars to keep the honey I bulk buy in three kilo buckets so I don’t have to keep dipping a teaspoon into the vat of stickiness. But I mostly like to use the jars for plant cuttings.

A while ago now I bought this big drippy kind of succulent from a lady who runs a plant stall out front of her house on the Gatton side of Ma Ma Creek. I have no idea what type it is, but it has these long strings of fat, juicy leaves that look like ticks who have had one heck of a feed, except green. They just dangle over the pot in an effortless, artful kind of way. When I moved into this place, I cut off a few danglers – that’s what I call them, but I’m fairly certain that’s the scientific term for them too – from the Mother Plant and shoved them into the pots in the vertical garden the previous owners built to block out the relentless sun from the back deck.

And now they are thriving. Like, I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but it looks like something an Instagram influencer would have.

But they’re thriving to the point now where it’s almost too much.

The danglers are danglin’ so low they’re approaching the ground. So I’ve started clipping off little bits here and there. But, again, because I don’t want to go wasting anything, I don’t just chuck the offcuts away.

I shove them into soil in the salvaged jars and let them take root. I have them lined up on the little plant bench I put on the back deck without prior approval from the house council, and somehow managed to avoid an official infringement notice despite how untidy (or, as I like to say, “homey and rustic”) it can look.

But the problem is that, eventually, you get to have too many cuttings on the bench. There’s only so much room.

So I’ve started insisting people take them with them as very trendy, grown up party bags when they come over to the house. It’s wholesome as all heck and just screams Trendy Late Twenties Chic.

So I try to send people home with some greenery whenever they pop by.

Unfortunately, in These Uncertain Times, we haven’t had too many people popping by lately and the people who do pop by have already got some cuttings or are tired of refusing my plant offerings. And in These Uncertain Times I feel like I’m going through jar-related foods much faster than usual. And I’m not talking just jam or stir fry jars, but bottles of various backgrounds and don’t even get me started on the empty scented candle vessels I have floating around.

Even I’m starting to think it’s a bit much now.

Thankfully, those restrictos are lifting soon.