Cool. Please share some pics of your rescues.

Love it! I could try this on my lunch half hour... Home Depot is right down the street!

Some of the big box stores like HD now have trash compactors, so there is no open dumpster that you can dive in. WalMart does also, but I've heard sometimes they have an open dumpster near the garden section where they pile everything at the end of the spring season. Here in the Midwest, that's about the end of June.

I do pretty well at the Ace Hardware and the regional farm supply store. They are small enough that they don't have big compactors. Ace Hardware throws out literally hundreds of plastic flats of all types. I collect stacks of them and donate back to a local nursery where I buy my vegetable plants. Keep wishing they'd give me a discount but the point is to recycle, whether I get a reward or not.

Couple years ago the farm supply threw out 20 potted flowering crab trees. I found one that was not broken off and rescued it. Guerilla-gardened it across the street in an empty spot in the tree line of a large school yard. Got to see it bloom this spring - nice!

Yes it's too bad that these places don't even save containers or have the city come pick up the plants for compost or mulch. I'm not sure how I'd feel about things like this if i was a manager at the store, though I do know that like many things in life, once you acquire a few of them, you don't really have the same care and concern about the others. One reason we want these plants (that have been tossed) is that we don't think we have enough of them yet.

I do get some rescue plants because I wanted to learn the ways to revive them, for when I ever actually need them. For example, I'm too chicken to transplant and cut the roots on my orchids before they need it, but with the rescue orchids I found once, I was able to repot and cut roots as needed to try to save them.