I asked at Wegmans and the Giant. The Giant gave me a quick no. Wegmans appeared amenable at first when they mentioned that they used to save the spoiling produce for local pig farmers. But after I showed up several times to fill out a form that noone could seem to find they lost interest in helping me. The last time I asked they gave me the story that in order to give me the spoiling produce they would need my tax id number, presumably causing me to be liable for taxes on their waste. That turned me off to Wegmans for collecting compost materials. I did place a bin outside of my local Starbucks that the manager agreed to allow to be filled with excess bags of used coffee grounds. She was very reasonable and only asked that I provide the container (a 32 gallon trash can). Unfortunately for me she also told everyone else who showed up for coffee grounds to take them from my bucket, but I still do have a chance of getting up to 6 bags of grounds at a time. That is, if others don't beat me to it. I figure, at the very least, I am stopping more coffee grounds from heading to the landfill with my bucket (since they used to only keep a max of two bags until they went straight into the dumpster), even if its not me who gets them. Cheers, Kyle

But, as I posted previously, I called Amex (well, actually, it's a 3rd party Amex, so it was really FIA Card Services) and was told that it had been a common occurence at a handful of retailers, that Lowes _was_ one of them, and that it was, indeed a "sham" card read error. Merely designed to discourage you from using the card because of a non-competitive merchant fee. This particular card is only a few months old and works just fine at all other merchants. It isn't the card. And the chances that card readers at two different Lowes just "randomly" started having issues with this card, in the same week, are astronomically small. Somehow I'm not surprised Lowes in involved, because they's always been non-standard in their handling of credit cards. At least on the east coast, until recently the checker always had to enter, manually, the last 4 digits of the card. Any card - Visa, Mastercard, or Amex. Going all the way back to the end of the manual charge card era (yes, I'm old enough to remember that) I've never known ANY other merchant requiring that. My guess is Lowes uses some off-name, discount pay processor that nobody else uses, and they are the ones who have some issue negotiating a merchant fee with Amex or FIA. The other people might not have had a bad experience because they were using "real" Amex cards; though I'm not sure if the back-end transaction belongs to Amex or FIA. (in other words, Amex has now licensed their name and numbering scheme to cards that really are credit cards, mine is the Fidelity one that offers 2% cashback. I suppose it is possible that with certain accounts, the processor tries to exctract part of the cashback out of the merchant fee. In other words the problem isn't mere that it is a 3rd party Amex, but that it's a 3rd party Amex with a good cashback program. I've never carried a balance so I've made a lot of money using it.) This post was edited by davidrt28 on Mon, Dec 29, 14 at 9:48

I like the idea of some pebbles around the surface. You could offer some more attractive alternatives. You can make a little pile of things that would be good for their nest. There are lots of ideas on the 'net. The birds here seem to love that leftover coco liner from last year's hanging containers. Since it's usually of no use to me a second year, I don't mind them taking what they want.

I have been having trouble posting images. It uploads fuzzy and if I hit submit before it clears (it has been remaining fuzzy) the post disappears. The last few days I have to exit a thread and try again. Sometimes I have to walk away and try again later before it goes through. Did your post include a photo?