Formerly Known As the Plastic Cloche Emporium and House of Miscellaneous Pots

Everybody has probably experienced the feeling of seeing something that looks useful, or actually may be useful but not at that moment, then struggling with whether to get rid of it or not. Those of you with garages, attics, or barns each have the experience to a different degree. And those who have hobbies requiring large numbers of objects bigger than a stamp understand that stuff gets collected. Every once in a while, say during the cold and rainy winter months, you get a chance to step back and look at the past 20 years' accumulation of these objects. You have the opportunity to look at them with some sense of perspective. Especially if someone else put them there.

Let's get to the point now. You may or may not be familiar with the idea of season extension. Most often it involves greenhouses, floating row covers, cold frames and such. Back in the 1800's the French Intensive gardening method started using glass bells, each of which would cover one plant, to be able to grow earlier and later in the season. Here is a close view of one I found on a forum about how to start eggplants in Ireland.
One of these cloches for each plant in your garden. Are you starting to see how this could lead to the "large numbers of objects" I referred to earlier? For an even better visual, check out this blog post by Alexis Madrigal on the subject of British food raising in 1918. The photo shows women working with over 200,000 cloches, each covering a single lettuce plant. Wow, huh? You might ask why one would go to the trouble working with multiple tons of glass pieces that are somewhat expensive (especially now) and very breakable, not to mention need to be cleaned occasionally to remain transparent and have to be stored somewhere when not in use. And the answer, of course, would be because they work very well for the purpose, which is to get plants going weeks or months before they would ordinarily be planted. A gold mine for the savvy market gardener or the farmer trying to produce as much as possible.
Ah, but the times have changed, and plastic has altered the season-extension landscape. We have greenhouses covered with flexible and cheap alternatives to glass, and we have plastic milk jugs that are durable and cheap alternatives to the traditional glass cloche. A brief moment for the downsides of this revolution: when carefully attended, glass will last a long, long time, but plastic will turn brittle and opaque with but a few years' exposure to the sun. Then what? It is unusable and becomes junk, or gets recycled into an even less stable form of plastic.
Back to the theme: cloches are helpful, and empty milk jugs are plentiful. So why not collect as many as you can, just in case you might use them later for something? I have one good reason, which is that someone else will eventually come along and have to clean up after you. In this situation we had about 500 cubic feet of milk jugs, some already converted to cloches by having the bottom cut off, some not yet converted, and many so brittle that they broke into a disagreeable number of shards that then had to be swept up.
I'd like you to know that I am not bitter about this. I am writing from a perspective of wisdom, which I would like to share. That is this: don't stockpile useless plastic things for some hypothetical future scenario, no matter how well-intentioned. If you find you want, say, 1,000 plastic milk jugs, call up your local elementary school. Present your idea to a bunch of the classes, and let them know what you hope to achieve. Your cup of milk jugs will runneth over, probably in a matter of days, and you will have captured the imagination of a whole school of children that will be excited for at least a few days about your garden.
Next up are the miscellaneous pots. Anytime you go to the nursery to get a plant, whether it be tomato, spice bush, or maple, it will come in a pot. A plastic one. Somewhere between 2-24” wide and deep. It might be black, it might be red, white, or green. It may be made out of tough plastic, or possible the really weak kind. It may be smooth, or have ridges. In fact, it may have vertical or horizontal ridges. Maybe 8 ridges, or maybe 20 or them. Maybe it will have holes by which to hang it, or maybe flanges by which you can clip a tray on the bottom. It might have indentations set so perfectly that, when stacked with others of its kind, it nests without sticking. But this measure is useless, because whatever it looks like, whatever its attributes, you can be guaranteed that it will be at least subtly different from any other pot you have. As you can see from the picture, this makes for beautiful variety. For effect, I put them all in stacks according to their basic dimensions. And, for the record, there were as many as 8 pots that were actually identical in design. But for each of those matching pots there were three that absolutely refused to nest with another.
All this is great if you are displaying your diversity of potted plants, but if you want to store pots for some other day such variety of design is a waste of space. So we are getting rid of them, giving them to a local nursery that fosters out such pots to more willing owners.
We are finally clearing out all the unwanted and space-stealing plastic from our storage space!

ps.
I kept some of the potential plastic cloche jugs. Just the ones that are in better shape. You know, because somebody might want to try using them sometime in the next couple of years...