They are replacement pieces, not reproductions. I suspect they buy every speck of china they can find, then stock it according to type. I wonder if they have professional estate shoppers or garage sale folks?

Re compost, my last word on it in this thread, but at the Dirt Doctor site their most experience composter says:

You will always get conflicting information on this one. The question is easily misinterpreted by our common use of English.

"Can" you put dog poop in the pile? Yes you "can." It is physically possible to put poop in a pile.

"May" you put dog poop in the pile? Actually, yes you "may" but most people will give the other answer. I will go on to caution you that if you are not getting heat from your pile, then I would not compost the poop. If you can get a hot pile and keep it hot for a couple weeks at a time, then you are an expert enough composter to handle a little dog poop. OR, if you have tons of leaves and you keep the pile relatively moist, then you can probably bury the poop deep in the pile and it will decompose nicely before the leaves do.

Personally I leave my dog's poop on the grass and the flies, pill bugs, and microbes take care of it in 4 days, max (summer time). In the winter the poop lasts about a week but then disappears. With my new dog she's trained to poop back by the compost pile, so no problem on my grass anymore. One nice thing about a Chow-chow is they don't poop anywhere close to where they play or live. They get as far away as they can. In my case that's back by the compost pile.

You will continue to get conflicting info on this question. 99.99% of all the articles written on composting say not to compost meat or the droppings from meat eating animals. Well, don't say anything to Mother Nature but she's been composting meat and meat eater droppings for several billion years. Apparently these article writers missed the event. So everyone who takes these beginner-level articles to be gospel will tell you that you cannot compost meat or carnivore droppings. I have composted several squirrels, several rats, and my golden retriever. Our commercial composters out at Garden-Ville composted over 100 head of cattle, horses, or deer last year. It can be done no matter what anyone else tells you. But again, this is not something beginner composters should be doing.
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David Hall
Moderator
Dirt Doctor Lawns Forum

If there weren't a better way to recycle it, you could "declutter" by putting all of your shredded paper on your compost pile. Also your kitchen scraps. I have a very large yard and I start a new compost pile each year. My compost fits the "high volume and enough water" category, but I often times will torque it up to generate some heat. It takes me probably two years to get back to an earlier pile to spread around, so by then even the slowest compost pile has broken down to a fine dirt look and a forest floor smell (the desirable characteristics in compost).

This all dovetails with the decluttering and recycling that are important. I don't change out flowers every season like you see at the commercial property around town. I tend to save seeds, winter over plants (mulching is a great way to keep things alive from one year to the next) and when I do discard a plant, it goes in the compost. I spend a lot of time digging up stuff in the yard every year so I create some very large compost piles, filled with weeds and dirt on the roots. My mix doesn't strain the recommended formula of 80 percent organic matter and 20 percent animal manure.

On a separate note, it will be interesting if this decluttering we're all working on ends leads one or more of us to finally go ahead and get that fine china cabinet to display the good stuff. With a "less is more" approach, we will have winnowed our collections down to the few really high quality pieces that merit the Mission oak look. ;-)

SRS