Plants Galore!

Yesterday I went to the quarterly Harris County Master Gardner Plant Sale. My friend Erin and I have a tradition of going to this particular sale because of the quality of the plants. I got there about 10 minutes early, thinking I would beat the Saturday morning crowd. Little did I know people had been in line since 7 am, which put me around number 300. This was fine with me since I live in an apartment and am not in the market for large quantities of plants.

At 9 am the air horn blew and I felt like I was in middle of a stampede. People charged into the pavilion with their little red radio flyer wagons (issued by the MGs) bouning behind. I stood there in wonder looking at the chaos before me, people fighting over fruit trees, little children left behind by tomato-crazed parents, until the old lady behind smacked me with her cane and told me to get a move on before her prized peppers were gone. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to enter the building….did I want to my obituary to read “trampled by a Texan fruit tree in transit”?

I always have good luck at their sales so I went for it. After standing in line for 20 minutes and finally getting into the tomato/pepper tent (crammed with 80 people and an equal amount of wagons) I grabbed what I could and stumbled out to the checkout line.

I finally met up with Big Erin (Erin is not that big, actually she is rather petite Unfortunately, she got stuck with the name to decipher her from little Erin). We also met up with Lonnie ( who was accompanied by her two-year old daughter) and we proceeded to stand in line over an hour to check out.

We made it to the checkout right as it started to rain and were soaked by the time we got back to the car. I ended up spending $8.00. I purchased a California green pepper plant, a banana pepper plant, and jumbo pepper plant (the peppers are up to ½ lbs) and an eggplant.

Was it worth two hours, some cash and a few bruises from the retired locals…probably not, last year the neighbor kids ate all the peppers off my plant….