In Which My Name Is Jess And I'm A Gardenholic

My mom (my parents are currently up for a visit) and I went shopping for a flower pot today.  Big mistake.

See, my mom and I have a problem.  We are garden junkies.  We will spend hours and hours happily tooling around plant nurseries, filling our baskets with unusual specimens that we have no room for in our already stuffed flower beds but determined to squeeze them in anyway.  Since my backyard is pretty large and, other than a large collection of overgrown shrubs is relatively empty, I have completely lost all sense of restraint when it comes to plants, and Mom is my happy enabler.  We spent a good hour this morning planting the remnants of my last frienzed plant buying trip (in which I bought my entire herb garden along with several ornamental plants) and had an azalea left over that we thought would look really good on our deck if it was in a nice ceramic pot.

So in the afternoon Mom and I casually mentioned to Jeremy and my dad that we were popping down to the local Target to buy a single flower pot.  We said we'd be gone about twenty minutes-- half an hour at the most.  The guys would have been completely justified in rolling their eyes at that statement. 

Three hours later we returned home with three flower pots, a small bag of chocolates, a shower curtain liner, a chicken (the dead to-be-cooked kind, not the live squwaking kind) and several large flats of plants.  "I thought you just got finished planting stuff!" my dad said.  Jeremy just shook his head.

But see, we had a totally logical explanation for this.  We didn't see any flower pots we liked at Target, but I did need a shower curtain liner for the guest bathroom so we got that, and then we had to pop into the mall (which the Target is connected to) and grab some chocolate for everybody at the candy store.  I remembered that one of the local grocery stores had some flower pots that looked pretty good a couple of weeks ago, so we got back in the car and drove over there.  So far so good.

We got out of the car, walked up to the front of the store, and this is when things started to go south.  They'd fenced one whole side of the outside of the store and turned it into a garden area.  Green, happy plants just begging to be taken home with us were everywhere.  They'd just gotten a huge shipment of plants in that all looked extremely healthy, and Mom and I were already drooling when we saw that they had a large table of quart-sized perennials on sale for a dollar.

"I'll grab a cart," said Mom.  We were totally lost.

So we got about fifteen different kinds of perennials, with a few annuals thrown in for good measure.  How could we possibly pass up such a good deal?  Of course some of them would look great on the deck, which meant we needed some more flower pots. 

We threw the chicken in the cart on the way to the checkout line inside for good measure.  We had to put it in the bottom, though, because the top was so full of plants.  This might be an indication I have a wee bit of a problem.  But don't worry, I could quit gardening at any time if I wanted to.  I swear.

Like tomorrow, for instance.  We didn't find any potting soil at the grocery or at Target when we went out today, so we're just going to pop down to the local home improvement store really quickly to pick up a single bag.  We won't be gone long; it'll take twenty minutes.

Half an hour at the most.

~Jess