For my fourth installment participating in Emily’s Green Week I’ve got a little story to share with you. Oh, and a few green photos too.
Do you ever go into a store and come out with so much more than you planned? I do that at Ikea. I go in for tea lights and come out with a shopping cart full of God knows what. I get home and I’ve got a ladle, candle holder, picture frame, dog bowl, glasses, cutting board, napkins, wrapping paper, bamboo, etc., etc. It never fails, it happens every time.

This week I had a similar experience at Lowes, a home improvement store. I went in for a bag of potting soil and came out with $600 worth of plants. Now mind you, I did not buy any of the plants and I did not steal them either. As I was loading the kids into the car, without the potting soil because they didn’t have the organic variety I was looking for, several people began loading plants into my car. They were taking plants off of these seven foot high rolling carts. There were signs on the cart that had the actual retail value ($594). That price was marked out and $10 was circled. There were begonias, geraniums, this and that. All kinds of plants were being pulled off of the shelves. You could buy an entire cart valued at $600 for $10. I quickly made a mad dash back inside to purchase my own gigantic cart of red geraniums.
Supposedly a freeze had come through the night before and some of the plants were damaged. I guess one yellow leaf makes a plant unworthy of selling because my cart might have had five yellow leaves in the entire group. Makes you think about all of the plants that must be discarded on a regular basis.

It only took us two trips back and forth from the store to get all of the plants home. Makena and I spent the past two days attempting to dig holes in our rocky dirt to no avail. So we moved on to ‘landscape design’ and placed all of the plants around the yard to wait for Miles to come home and dig some holes for us.

It was dark by the time Miles got home. So there we were, two lovers in the moonlight planting the 10,000 geraniums and whatchamacallits in the garden. Miles was the digger, I was the planter. It really is a good thing we live in the country because if we had close neighbors, they would think we are crazy. Oh what the heck, we are crazy. And you know what? That has to be one of my favorite memories living in this house… and it was only yesterday. As taurus, the big dipper and the little dipper watched over us we talked about life, jobs, family, and everything in between. We talked about why the dirt is hard in this one spot, but one foot over it’s perfect soil. We talked about our dreams, our kids and how absolutely beautiful it was outside.
We’ve managed to plant about $250 worth of plants and have run out of room. The rest of the plants will be handed out to helpless victims. I only hope that when they plant them, they plant them under the stars at night. You should try it, it’s a life changing experience.