Botanical Garden

It is day #2 of my mom's visit, and we decided to go visit the botanical garden. It was a beautiful sunny day and perfect to go walking around. It was however not the perfect day to go there because they had a charity fundraising walk-a-thon type event going on and it was a madhouse there. We walked around and looked at all the tulips, lilacs, cherry trees, dogwoods, azaleas and it was beautiful.

We got back to a vegetable garden demonstration area where people were working outside. One of the ladies asked me if I would like to have some of the flower plants, because they were getting ready to till up an old neglected bed to plant some vegetables. May as well ask me if I still want to keep breathing! So they dug us up some day lilies, poppies, oxalis and sweet william and put them in plastic grocery bags to carry out.

In case you didn't know, the soil in Alabama is clay. Heavy, dense clay that turns hard as a rock when it is dry like it has been. When they dug up the plants there was a substantial amount of dirt on them. We picked up the bags and started walking back to take them to the car. Before too long it felt like my arms were getting pulled off. The handles on the bags started stretching. We made it to a park bench and sat down to rest. We started off again and made it a little farther and the handles on the bags started breaking. We stopped at another more secluded park bench and decided that something had to be done. So we pulled out the clumps and started knocking off big clods of dirt to lighten up the loads.

We finally made it out, although there was a brief period of time where I was afraid we were going to get tackled as we left since it looked like we were carrying ill-gotten gains. We went out to eat afterwards and then went home. We stopped by the quilt shop and both left with more fabric than we needed to. Tomorrow: On to the nursery and pond store!