I have never seen a plant sale like the Friends School Plant Sale. It was like a cross between a plant sale and ticket sales for a hot rock concert. The sale started at 11:00AM and my friend Martha, her baby and I arrived at the State Fair grounds by 9:00AM, by no means the first to arrive. We brought my bike trailer/double stroller to hold the plants. We walked up to the entrance and were given wristbands with a group number. “You are Blue 10,” the lady told us. “Plan to be back here around 11:15 to be admitted with your group.”

We hung around with all the other excited would-be plant buyers for two surprisingly fast-moving hours eating fair food, chatting and admiring the interesting contraptions people had brought to hold their plants. There were wagons with milk crates held on by bungee cords, homemade carts and even a tri-level PVC contraption with sleds for shelves. These people meant business!

Before long the man with the bullhorn ordered the Blue 10s “into the chute.” We would be the next group allowed to enter the building.

The sale was worth the wait. The entire Minnesota State Fair grandstand was filled with plants of every type. There were perennials, annuals, native plants, grasses, bushes and shrubs, herbs and vegetables. Martha and I were primarily focused on vegetables, herbs and shrubs, so we stuck to those areas.

I was like a kid in a candy store. My mom had sent me $100 to spend on plants, so I was feeling free with the money. They had aisles of tomatoes, peppers and basil and odd herbs and vegetables I had never heard of. Martha and I decided to split a few packages of things we wanted to experiment with.

In the end we left with a cartload of plants. I got three kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of peppers, three kinds of basil, lavender, thyme, rosemary, pineapple mint, orange mint, tarragon, epazote, oregano, sorrel, ground cherries and an unusual purple Asian herb I had never heard of before. It’s supposed to taste kind of like cinnamon. They recommended it for spring rolls, which I love to make. I may be forgetting something, but that was the bulk of it. The best part is that I didn’t spend anywhere near the entire $100 I had to spend.

This is definitely going to be a tradition from now on.