To say it has been cold here is an understatement. Yes, I know that plenty of places are much colder and covered in snow, so what! We moved south to escape snow and frigid temperatures and the last two weeks have been brutal here. So rather than dwell on the cold or debate who has it worse and all that, let’s just look at photos from the fall taken out at the Demonstration Garden in Ellington Ag Center. Before the frost. When it was still warm… Mexican Sage in bloom.
Love the fuzzy blooms, so do the bees.
Vietnamese coriander in bloom. So delicate and tiny.
The swamp monster that tried to eat the garden-Swamp sunflowers in bloom
The swamp sunflowers were about 8 feet tall and they are spreading out. Don’t they look beautiful with the Burning Bushes?
Want to plant something that bees and hummingbirds love? Fill your garden with salvias and one of my favorites is Pineapple Sage. The leaves smell like a pineapple lifesaver candy when you rub them and they are edible meaning you can use them as you would most other edible herbs. Honey bees love them and if you have a colony nearby, you might just find enough of them in it to make the whole plant buzz and vibrate. Hummingbirds will visit them too but only if they stay in your area through the fall. Pineapple sages tends to put this show on late in the season and this was taken around the first week of November.
Just look at those pollen baskets!
We built this out at the Bee Garden and we are hoping that beneficial insects are nesting here.
This garden is just full of color and blooms.
Our climate here allows for tropical plants to grow and thrive during the warmer months but the fruit never has a chance to mature and ripen.
We can only dream about bananas; these did not make it and were killed by frost shortly after I took the photos but while it was blooming, the wasps and bees loved the nectar and pollen.
This update is a little late but if you are wondering how the garden is coming along, here it is! When we finally had our hard frost a few weeks ago, I went out and spent the day cleaning and harvesting what I could.
In my effort to add visual interest, I have added a bottle tree and the white metal baskets are a project in the works.
Our hens have really helped us improve the soil and control insects. These are two of our young hens; a Black Australorp and an Americauna, who is also our only green egg layer.
She really is a sweet bird but she is also a bit shy and the other hens tend to bully her a bit.
These are a couple of the old girls. We brought our Golden Laced Wyandottes with us when we moved here from Virginia. They aren’t laying much anymore now that they are over 2 years old but they still help out by providing us with manure and by eating insects.
The iridescent feathers on the Australorps are beautiful when the sun hits them. The hens wander the outside of the garden in their tunnels and they are safe from hawks and our plants are safe from the hens!
This pretty lady, an 
Because I was curious, I looked up information about her and discovered that this little brown ball is actually an egg sac. Each one can contain about a thousand live babies who will over winter in the sac. As I cleaned up the bed of flowers where she was living, I discovered three of these egg sacs! In the hope of having another spider or two next year, I carefully moved the sacs and placed them in the beds with our fig trees.
Early in the spring, I planted a number of perennial flowers and herbs around the garden. At that time, I also planted an artichoke. It has gotten large and if it survives the winter, I am hoping for chokes!
Cabbage heads are looking good.
We harvested most of the broccoli for Thanksgiving dinner and froze what we did not cook. Because we only cut the top heads off, we left the plants in the ground so that they would produce side shoots of smaller heads. If all goes according to the plan, we will be picking broccoli through the winter.
When we were in Virginia, I planted Tokyo market turnips for the first time. They are smaller than the typical turnips found in grocery stores. At last check, they were nearing maturity and I am looking forward to roasting a few!
Cardoon looks a lot like an artichoke. The difference, chokes or the flower, are the only edible part of an artichoke while both the flower and the stalk are edible on a cardoon. Actually, the stalk is more commonly consumed and it requires a long simmer to soften the extremely tough fibers.
The stalks look like celery on steroids and they are just as tough as you would imagine. And then there are the spines; they are every bit as sharp as they look!
Handle the stalks with care and be sure to cut them off before you try to cut and cook the stalks.
All around the garden are little pops of color in the form of violas, one of my favorite plants.
Love this color combination.
Part of the clean up meant gathering tomatoes, both ripe and green. If you are considering planting tomatoes, give these little yellow gems a try. They are called Barry’s Crazy Cherry and they can be found in the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog.
Late in spring, we put a watermelon plant into the garden. Hoping for a few melons to share with the hens, we were disappointed by how slowly the plants grew. This was the largest of three melons. The first one that we cut into was white inside, it became some really nice pickles. The other two are still waiting to be cut and we are hoping for better luck!
Entering a competition at the State Fair is as American as an apple pie, much like the one in the photo above. And while I realize that the 2017 Tennessee Fair is old news, I really wanted to share these photos. Actually, I have been missing in action (blame it on the job) and thought I should get my act together and start posting some of the photos that I have taken.
Dusk is the best time to visit the fair. It is not as busy and the lighting is perfect, even when you are taking photos of lights.
As members of the Master Gardeners, we always find ourselves at the fair and working in the MG booth but we make time to walk around and see as much as we can. This year, we did not work the booth but we spent some time there with friends who were visiting from Germany.
As adventurous as I am, and I am-I love a good roller coaster, this ride terrifies me. The thought of dropping like a rock, straight down to the ground…If you need me, I will be out here with a camera, watching you drop like a rock.
This type of ride doesn’t thrill me either-too intense and too much round and round and round…
Ferris wheels can be fun, guarantees a great view of the fair.
This one made me dizzy just watching it.
And then there is the real reason I was at the fair. On a whim, I decided to enter several competitions. This was the first time I entered a canning competition and I entered a jar of my 
Another competition I entered was the chess pie contest, this one, a 
Here are the judges tasting my apple pie. Long story short, I didn’t win, place or show. At the end of the day, I have a pretty good idea of what is expected and I will be better prepared for next year.
will garden for cake 