Ohio State Fair

Weekly visits to Chicago have not left much time for gardening or day trips for us. Luckily, Pat and I found ourselves back home during the Ohio State Fair. It is BIG! HUGE! GARGANTUAN! We saw a giant cow made from butter and a giant pig and piglets made from chocolate. We visited the various animal barns and discovered marketing at its best. You can visit cows in the cow barn and then eat them at a steak stand. You can visit the pigs in the pig barn then eat sausage at a sausage stand. Outside the hose barn there was an iced tea stand. After all, we are civilized carnivores in Ohio.

The arts and crafts barn was a cornucopia of stuff. Quilts, duck tape creations, cakes, preserves. There was a vegetable and fruit carving competition while we were there. One of the barns had flower arrangements. I find flower arrangement amazing. I can barely grow flowers, let alone create designs.

Pat and I walked around the fair for 3 hours and found ourselves at the opposite end from where we started. It was a good thing that there was a gondola ride to take us back to where we started.

Since we were heading down to Columbus, we thought why not make a detour to our favorite nursery? Scioto Gardens, in Delaware, Ohio, specializes in plants native to Ohio. They grow all the plants they sell and have an enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff. The young man who helped us last month remembered us and our plant selection. That is really good customer service, or else he knows the signs of a plant addict. Either way, I knew we would leave happy. I even kept the receipts from the last couple of visits so I could use the plants’ actual names when I blogged about them. Alas, we are visiting the grandkids in California and the list is in Ohio, so the post on our new plants will have to wait.

I am an urbanated individual. My knowledge of farm animals extends to knowing that you eat them, after you buy them at a grocery store. So when we came across the chicken barn I found Foghorn Leghorn across the aisle from Mr. Black Chicken.