10th Annual Garden & Art Expo

Bachman Community Center’s tenth annual Garden and Art Expo is scheduled for April 26 from 9 am to 3 pm. At this printing, planning is ongoing and changes and additions are in the works to make this event even bigger, more interesting, and more exciting.

The Expo is your chance to add valuable and often unique plant materials to you garden in a convenient one-stop shopping spree. Trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, annual flowering and vegetable plants will be there for your choosing. At least one new native plant vendor will join our returning plant societies and nurseries. Native plants are a wise choice for both the gardener and the environment.

Also new this year, several of our Signal Mountain farmers and local artisan vendors will be selling local produce, grass fed beef, free range eggs, fresh cheese and unique crafts.

MAGI (the Mountain Arts Guild) will again exhibit and sell the works of their talented artist members. This is your opportunity to purchase original art at very affordable prices. Many artistic mediums will be represented including oil, acrylic, water color, and constructions. Wonderful juried crafts will be represented as well as the fine arts.

For the first time, The Expo will host a food truck. Food trucks are a hot trend in the culinary world offering menus not available at brick and mortar restaurants in the area. Mountain Waffle Wagon food truck will serve both breakfast and lunch providing sustenance to hungry shoppers and vendors. Signal Mountain resident Bruce Smith is the chef-owner who prepares both sweet and savory waffle creations. The popular S’more topped with chocolate ganache and the southern staple, buttermilk fried chicken and waffles, are among the items on the menu. Mayfly coffee and several flavors of Sioux City Soda are popular beverage items available for purchase. Be sure to check it out during the Expo.

Entertaining and educational seminars will include happenings at the Chattanooga Arboretum and Nature Center and a program to help residents deal with the dreaded hemlock wooly adelgid that is destroying the eastern hemlock trees from Maine to Georgia and Alabama. This threat has already killed many hemlocks on the mountain and the surrounding area.

Another new feature of this year’s Expo is the Green Elephant Sale. This is recycling at its best! Flower pots, gardening books, magazines, tools, and repurposed items that can be used in the garden will be for sale. All of these items will need new homes, and all of the proceeds will benefit BCC. Please call the center if you have Green Elephant items to donate. 423-886-4842

Plans are ongoing for including a honey bee demonstration hive. Come see the inner workings of a bee hive without the stinging. Weather will be the deciding factor to the inclusion of this demonstration. At any rate, local honey will be for sale to benefit the Center.