It's not fall in Miami until Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden hosts its annual edible garden festival and scarecrow contest.
Cooking demonstrations, sponsored by Whole Foods Market will be held both days, so you can prepare healthy meals and desserts using the items you've just grown.
If you're the impatient type, a farmer's market will allow you to purchase fresh local fruits, vegetables, and herbs to take home and use right away. In addition, you can buy plants and seedlings and pick out a pumpkin from the patch set up at the festival. Pumpkin babysitters will watch your pumpkin until you're ready to leave so you don't have to schlep your new orange family member around all day.
Note, the pumpkin we purchased at last year's festival lasted so long outside the house we put a Santa hat on it.
This year, the garden is setting up a fall beer garden, filled with ciders and spicy seasonal ales for your enjoyment.
But the best part of the edible garden festival has got to be the scarecrow contest and the Halloween decorations hidden along the garden's paths. Each year, Fairchild employees turn palm fronds into ghosts, coconuts into scary spiders, and plants into witches that are so creative and crafty, they would make Martha Stewart fume with jealous rage.
The Edible Garden Festival is open 9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Saturday October 20 and Sunday, October 21. Admission is free for members, $25 for adults, $18 for seniors, $12 for children 6-17, and free for kids 5 and under. Walk, ride your bike, or take public transportation, take $5 off admission for adults, $2 for kids. Active military get into the garden free.
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