Events for Asheville homeowners

Every renovation leaves a shelf of things you can’t put in the trash. Half-used paint and stain, deck sealer, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals, old fluorescent tubes, automotive fluids. They sit in the garage for years because there’s nowhere obvious to take them.

Buncombe County runs free collection days at the landfill on selected Tuesdays, 9 AM to 3 PM, and it’s genuinely the easiest errand on this list. Load the garage shelf into the trunk and go.

A few things worth knowing before you drive out:

• Residents only. This is a Buncombe County service.
• Leave things in original containers where you can, so staff can identify what’s in them.
• Latex paint isn’t hazardous waste — it can be dried out with kitty litter and thrown away. Oil-based paint is a different story and belongs here.
• Call (828) 250-5462 if you’re unsure whether something qualifies.

Dates shift year to year, so confirm on the county schedule before you load up.

Mountain winters are hard on houseplants. Short days, dry forced-air heat, and big swings between a sunny window and a cold pane of glass will take out a fiddle leaf fig faster than neglect ever could.

This class covers the fundamentals — watering, light, soil, pest control, repotting, and a quick look at propagation — with staff who sell these plants year-round and know what actually survives in a local house. Every ticket includes a 4-inch potted plant to take home.

Worth an afternoon if you’ve killed more plants than you’d like to admit, or if you’re setting up a new place and want to start with something that lives.

Most landscape money gets wasted in the first month, before anything is planted. A slope nobody read correctly, drainage running the wrong direction, a bed laid out where the afternoon sun cooks it — those are design problems, and no amount of good plant material fixes them later.

This two-session course at the North Carolina Arboretum works through design principles, site assessment, and planning, with time on sustainable landscaping and permaculture practice. The goal is judgment: being able to look at your own lot and evaluate whether a plan is any good.

Useful whether you’re doing the work yourself or hiring it out. Homeowners who understand site assessment ask sharper questions and get better proposals from the landscape designers they bring in.

Both sessions are required — this is one course split across two Fridays, not a pair of standalone classes.

Bad pruning is one of the few landscape mistakes you can’t walk back. Top a tree, cut flush to the trunk, or take a shrub down at the wrong point in its cycle, and you’re living with it for years.

This three-hour Extension workshop covers the biology behind why cuts heal the way they do, when to prune what, the actual techniques and styles, and how to pick and maintain tools. It’s a demonstration format, run by N.C. Cooperative Extension’s Buncombe County Center, and it’s aimed at green industry professionals — which makes it a genuinely technical session rather than a homeowner overview.

At $20, it’s the cheapest way in the region to stop guessing. Worth noting: for anything large, mature, or near a structure, this class will mostly teach you which jobs belong to a tree service — and that’s a useful thing to learn before you get on a ladder.

This one is narrower than a general home show, and that’s the point. If you’re building a log or timber frame home, renovating one, or trying to restore a log structure that’s been sitting on a mountain lot for forty years, this is the weekend where the specialists are all in one building.

Sessions cover floor plan design, budgeting, and financing, plus the comparison most people come in undecided on: full log versus timber frame. You can put hands on actual products and materials rather than working from a catalog.

Log homes are a real segment of the WNC market and they don’t behave like conventional construction — settling, chinking maintenance, and finish schedules are their own discipline. Talking to people who do only this is worth the drive to Fletcher.

January is when most people finally admit the kitchen needs doing. This show lands right in that window, which is exactly why it’s useful: you can talk to twenty remodelers, landscapers, and design outfits in an afternoon and figure out who you actually want to call in February.

Grab the free pass online before you go. It’s $10 at the door otherwise, and the online pass takes about thirty seconds.

Come with a short list of questions rather than a vague sense that you want “something done.” Ask about lead times — a good contractor in this market is often booked out several months, and knowing that in January is what keeps a spring project on schedule. Anyone you meet is worth cross-checking against the North Carolina Licensing Board for General Contractors before money changes hands.

Three days at the Ag Center, free to get in, free to park, and free workshops running the whole time. It’s a plant sale at heart — herbs, natives, starts — with growers who can tell you what actually performs in mountain soil at your elevation.

The workshops are the underrated part. Growing at 2,200 feet in Asheville is a different problem than growing in the Piedmont, and the people selling here farm in the same conditions you’re planting in.

Go early on Friday if you want first pick of anything unusual. By Sunday afternoon the good stuff is thinned out.

2027 dates hadn’t been posted as of August 2026 — the 2026 festival ran April 24–26, and it has historically landed on that late-April weekend. Check the festival site before you plan around it.