James Petrakis / The Ravenous Pig from Giovanny Gutierrez on Vimeo.

As some of you may be aware, due to seeing their logo on our site, ChatChow.tv recently became a media sponsor of the Harvest Festival and Eat Local Week.  This fresh and smart Florida based group produces mouth-watering video podcasts where they go behind the scenes with the chefs, restauranteurs and mixologists of Florida’s celebrated food industry. They will be rolling out several locally produced episodes in the month of October. Their first one is live and you can view it above or on their site.

In this video they caught up with our friend James Petrakis at the Ravenous Pig. James and Julie started the Pig to bring something new and unique to the citizens of Central Florida. One plate and one pint at a time they are educating the eating public about the ways great food can be serve as a galvanizing force in a local community. The Harvest Festival was founded in 2010 to champion this very thing, to create a venue showcasing the emerging local food culture that is making Central Florida and Winter Park, in particular, such a wonderful place to dine and call home.

The garden is in a bit of disarray following the Summer and in need of some TLC in order to have it ready for the students to do their fall plantings.  The school’s garden program isn’t self-sustaining yet and without the generosity of green-thumb volunteers it would remain under utilized.

So….here is where we come in.  On Saturday October 8^th from 9-noon we will be cleaning out the remnants of the garden’s Spring vegetables, doing some weeding and fluffing up the 14 garden beds with fresh compost.

“Many hands make for little work” and when you are working along side other passionate volunteers it doesn’t seem like work anyhow.  Help us keep this garden project thriving for these students and teachers.  In many cases this is the first time these students have seen vegetables in the “wild”.

If you would be gracious enough with your time to spend some of it with us then please RSVP to John@WPHarvest.com so we can get an accurate count of volunteers.  Please fill out the brief Orange County Public School’s volunteer application and designate Hungerford Elementary as your school,  “small groups” as your preferred grade level and “other” as type of work preferred.

I know several of you are already registered as Orange County Public School volunteers and if you could log-in and change your volunteer school for Hungerford prior to the workday that would be great.

Our next “Work and Learn” on the farm is tomorrow, Monday Sept 26th from 5pm-7pm.  Here is our weekly update from Tia:

At our second workday we got 6 more beds planted with beets, carrots, soybeans, sweet peas, broccoli. cabbage, and kale.  Many of the seeds from groundbreaking have already sprouted with our green beans and carrots and some of the cucumbers are starting to vine.  Join us at the Winter Park Urban Farm for our next workday on Monday Sept 26th from 5-7pm to help fluff up, add compost, and plant the next garden beds as we are growing food for the fall Winter Park Harvest Festival. Bring water, sunscreen, snacks, and vegetable and herb plants to
donate to our garden.

Registration is now Open for our 2011 Harvest Festival Farmers and Vendors Market.

For Rates and To Register – Click HERE !

On Sunday November 20th we will be hosting a “producer” only farmers and vendors market in the West Meadow of Winter Park’s Central Park. The goal of the festival and market is to give our local local farmers, gardeners, entrepreneurs and non-profits a venue to showcase the valuable products and services that they provide to our community.

The event is being marketed through the the festival’s website, local and national blogs, local TV, radio and news outlets as well as through social networking sites and local social and community calendars. Not to mention, the more than 3,000 attendees of last year’s Festival spreading some great word of mouth advertising too.

The festival offers an opportunity for your business or organization to reach thousands of attendees ranging from the influential and affluent deep-roots of Central Florida to the passionate and progressive grass-roots of our local community. Attendees will range from those inquisitive about gardening to full blown green thumbs; health care specialists to those eager to make healthier choices for their families.

The Winter Park Harvest Festival is put on by a local non-profit called Our Whole Community a health initiative focused on producing inter-generational wholeness and healthy lifestyle outcomes in the Eatonville, Maitland and Winter Park communities. The Winter Park Health Foundation is the chief sponsor of the event and the focus of the seminars and roundtables are food, farm and health focused.

If you would like additional information, please contact our market coordinator Gabby at WPHarvest@Gmail.com

At This Year’s Festival…

Day 1:  Saturday November 19th

Harvest Conference: A Local Food Conference & Food Enterprise Summit

9am – 5pm: Winter Park Garden Club (Mead Botanical Garden)

Keynote Speaker: Woody Tasch – Slow Money author and founder

We are cooking up an incredible line-up of programing for the conference and details will be available in our next newsletter. However, we can give you the scoop on our awesome keynote speaker, Woody Tasch.

“Woody Tasch is Founder and Chairman of Slow Money, a nonprofit formed in 2008 to catalyze the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises and to promote new principles of fiduciary responsibility to support sustainable agriculture and the emergence of a restorative local economies. Woody is author of the book “Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money.” You can hear a recent interview of Mr. Tasch by Festival Founder John Rife and Front Porch radio host Julie Norris HERE.

Farm to Table Dinner: Winter Park’s top chefs cooking Central Florida’s freshest local food.

7:00pm – 10pm: Mead Botanical Gardens

Day 2:  Sunday November 20th

Winter Park Harvest Festival: A day-long event focused on celebrating local food and the farmers, chefs, entrepreneurs and non-profits that bring the harvest of their fields to our tables.

9am – 5pm: West Meadow and Central Park North in Downtown Winter Park

We will be featuring each of these events in the coming weeks so that you can get the full dish on what to be anxiously waiting for (and it’s a lot)! ]]> http://winterparkharvestfestival.com/uncategorized/488/488/feed 0 http://winterparkharvestfestival.com/gardening/update-from-the-urban-farm/481 http://winterparkharvestfestival.com/gardening/update-from-the-urban-farm/481#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:53:44 +0000 johnrife http://winterparkharvestfestival.com/?p=481 Continue reading →]]> We had a great time at our first “work and learn” session this past Monday.

Join us for our next two garden workdays on Tuesday Sept 20th from 10am-noon and Monday Sept 26th from 5-7pm.

Here is the write up from Tia letting you know what we were up to on the Farm!

On Monday September 12th the first of the fall crops were planted at the Winter Park Urban Farm.

September is prime time for planting warm season crops and we planted transplants of cucumber, zucchini, and yellow squash in the garden.  We also direct sewed green beans, yellow wax beans, and three different varieties of carrots into the garden beds.

So far we have made four biointensive beds that are 4×12′ wide with a one foot pathway in between.  With biointensive gardening we can get the most yield out of the smallest space, we also added lots of fresh compost to sustain the close plantings of vegetables.

Cool season plants including broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and kale were planted in seed blocks.  We’ll let these grow for a few weeks before planting in the garden.

We’ll be preparing an additional in-ground plot during next Tuesday’s work and learn session as well as creating more soil blocks (you can even take some home for your own gardens.)

Hope to see you then.

~Tia

With 11 weeks to work with we are looking to see just how much produce we can grow and bring to market at this year’s Harvest Festival.  Along the way we will be offering volunteers and our “ag-curious” neighbors free lessons on the in’s and out’s of organic agriculture.

The green-thumb wielding Tia Meer will be our organic farming guru on the project. Tia and her husband Terry run the incredible Econ Farm, a 5 acre organic farm and sustainable residence in E. Orlando.   Tia has an amazing ability to coax beautiful and tasty vegetables from Florida’s sandy soils and we are so excited to be working with her on this project.

The experiment is open to the public and volunteers will learn first hand, from Tia and Festival founder John Rife the step by step process of gleaning a healthy wholefood harvest from any backyard or patio.  Space is limited as we are striving for the volunteer experience to be hands on and intimate so please RSVP via our contact page if you’d like to participate in this Monday’s groundbreaking or in future work and learn opportunities.

If so, join us tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon at 1pm at the home of Harvest Festival founder John Rife to watch a webinar put on by BALLE the non-profit dedicated to creating, strengthening and connecting local business networks dedicated to building strong local living economies.

The webinar is part of their “Accelerating Community Capital” series which seeks to

• Connect local businesses with local lenders, investors and donors,
• Earn a “living rate of return” while supporting the local economy, and
• Create jobs by strengthening family farms, local manufacturing, and independent business.

Tomorrow’s webinar will focus on The No Small Potatoes Investment Club. Inspired by Slow Money, the club is a group pooling funds and making micro-loans to farmers and food businesses in Maine since the fall of 2010. The club provides working capital in the form of low-interest loans, and meets three times a year to evaluate loan applications. Initially, the club made individual self-directed loans, but since April of this year has been pooling funds and making loans as a group. Loans thus far have ranged from $2,000 to $15,000, with $5,000 as the investment commitment to join the club.  Loan recipients have included organic vegetable growers, a composter, a butcher, and tofu and goat cheese producers.

We are hoping to  to debut during the Saturday November 19th Harvest Festival. Come be a part of our clubs establishing by participating in this one of a kind webinar.

We hope you can make it ☺ If you can’t join us feel free to register and watch it from your own computer.

For those of you unfamiliar with Eat Local Week here is a primer:  It is a week-long celebration promoting connection, community, culture and cuisine in Central Florida, November 11-18, 2011.  Think fresh food from local farms cooked by some of your favorite chefs for 7 days straight. You will be served a 3 course meal at some of the area’s top restaurants and local food purveyors with prices organized into 4 tiers $15, $25, $35, $45.  There is a ton more information on the Eat Local Week website so head on over for all the detail.

BUT WAIT!!!!  There is more local food loveliness!

Slow Food Orlando is hosting a fundraiser on Aug 19th, 2011 from 6:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. at Napa Restaurant in the Peabody Hotel (across from the Orlando Convention Center) on International Drive. Proceeds from the event will benefit Eat Local Week.

Napa Chefs will prepare a variety of gourmet dishes throughout seven stations at Napa, featuring organic and local produce, meats and seafood from area farmers and purveyors such as Deep Creek Ranch, Heart of Christmas farms, Lake Meadows Farms, Healthy Living Produce, Wild Ocean Seafood, Bear Wolf Ranch and Winter Park Dairy.

Tickets are $65.00 per person which includes dinner, music, wine, beer, soft drinks, and free valet parking for event guests.

Space is limited. Call 407-345-4570 for reservations and mention Slow Food to reserve your seats for this exciting culinary event.

Event info:

An Evening of Jazz and Gourmet Food

August 19, 2011
6:30 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Napa Restaurant, Peabody Hotel
$65 per person, all-inclusive event
Call 407-345-4570 for reservations

Although it is just yards from Denning Dr. it is almost impossible to see.  Plus….considering most of us use Denning as a cut-through street to avoid the train it is easy to understand why we’d miss spotting this incredible garden.

That is all about to change!

This Saturday, Keep Winter Park Beautiful is coordinating with a number of Rollins students and Harvest Festival volunteers to thin out and clear the underbrush that is hiding this wonderful amenity from view.  As you can see from picture it’s quite the unkempt jungle.

A community garden takes a community effort and we’d certainly love to have you join us. We want to bring more visibility and awareness of the garden to the neighborhood and the citizens of Winter Park as a whole and clearing away the overgrowth along the road will go along way towards making that a reality.

Come join students, local foodies, green thumbs, civic leaders and friends of the Festival and get your hands dirty for a good cause.

We’ll be meeting on Mills Laws on Rollins Campus at 8:00 am Saturday.  We’ll be walking to Mead Garden along with Forest Michaels the architect/planner behind Winter Park’s Central Park design.  He will be be giving us a tour of the new design for Mead Garden as we walk through the grounds en route to the community garden.

OR You are welcome to skip the walk and just meet at 8:45 at the garden itself.  We’ll be there until noon.  We will have all the tools and glove’s you’ll need but you are welcome to bring your favorite machete   Water bottles, close toed shoes and sunscreen are good items to bring as well.  Click here for a map and here for a street view.