The Bluegrass and Beyond

Cheyenne Olson of Berea recently sent me this photo of a giant sunflower in her garden. She said she has no idea how it got that big, but notes that it falls a bit short of the world record, a 25-foot sunflower grown in Norway in 1986.

If you want to ask Olson about her sunflower, she’ll be at the Third Annual 100-mile Potluck and Auction at Berea Community School on Sunday from 5:30-7:30 p.m. The event is sponsored by Sustainable Berea and the Berea Farmers Market.

Admission to the potluck is free, but bring a dish made with ingredients produced within 100 miles of Berea. Also, bring the recipe for inclusion in a cookbook of recipes from the first three annual potlucks that will be published in October.

The auction includes a variety of items related to local food. And it features seven of the ever-popular rain barrels painted by Berea-area artists. The auction benefits Sustainable Berea, an non-profit environmental organization. An auction booklet is on the group’s Web site.

Tall flowers, giant produce and big fish have long been a photographic staple of local newspapers. So, in that spirit, email me a photo of your outstanding specimen from this summer and I’ll post it on my blog. (No PhotoShop creations or wide-angle lens distortions, please. I can tell.)

The New York Times Magazine on Sunday profiled Will Allen, the urban gardening guru and local food supersalesman who will speak this fall in Louisville at the annual Idea Festival.

Allen, 60, a former pro basketball player, is the brain behind Growing Power farm, which provides nutritious local food and jobs for inner city residents of Milwaukee, Wisc. Allen’s work has brought him one of the famous $500,000 “genius” awards from the MacArthur Foundation and other honors.

Allen will speak at the Idea Festival on Saturday, Sept. 26, at 8:45 a.m. at the Kentucky Center. Click here for more information. Click here to read the New York Times Magazine profile by Elizabeth Royte.

It seemed almost inevitable.

Chris Canon’s family farmed hundreds of acres of cotton and soybeans in Mississippi. Sandy Canon’s parents raised begonias and fuchsia in California and finally “stopped entering them in fairs so other people could win.”

But the Canons had two sons, white-collar careers and a suburban home. Agriculture didn’t have a place in their busy lives until Chris got some 2×4s and built a raised bed in their backyard.

Then another. And another. And a dozen more.

“Chris kept planting more and more,” Sandy Canon said of her husband. “And I had to freeze it and can it.”

So, for the third summer, the Canons are selling vegetables once a week at the Lexington Farmer’s Market — most grown in their backyard and some in the fraction of an acre they cultivate on a wooded farm in Washington County.

“We make some pocket money, but a side benefit is that we’ve spent more time together than we have since before the children came,” she said. “And we really enjoy the people at the market. It’s a social experience.”

The Canons’ backyard on Duncan Avenue near the Red Mile is the smallest and most urban of the dozen Central Kentucky farms that will be on display Saturday during the self-guided Lexington Farmer’s Market Farm Tour.

Other farms on the tour include Abigail’s Apiary, which will demonstrate how bees work; Bleugrass Chevre, which specializes in goat cheeses; the Chrisman Mill and Lover’s Leap wineries; Henkle’s Herbs and heirloom tomatoes and the Barton Brothers’ sweet corn farm.

This is the 2nd annual tour sponsored by the Lexington Farmers’ Market, which recently moved its Saturday market to Cheapside and this week begins a Wednesday evening market at The Mall at Lexington Green. It also has a Sunday market on Southland Drive and Tuesday and Thursday markets at South Broadway and Maxwell streets.

The Lexington Farmers’ Market has been around since 1975, but its recent popularity coincides with growing public interest in locally grown food. Rona Roberts, a Lexington communications consultant who writes the Savoring Kentucky food blog, cites several reasons.

“Part of it is driven by a longing for flavor and the realization that the very best flavor comes from things closest to you,” Roberts said. “There’s a lot lost in transportation.”

That, along with more focus on health and nutrition, has prompted more people to buy produce from farmers’ markets and other local growers such as Elmwood Stock Farm in Georgetown and Honest Farm in Midway.

Many people are becoming more conscious of the environment. They’re concerned about agricultural chemicals and the petroleum used trucking food cross-country.

In addition, the economy has prompted people to look for ways to save money and make their communities more self-sustaining.

Local organizations such as Seedleaf are promoting urban gardening as a way to get nutritious, economical food to people at risk of hunger. Seedleaf teaches people how to grow food and helps establish community gardens.

On the farm tour last year, more than 50 people stopped by to see the Canons’ backyard garden. It inspired one woman to go home and build two raised beds in her backyard. “She said it changed her life,” Sandy Canon said.

More than anything, though, organizers want to inspire more loyal customers for local farmers. After all, that’s what it will take to grow and sustain a local food economy.

If you go

Lexington Farmers’ Market Farm Tour

Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

$10 adults, $5 students, younger than 12 free

More information: www.lexingtonfarmersmarket.com

Seedleaf: www.seedleaf.org

Savoring Kentucky: www.savoringkentucky.com

BEREA — What if the energy supplies, food systems and other foundations of our modern economy and lifestyle suddenly changed? How would your community cope?

It’s a notion more of us have been thinking about during the past year. We saw gasoline spike to $4 a gallon last summer, then watched our consumption-driven economy slide into a deep recession.

Berea is one of nearly 150 communities around the world participating in a project called Transition Town. It is a citizen-driven effort to develop local strategies for coping with inevitable change in energy supplies and economic conditions that are no longer sustainable or good for the planet.

The Transition Town movement was started in 2004 by Ron Hopkins, an environmental educator in Totnes, England. Most Transition Towns are in the United Kingdom and Ireland, although the movement has spread to every inhabited continent except Africa. In addition to Berea, 17 other U.S. communities have signed on, including Los Angeles, Denver and Boulder, Colo.

“The next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years,” predicted Richard Olson, director of Sustainable and Environmental Studies at Berea College and a leader in Berea’s Transition Town effort. “But what they are largely depends on the actions we take.”

Here’s why things will be different: The world’s population of 6.7 billion will grow by nearly one-third over the next 40 years amid increasing worldwide demand for dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. Fisheries are diminishing, as are forests and fresh water supplies. Climate patterns are rapidly shifting.

Decades-old economic structures, lifestyles and food-supply systems based on an endless supply of cheap oil, natural gas and coal must change. “We’re going to be using less energy — and soon — so why don’t we plan for it?” Olson said.

These changes may seem like doom and gloom, but the solutions to them don’t have to be. In fact, Olson said, smart strategies could create stronger communities, more healthy lifestyles and happier people. “A future with less oil could be better,” he said.

Transition Town Berea, an outgrowth of an organization called Sustainable Berea, has citizens groups looking at ways the Madison County town can be less vulnerable to global changes. It’s a good model other Kentucky towns should consider.

For example, how could a community increase its ability to feed itself if high energy costs made it no longer practical to truck in produce from California, poultry from Georgia and grain from Iowa? How could more support for local farmers result in healthier, better-tasting food that is less vulnerable to contamination like we’ve seen in the recent peanut scare?

Citizen groups in Berea have come up with a variety of ideas, many of which hark back two or three generations to what our conservative ancestors would have considered simple, common-sense steps.

Among them: Teach interested residents to grow gardens, put up food, plant berry bushes and fruit trees. Promote the local farmers market, the use of local food in Berea restaurants and facilitate creation of local certified kitchens and food-processing businesses.

Provide home energy-use audits and low-interest weatherization loans to promote less energy use and save people money. Partner with local builders to promote “green” construction methods and consider future energy needs in zoning and land-use decisions.

Better connect the town with walking paths and bike trails, organize car pools and convert the municipally owned utility to a “smart grid” that could gradually integrate more decentralized sources of renewable energy. Support and promote locally owned businesses, and set up internship programs at them for local high school and college students.

To challenge the community, Transition Town Berea has adopted some ambitious goals around the slogan “50 by 25.” By 2025, the group would like Berea to use half as much electricity, and have half of it come from renewable sources. It also would like to see half of local food grown locally.

More than 60 people jammed into a room at Berea College last month to see Olson’s presentation on Transition Town strategies. It was heartening to Berea Mayor Steve Connelly among them. Too often, political leaders are so focused on the next election that they’re afraid to think long-term.

Connelly said the Transition Town group’s goals for Berea are ambitious, but worth striving for. “You can’t argue that there’s a lot of truth in what’s being said,” he noted afterward. “We have to change. It’s truly in our best interest.”

Change is inevitable. How will your community survive, and thrive?