Remember:
1. You don’t need to answer every category for your ballot to count
2. Voting ends on December 31st for The Daily City and on January 2nd for the Ovations
3. The “best event/festival” category is #48 on the Ovations survey and #64 on The Daily City’s
*The Daily City also has a “Best Farmers Market” category (#9 on the ballot). If you enjoy Orlando’s unique “producer-only” market as much as we do, please consider voting for the Audubon Park Community Market!

Congratulations to our Market Money Raffle Winners!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Winter Park Harvest Festival on November 17th! From the packed “producer-only” market and popular beer garden to our three Market Money Raffle Winners, there was much to celebrate! If you weren’t able to join in for the festivities, you will find some helpful information below.

Kids discovering the wonders of plants!

• Read about Edible Orlando Magazine‘s Cooking Demonstrations, and find some delicious recipes here.
• Find your picture in our online gallery of Rhonda Walsinham‘s photos of the event!
• Review our Vendor List to continue supporting your favorite local businesses throughout the year!
• Learn more with our Gardening and Health and Homesteading presenters directories!

Thanks to our musicians for the entertainment!

To continue receiving updates about other local food events like the Winter Park Harvest Festival, be sure to sign up for our bimonthly newsletter HERE! Thank you again to all of our sponsors, volunteers and participants for making the 2012 festival the best fest yet!

Click HERE for a Full Schedule of Festivities!

Letter to Joel Salatin from an elementary school student about Chipotle's sustainable efforts

There’s something special about a fast food chain if you see their logo around one of America’s most famous sustainable farms, especially on Joel Salatin‘s Polyface Farm. In Salatin’s farm store, there is a bound book of hand-written letters from elementary school students, explaining all they had learned through Chipotle about his unconventional farming practices. On the farm, pigs, cattle, chickens, turkeys, and even rabbits are confined to rolling green pastures, eating as they wish and fertilizing the land as they roam.

Joel Salatin's Farm

Chipotle is truly committed to “food with integrity.” Chipotle’s Cultivate Foundation is committed to creating a more sustainable and healthful food supply and to raising awareness concerning food issues. They support family farmers and their communities, educators and programs that teach younger generations about food matters, and provide support for ranchers and farmers who are working to develop more sustainable practices.

Come design a shirt with Farm Stencils at Chipotle's Kids Corner

With a mission like that, it wouldn’t make much sense to have any sponsor for this year’s Winter Park Harvest Festival other than Chipotle. The farm to foil restaurant is partnering with A Local Folkus to bring a fun and interactive kids corner to the Festival and is also working with A Local Folkus to start an organic garden at their UCF location. At the Festival, they will use local ingredients for their Salsa-Making Demonstrations, provide a Chalk Wall for kids to share their love of real food on, a kid’s organic T-shirt Decorating activity with farm stencils, and a Plant-a-Seed Activity Kit. As if they weren’t already doing enough, Chipotle will donate $2,500 of their Taco Sales from the event to Slow Food Orlando.

We’ll be keeping you up to date on Chipotle’s garden as it progresses, but for now, click HERE to learn more about Chipotle’s drive to go back to the start.

The Winter Park Harvest Festival is a one-day event; however, it’s easy to forget that seasons go into creating it! The Harvest Fest began a unique tradition with the initial Winter Park Harvest Festival in 2010. With the organizing power of Our Whole Community, and donations from Florida Hospital, we created a mobile community garden, and will continue to do so in our third year.

Leading up to the festival, 14×28 inch grow boxes are purchased and prepared by local schools, churches, families and organizations (Get yours HERE). On the day of the festival, the grow boxes are transported and displayed for all festivalgoers to see. Since 2010, a local Catholic school, St. Margaret Mary, has gone above and beyond with their gardening project, growing outside of their grow boxes and into community projects.

School Counselor and Gardening teacher, Judy Keith, has a garden box for every class, and a raised bed for every grade level. Mrs. Keith recently had us out to visit with her extraordinary 3^rd grade gardeners.

With the first hints of fall in the air, the students were lively as they came off the playground and under the garden trellis. Their excitement wasn’t settled by the rumors of an earlier Black Racer sighting in the garden. They seemed to easily forget that the snake could be lurking in any corner as they began to trample through the greenery. Maybe Mrs. Keith’s reminder that the “garden is home to the snake and we are just its visitors” calmed their nerves.

First the students checked on their “seeds of peace,” which they planted in their grow boxes the previous week for International Peace Day. Their carrots had grown into one-inch tall sprouts, and somehow escaped the wrath of a recent snail infestation. Since they practice organic gardening, fighting off their slimy friends has been quite a battle. By the time the festival rolls around, the carrots will be near ready to eat. After the students show off their plants at the festival (like most proud little artists do at an art show), they will bring their produce back to the school’s garden to munch on for a recess snack.

Next, the students planted some pumpkin seeds in their grade’s raised bed. Questions flowed from the students about how far apart, how deep, and how many seeds to plant. Surprisingly, the students knew what questions to ask, and they went straight to work tilling up the ground and measuring rows to plant in. One student exclaimed, “The dirt feels so good,” as if he had never touched it before!

Not only is the St. Margaret Mary garden giving kids the chance to get their hands in the dirt, but teachers also use the garden as a hands-on science experience. Students compare and contrast plant structures, including roots, stems and leaves.  The art teacher brings some students out for open-air art lessons. Students also learn about civic engagement as they plan to donate their next sweet potato crop to the community’s needy. Most importantly, Mrs. Judy says, “The experience of harvesting produce and replanting seeds teaches the life cycle and the importance of preserving and caring for our environment.”

Six new schools have signed up for grow boxes this year, including Aloma, Brookshire, Hungerford, and Lake Sybelia Elementary, Maitland Middle, and Winter Park High School. Join these students by getting your own grow box here, and bringing it to share at the November 17^th Winter Park Harvest Festival! For more information, email ourwholecommunity1@gmail.com or alocalfolkus@gmail.com. Boxes are limited, so order yours before they are gone!

At the 2011 Winter Park Harvest Festival Conference, we discussed Central Florida’s local food system gaps and assets. One of the noticeable gaps was the lack of a permanent, scalable venue for enterprising food entrepreneurs, tradespeople, chefs and artists.

A week after the conference, Harvest Festival founder John Rife and Gabby Lothrop, Audubon Park’s Community Market director, hatched an idea to fill this gap: East End Market. A few months later, a two-story former church building in Audubon Park was purchased on the corner of East End Ave and Corrine Drive, with the hopes of creating Orlando’s first Local Food Hub.

This community and local food hub will house twelve of the best local food merchants in a market hall, a farm-fresh restaurant by Spanish River Grill’s award-winning chefs, an incubator kitchen, market garden, and an event space.

PLEASE NOTE:  With a flashy new event space in the works at East End we have decided to reschedule the Farm to Table dinner that normally accompanies the Harvest Festival in November for the Spring of 2013.  In the same way that the festival serves to showcase the best of Central Florida’s local food scene, it is our desire that the event space at East End Market will serve the same mission.

In addition, many of the chefs who have participated in previous farm to table dinners will be cooking for the upcoming James Beard dinner in Winter Park this October.  In an effort not to duplicate efforts, and to also begin a new tradition of quarterly Farm to Table Dinners at East End, we are relocating and rescheduling our dinner.

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