“It started with bare ground and piles of garbage,” Deb Rudis said, when asked about about a local harvest fair that started 30 years ago, while standing at a table adorned with vegetables she grew this summer and award ribbons next to most of them. Since that first fair the roots may largely be the same, but what’s taken bloom differs in bountiful ways.
A crowd of people quickly grabbed the best items near the entrance of a farmers’ market, and people spent the next couple of hours looking at prize vegetables, fruits and flowers grown at the 30th Annual Juneau Community Garden Harvest Fair. There was also hot food and baked goods being sold under the garden’s main shelter, live music, children’s games, and a chance to wander the grounds of the garden that has changed in major ways during the past three decades.
“We had to make all our own soil,” Rudis said of the startup efforts for the four-acre community garden founded in 1990. “We got dumped with some sand and we got hops from the brewery, and then the rest of it we had to figure out.”
Deb Rudis examines her table of award-winning vegetables during the 30th Annual Juneau Community Garden Harvest Fair on Saturday. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
The first harvest fair followed a few later, with participants and officials alike needing some grounding in the basics, she said.
“All I know is we scrambled to enter stuff, but we didn’t know anything about specs back then,” Rudis said, hoisting a “bible” used for such events that provides explicit guidelines for the qualities award-winning produce should possess. “Like, you know, things are supposed to be uniform size. You have to have a special trim length.”
[Judges’ results from this year’s harvest fair]
The shelter didn’t exist at the garden during its early years, and more recently lights and electricity have been installed among its fixtures, said John Thedinga, Juneau Community Garden’s president. That allows hot food to be sold during the festival in addition to baked goods and other items people provide primarily using ingredients grown at the garden.
“The food, that’s just skyrocketing it’s so good,” he said. A chef prepared this year’s hot dishes — including potato-leek and lentil-carrot-apricot soups — and “people bring in all these wonderful baked goods that are just tremendous. One guy donated about 20 loaves of sourdough bread that he made just in the last day or two.”
A mix of annual and occasional attendees were among those visiting the harvest fair for its landmark anniversary. Julie Leary, who was admiring a table where award-winning flowers were displayed, said she attended her first harvest fair about 25 years ago and has returned intermittently since then, but the changes are noticeable.
“It just seems more people are into gardening and growing their own food, and it just seems like (the festival) is more popular,” she said.
Julie Leary examines flowers on a judges’ table at the 30th Annual Juneau Community Garden Harvest Fair on Saturday. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
One of the games at the festival involved searching for money in a bed of straw spread across a tarp. Afterward Sigrid Bogert and Fathom Mitchell, both 11, gathered up handfuls of the straw to load into a wheelbarrow so they could place the straw on their family’s garden plot. Bogert said among the crops her family grows are carrots, flowers and kale.
“I love kale chips,” she explained.
The garden currently has 168 plots and 29 small beds — with vacancies coming up rarely — and upgrades beyond the shelter include a compositing facility, Thedinga said.
The garden also has expanded its community engagement with nine of the 10- by 20-foot plots designated for charitable purposes. Most of what’s grown is donated to local organizations such as the Glory Hall or Southeast Alaska Food Bank, with some of the rest used to raise funds for the garden project, said Joel Bos, the charity plot coordinator for the community garden.
“If you’re a member at the community garden one of your duties is to give five hours of community service every year,” said Joel Bos, the charity plot coordinator for the community garden.
People tour the garden plots during the 30th Annual Juneau Community Garden Harvest Fair on Saturday (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
Rudis was both a grower and a judge this year — but not in overlapping categories as she helped evaluate greenhouse vegetables and youth exhibits. While Juneau saw record rain in July, a fairly dry and sunny August helped make for a decent harvest.
“I like to make potato soup, but our leeks bolted this year so we didn’t have any leeks,” Rudis said. “I’ll use the garlic for a number of things we do. We grew like 90 cloves of it, so we’ve got 90 heads. And then I make a bunch of pickles. The lettuce, when it gets like this it gets bitter, so the chickens will eat it because we have chickens. And let’s see — the dill I’ll dry, a lot of herbs I just dry. My sage, I wasn’t even going to enter it and now it became champion.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
