Winter Park Harvest Festival connects people through local food

John Rife started with a little curiosity, a patch of dead grass and a couple tomato seedlings. He didn’t know it then, but the little plants sprouting from the seedlings weren’t just growing tomatoes, but also a great passion that he would share with an entire community as the founder of the Winter Park Harvest Festival.

“We, citizens of Central Florida, deserve to eat great food and deserve to grow and deserve to be able to buy from great local purveyors and know where their food comes from,” Rife said.

And he was going to make that happen. Rife, a Winter Park resident, became totally enamored with gardening. His easy success with those tiny tomatoes sparked a realization within him — it wasn’t so hard to grow your own food. And he wanted to learn more.

He read books, joined gardening groups and talked to experts. Then, he took a three-month trip across America with his wife, exploring, eating and learning all along the way. There were community gardens, restaurants with their own little farms, and the term “locavore,” describing people who are interested in eating as much locally grown food as possible, was being tossed around in the trend-setting cities he visited out West.

He was inspired to do an entirely local Thanksgiving dinner for his family. A little research told him that here in Central Florida, gathering all those ingredients would take weeks, and that wasn’t OK with him. Rife wanted to bring something back to his own Florida town from his experience in the more-forward moving cities that so inspired him. He thought, “We deserve this opportunity.”

So Rife organized the first Winter Park Harvest Festival, where local farmers and gardeners can gather in one place together to sell their products to the community, connecting residents with all the local food resources they need to fill their tables with a Thanksgiving feast. It’s in its third year now and on Saturday, Nov. 17, will also feature a mobile community garden, seminars and workshops with farmers and cooks, food trucks, music and activities for children. It’s grown from a struggling start-up to a festival that has more vendor applicants than it can accept.

Next spring Rife will open East End Market, a permanent version of the Festival, with local vendors set up, a restaurant and space to teach.

The Winter Park Harvest Festival is Saturday, Nov. 17, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Central Park’s West Meadow, 150 N. New York Ave. Visit winterparkharvestfestival.com for more information about the Festival. Visit eastendmkt.com for more information about East End Market, John Rife’s newest endeavor to bring local food to Winter Park.

Tom Carey, who’s been in the Central Florida local growing scene as a farmer since the ’80s — and before people knew what organic meant — said Rife has really brought a lot of attention to the farming community.

“It’s really picking up speed around here … it can only get better,” the Observer’s garden columnist said.

The Festival doesn’t just connect people to their food, it connects them to each other, Rife says. It’s a place where people from all backgrounds are brought together.

“A ton of relationships have come … watching a yuppie country club grower tapping his foot, eating food from a food truck right next to somebody with full-arm tattoos and spacers in their ears and total hipster, totally doing all the same thing is pretty awesome,” Rife said. “Food is this great common denominator and it’s universal and everyone wants good tasty food, so what you do, what you look like, it all kind of goes away when you’re talking about the pleasures of the table and the pleasures of gardening.”

Rife sees that every day right outside his kitchen. The real estate developer-turned-local food movement leader has expanded his tiny plot of seedlings into a public Winter Park Urban Farm on the lot next to his own home. There, Rife and his expert gardener, Tia Meer, host “work and learns,” where novice and experienced gardeners alike get together, knees and hands in the dirt. There’s such a sense of community, Rife said. Even the most mundane tasks become a pleasure when they’re together, sharing an experience. And that all brings them back to their original mission: educating and exposing people to organic, local food sources.

“Food is one of our basic necessities and being disconnected from food is being disconnected from nature, so being the catalyst to reconnect people … is huge,” Meer said.

Their gardeners said they feel great being able to come to the Urban Farm, work and then see their hands make something so precious — food — grow, and that then taking the knowledge back to their own gardens and dinner tables is very satisfying.

“It just makes you feel really empowered,” Cheryl Taylor said.

“Mind, body and soul — I just feel so good,” Maitland resident Jennifer Moon-Huggett said.

Rife describes what happens in the garden, for the people and the food they grow, as magic. Meer thinks it’s a little something more.

“It’s like miracles can happen, and they do every day in a garden,” she said.

And they both plan to spend a lifetime sharing that with anyone who’ll listen.