It is harvest time for many communities in America, which just happens to coincide with many a celebrated day in the upcoming months. Translation: food, and lots of it (for many fortunate people). Although ingredients for dishes greatly vary among culinary cultures, there is one humble vegetable that remains steadfast in its appeal to all, the onion. In the spirit of community, State of the Re:Union intern Melissa Lee shares her story of how this mighty bulb veggie continues to work its delicious magic to bring a community together.

My summer kicked off with a twenty five pound bag of onions. I really only wanted ten, but I was talked into the bigger bag. These weren’t just any onions, Sean, the onion grower, told me. They were Walla Walla sweets, famous for being “so sweet you can eat them like an apple.” They are, in fact, the official Washington State vegetable, signed into law in 2007.  Maybe you’ve heard of them.

Onions run deep here in the Walla Walla valley. Onion growers can trace their roots back to the late 1800s when the sweet onion seed was brought from the Island of Corsica to Walla Walla by a Peter Pieri, a French soldier. The crop was cultivated by generations of Italian immigrant farmers, choosing the best from each crop to develop the next. It is the low sulfur content in the onions, as well as Walla Walla’s mild climate and rich volcanic soil that causes the sweetness. Sean’s family is one of about 30 onion growers in the Walla Walla valley, with farms ranging from two to three hundred acres, to those that are only half an acre in size.

“It’s always been part of this community. We have our wines and our colleges, but the onions were here first. And that was from back in the day when families lived off of their gardens. They called them truck gardeners back then,” said Kathy Fry-Trommald, director of marketing of the Walla Walla Sweet Onion Committee.

When it’s sweet onion season from mid-June to mid-September, little roadside onion stands like Sean’s pop up all over Walla Walla. These are usually the old-family growers, the ones that have been farming sweet onions for three or four generations. And it is not only the stands that indicate that onion harvesting has begun – it’s a community affair, culminating in the Sweet Onion Festival. Originating from the early days when farmers would help each other harvest, celebrating once they were finished, the festival eventually became an institution.

“Some of the older guys that I know remember as young kids how the families would all get together and help each other out. It was a big job, a huge job, so that was the way things were done,” said Fry-Trommald. “I think there has always been a harvest celebration once the work was done.”

This community celebration has become an official annual event; this summer’s being the 27th, though that’s just 27 since they’ve been counting. Hosting from 5,000 – 10,000 people over the weekend, vendors fill the streets with everything from onion mustard to caramel covered onions to little stuffed versions of “Sweety”, the sweet onion mascot.

Bands play on the street and chefs give demonstrations on the numerous options for preparing sweet onions. Next year’s festival may reinstate some older traditions – like producer competitions – offering a platform for farmers to show off their biggest, most pristine onions and pack houses to display boxes of extraordinarily well-packed onions. And should the trivia contest come back as well, here’s a fact to give you a leg up on the competition: On average, 32,500 pounds of onions are harvested from one acre of land.

As I spoke with Sean at his family’s roadside stand, he told me his family has been in the onion business for three generations. They invented the strain of onions that they were selling.  In fact, every family has their own strain; each onion has its own family name. Literature on the sweet onions points out that growers are not just “raising sweet onions, but cultivating a tradition.” And I can see that in the pride Sean takes in his family’s onions, to the way it still brings people out to the streets when it’s sweet onion time. Sean also gave me a few tips about onions. Try placing an onion in each corner of the cellar to keep mice away and keeping a slice of lemon in your mouth while cutting an onion to keep the tears from falling.

Here in Walla Walla, onions aren’t only something you eat, they are a part of the history of the place; part of what created the community that it is today. Here onions are something to celebrate and are part of a tradition that brings people together. As a new-comer to Walla Walla, I was glad to get to know a little more about the place through this wondrous little piece of produce, and as the cold winter approaches, all I need to do is get out some of my remaining onions to bring a little of the sweetness of summer back.

This is the season of traditions. Some will continue on, while others will begin anew. What are some ways that you will celebrate community in the upcoming weeks? What unique item or quirky tradition represents the community you call home?

State of the Re:Union contributor Rich Harwood of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation offers pertinent views of community issues every Tuesday.  In addition to Rich’s post yesterday, we came across information about his paper, Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide, coming out later this week which reflects what we find in communities every day. (To view the original blog, click here.)

Solutions to the challenges we face don’t yet exist and planning alone won’t get us there. In communities, states and the nation we need a different mindset – one of innovation. The Aspen Institute’s newest white paper, implementing the Knight Commission’s recommendations, calls on America’s community members and leaders to adopt a set of useful strategies to assess the health of civic resources and infrastructure, to build up local news and information environments, and create engaged communities with the capacity and resilience to meet today’s—and tomorrow’s–most pressing challenges.

In the paper, Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide, Richard C. Harwood urges citizens and community leaders to go beyond “simply doing good planning” to develop a mindset and practice of innovation and “Turning Outward” toward the community in order to take effective action to solve common challenges. Harwood is the founder of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, an organization recognized for their approach to breaking down barriers and empowering people to make real progress in improving their communities.

“In reality, most change in communities occurs through pockets of activity that emerge and take root over time,” notes Harwood.  “These pockets result from individuals, small groups, and various organizations seeing an opportunity for change and seizing it, often through trial and error. Seldom are the collection of such pockets orchestrated through a top-down, linear plan; instead, they happen when people and groups start to engage and interact.”

The Turn Outward approach allows community members to focus on relevance, re-building and re-engaging with each other as well as the schools, businesses and other organizations that contribute to the health and stability of a community. Harwood’s paper gives people actionable steps and support around what it takes to act on what matters most.

Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide will be featured Monday, October 17th from 12:30 to 3pm ET in a roundtable discussion among a select group of leaders, innovators, advocates and critics from the national, state and local levels at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C.

We invite you to watch it live with us here and use hashtag #Harwood to discuss themes and findings.

Going from the big city to the countryside can be quite a challenge. Saying goodbye to the fancy coffee shops, sushi on the go and public transportation, as I moved across the country from Washington, D.C. to a very rural part of Washington state, I wondered what I was getting into. Beyond the big city’s amenities, I was worried about the community of friends, neighbors and co-workers I left behind. Here, my closest “neighbor” is a grain silo overlooking a few dozen acres of alfalfa. So instead of trying to find the big city in the countryside, I decided to embrace my new life and the offerings of living so close to nature. In particular, I was excited about the readily available fresh produce. Sure, you can get locally grown produce at the farmer’s markets in the Dupont Circles and Union Squares of the big cities out east, and, on occasion, I would buy a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread for $15. But I was ready to find accessible produce that could be eaten on a daily basis and not just as a special treat.

Upon arriving here, one of the first things I did was join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm.  As the name suggests, CSAs involve the public community supporting a farm through buying “shares,” typically consisting of a box of seasonal produce, offered weekly during the harvest season, which runs roughly from May through November. Over the last 20 years, CSAs have become a popular way for consumers to buy locally grown food directly from a farmer, and for farmers to receive financial support from the community.

This system benefits both parties in an impressive show of synergy. The farmers receive payment early in the season which helps with their cash flow, as well as having the opportunity to know the people to whom the fruits of their labor go. And members of CSAs get to know who is producing that food, creating a relationship with the farmer, the land, and their surroundings. Additionally, the food is fresh, local, and often organic. At the same time, one element of joining a CSA accepting shared risk. With a CSA, there is no guarantee of what you will get; it depends on what is growing and being harvested. This promotes the feeling that we are all in on this together; if the farm is productive, we reap the benefits and if it suffers we feel the consequences.

Schreiber & Sons, the CSA I joined, started offering community shares to the public in 2006. Along with the box of organic produce, I get a weekly email, telling me what is going to be in my box and what is going on at the farm; that the tomatoes will be out later this year due to the unusually cool spring or cilantro is suddenly plentiful due to a few warm days. This new sense of connection with my environment allows me to see how much the weather impacts agriculture, and now, me. Coming from a city, rain used to mean that I had to wear a rain jacket. Cold temperatures caused me to leave the house with an extra sweater. Now, these things translate into the amount of mixed greens and strawberries I will be eating.

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The true beauty for me though, is the way that CSAs draw people together.

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“In a lot of communities, with the whole agricultural system in this country, the farmer was getting more and more pushed off to the periphery where you actually didn’t know your farmer as a member of the community. He was the guy that lived on the outskirts of town and you never actually went to his farm to visit. I think this is pulling that member of the community back into the circle where he or she can be seen,” said Pete Shelton, a fellow CSA member, who himself spent some time working on a CSA farm.

In my case, this union of farmer and consumer came to fruition at a Farm Party. Schreiber & Sons has two Farm Parties a year, one in the spring, which I went to last weekend, and one in the fall. This party involved a farm tour followed by a roasted pig and grilled asparagus provided by the farm and long tables piled with pot-luck dishes brought by all of the members of the CSA; about 200 showed up. Handwritten recipes next to the dishes illustrated the numerous ways the farm’s bounty could be prepared. The food was delicious, the conversation easy, and I was struck by how naturally the community was brought together as we were led through fields of cilantro and greenhouses full of peppers, marveling at all the work it took to bring us the food we ate each week.

“Generally CSA’s do things that connect their members to what they do. We’re really taking people who have not been involved in farming like this and putting them into an agriculture area and we really are connecting them to the food and where the food comes from,” said Alan Schreiber, owner of Schreiber & Sons.

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Having been introduced to the CSA model has connected me to my food, my community, my farmer and my creativity.

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But we were also connecting with each other as we sat on the lawn and ate the homemade food and swapped stories about what we were doing with the weekly radishes in our CSA boxes. These were people I had not known until the Farm Party, who were now inviting me over for their next pot luck dinner.

Though there is no official count of how many CSAs are currently in the U.S., Local Harvest has the most comprehensive directory of CSA farms, with more than 4,000 listed in its database. I am glad to hear they are on the rise. This new model of farming is redefining property ownership, creating new forms of cooperation and a new agricultural economy for farmers that want to go beyond the large scale agribusinesses our farmland has been turned into. It’s a model that connects us and allows mutual benefit to be the rule.

Opening my box each week is like a little adventure. And I know that all over town, my fellow CSA member are opening their boxes and figuring out how to turn that into dinner. We have had a lot of asparagus so far this season, so I’ve had to come up with new and interesting ways of eating it, branching out from grilled asparagus to asparagus soup and asparagus salad. But it is more than being overjoyed by the abundance of fresh and healthy produce. I already ate pretty well in D.C., doing my shopping at Whole Foods and the occasional stint at the overpriced farmers market, but I never felt any connection to my fellow Whole Foods shoppers, or the people I bumped into at the weekly farmers markets. Having been introduced to the CSA model has connected me to my food, my community, my farmer and my creativity. My newsletter said next week’s box will include strawberries and rhubarb, so I already know a pie is in my future.

 

“Welcome to D.C.” familiarizes the listener with a side of the capitol city that most visitors never get to see; a thriving metropolis removed from the politics that govern this nation.