 The Eat Local movement is growing throughout Maine, and the UMaine Cooperative Extension will be holding its annual Backyard Locovore Day on Saturday, August 11th to help educate the public about ways to grow and eat more locally produced food. Tom Talk with Kate McCarty, a food preservation program aide about where you can go to learn how to eat healthy. Kate, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Your Locovore tour is coming up pretty soon. But before we get into that, do you want to explain just for people who might not know what the Cooperative Extension service is, what it does? It's the Department of the University of Maine, and we seek to connect the research of the university with the public. So we provide a lot of education in horticulture, agriculture, nutrition, youth development. A lot of people know about the 4-H program and the Master Gardener program. And then I work in food preservation, so I teach hands-on canning workshops. That's going to be really helpful this year, because we've had a pretty good growing season this year haven't we? Yeah, it's coming in early. The demand for our classes is filling, so. And the whole idea of the Locovore tour is to visit gardens and people who are creating the food that can allow us to be Locovores, which is what? What's the definition of Locovore? Well, we say that someone who strives to eat locally. So there's different definitions as to what that means as far as a 100-mile radius or a 50-mile radius. But we say just people who focus on main food and main and are aware of where their food is coming from. So what's the Locovore tour all about? What do people can expect, where do they go? So it's a self-guided garden tour of backyard sites all throughout Cumberland County. So it's from their sites from Brunswick to Cape Elizabeth, out in Wyndham, and then a lot around the greater Portland area. So at each site, there's going to be the homeowner who will take you on little guided tours of their yard, highlight all the different things you might see. We have backyard chickens and bees and a lot of edibles, different techniques for growing organic and square foot gardening. And there will also be a master gardener volunteer and a master food preserver volunteer at each site. So topics on gardening and food preservation and then, of course, food for you to try at each site. Now, how big of a circumference does it cover the tour? How many places can you go? There's 13 sites on the tour. And because it is from Brunswick to Cape Elizabeth and out to Wyndham, you won't be able to get to every site. So we'll provide the information ahead of time as to what each site will highlight. So you'll really need to narrow it down and pick the sites that might be the most interesting to you. How do you choose them? Well, it's mostly volunteer because they have to open their gardens for six hours to have people trompe through them. So we draw from the master gardener volunteers and then the planning committee went out and looked at all the sites ahead of time. And, of course, it was a few months ahead of time. So their garden wasn't in full bloom by then. But what they'd had previously and how accessible the site was, unfortunately, had it turned out a few people in the boonies because we know that they might not have the demand that they were expecting. So how many people do you have coming? How many years have you been doing this? This is our fourth year. And we've had three events in four years. And our highest attendance was 350 people. What kind of people come for this? I imagine would be gardeners themselves who want more tips and that sort of thing. Yeah, people looking to not only just read about the technique but to really see it in action and talk to the homeowner about what worked, what didn't, looking to incorporate stuff into their own yards, to really figure out how you can have chickens in downtown Portland or bees on your shed roof and things like that. Yeah, what are some of the important considerations of people who want to grow a lot of vegetables for the year living in Maine that they face? Yeah, there's a lot of season extension techniques. So how to get the most out of the shoulder seasons, we think just between Memorial and Labor Day. But we can really grow on either side for a lot longer than that. So people will be able to get some tips about how to get the most out of your garden in our short growing season. Yeah, it does seem like a short growing season, but you can extend it a lot of ways, right? Yeah. People, are there greenhouses? Are there different homes? Yeah, we've got greenhouses. And then that small intensive gardening, so maybe you don't have a lot of space if you're a downtown area, but how to get the most yield out of what you have. And you're into food preservation. Is there gonna be anything on the tour about that? Oh yeah, every site will have a food preservation topic and then a food sample featuring a preserved food. Oh wow. So there's a lot to look forward to, people should bring their notebooks and that sort of thing. Yes, definitely. And you're able to do. Now if people want more information about the tour and where to go, what can they get? Sure, they could call our office, we're 781-6099 and of course go online at extension.umain.edu. Okay, well great, well thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me.