Isn’t it funny how sometimes you can completely miss an opportunity that’s right beneath your feet? Here I was six months into my time on old mill road bio farm as their enthusiastic web designer come farming intern and I’d near missed one of the region’s biggest celebration on local food. I guess I had my head too deep in the veggie patch to consider that there was other people out there not only growing their own food, but there was a dedicated festival right in my new home celebrating the initiative.

There was a lot of talk of the arrival of Costa coming to town. I loved that, like the pied piper of Moruya. The town has a true love for their locally grown produce, and Costa represents a real inspiration in this local resurgence. So when word got out that he was coming to town, the place went into a frenzy. I figured that it would be great to catch a glimpse of the hullabaloo, so I set out to see what it was about this fuzzy little Greek man that had people squawking.

Saturday morning of the festival I had a chat with the organizers about capturing some of the Costa fever. It became apparent that this was so much more than a Costa fest. This was a celebration about how a community can come together over their love and ambitions of rebuilding a food producing hub. This was the South East once known as Sydney’s food bowl, this was a community determined to put the land back to a place of production and the South East Harvest was their way of fueling that momentum.

So with a new direction in mind I took my new camera and somehow managed to document the entire weekend blissfully unaware of my smudged finger print on the lens, I like to think of it as my South East Harvest watermark. The weekend was a blast with local producer stalls, cooking demos with celebrity chefs and a buck wild medieval themed dinner party (the shot in the film of the two babes crash landing an embraced Tubby should give you some idea of the night’s energy). Thanks to everyone for making it happen and I look forward to smudging the lens for this year’s event (July 20, 2013)