Vegetables a great excuse to party in Sonoma

Here in this foodie epicenter called Sonoma County, we love our vegetables.

We also love festivals. We celebrate locally grown fruits and vegetables with more fervor than some regions demonstrate for major holidays.

Since spring, we've had two apple festivals in Sebastopol and the Zucchini Festival in Healdsburg, which featured not only a giant zuke contest but a race held with cars carved from zucchinis. And there are lavender festivals, which those who cook might consider a foodstuff.

September brings a series of events celebrating the tomato, the biggest being Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates' 14th annual Heirloom Tomato Festival, featuring some 170 varieties of the love apple. (Once upon a time the tomato was believed to have aphrodisiacal powers.) In October, we'll start getting excited about pumpkins.

What is it about our region that prompts such ardor for produce?

“We have a very Mediterranean-type climate here, perfect for growing vegetables,” said vegetarian, dietitian and writer Jill Nussinow of Santa Rosa, author of the book, “The Veggie Queen,” and founder of the website by the same name.

“From Facebook and Twitter, there are people I know in Italy; we will each come back from the market, and we will have bought the exact same thing. It's the climate. It's the soil,” she said.

But Wine Country is good for growing many different crops, beyond its justly famous wine grapes, so why not choose to salute okra or figs, for example? A fig fest sounds like fun.

“We have okra here, but not much of it,” Nussinow said. “I love figs, but there are very few farmers growing figs commercially. That's the issue.”

All right, but why tomatoes?

“The tomato festivals are so popular because when you talk tomatoes, people are incredibly passionate about their tomatoes,” Nussinow explained.

“They'll say, ‘Oh, you can't get tomatoes like I used to have.' At the festivals, you can taste tomatoes like they used to be, because they're ripe and they're fresh.”

The simple reason Wine Country food lovers get worked up about locally grown fruits and vegetables is that growers here produce really good stuff and a lot of it, available not only at annual festivals, but weekly farmers' markets, Nussinow said. And backyard farmers can grow their own without much horticultural expertise.

“We have much better availability, and more ability to grow produce more months of the year. And I think people tend to be a little more health-conscious here than they are in Kansas,” she added.

“People need to taste these things, and the festivals give them that opportunity,” Nussinow said. “The more people taste fresh and delicious vegetables, they more likely they are to eat them.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. See his ARTS blog at http://arts.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.