Sunset's One-Block Feast
Meet the winners of our One-Block Contest
See how neighbors banded together to learn how to grow everything they planned to eat
The ultimate block party
Not a whole lot grows in foggy, windy Morro Bay, a quiet surfing outpost on California’s Central Coast. But when Sunset launched a grow-your-own block party contest last spring, 8 families in the town’s Beach Tract neighborhood entered right
away, wanting to show that great food could come from their soil. The 15 adults (and 16 kids ages 3 to 11), who named themselves
Team Beach Tractors, had limited gardening experience and tiny yards—but that didn’t stop them from putting their collective
green thumb up against 9 other worthy teams from all over the West.
Using Sunset’s backyard farming book, The One-Block Feast (Ten Speed Press, 2011; $25), as a guide, they started planting. They milked goats and made cheese, kept meat chickens and egg-layers, raised oysters,
fished for rock cod, and grew wheat and barley for beer; they even made salt.
Last August, the Tractors threw a party on a borrowed yacht that cruised around Morro Bay (the children had a separate feast,
which they grew and cooked themselves). While the team could claim to have grown a dinner—with the exception of a few ingredients—they
also came away with something else: In an era when hardly any of us know our neighbors’ names, around the Beach Tract, no
one was a stranger.
