Farm to Family Full Moon Gathering and Music Festival

I was fortunate enough this past weekend to attend the Farm To Family Full Moon Gathering just outside High Springs Florida. The concert is put on by a local resident Don Appelbaum. He has been having gatherings at his farm since I was in high school. For several years he had the farm to family concerts at his residence, but his neighbors began to become annoyed with all the traffic it brought in and he was forced to stop having them at his farm. Recently Don found a new place to have these events, and after a few years hiatus the Farm to Family concerts returned last November. Unfortunately I was about to move and begin at a new school that month, so I was unable to make it, but I was certainly glad to be able to make it to this one.

The land the festival is held on seems to be the framework for what will someday be a suburban neighborhood. When you first drive in it is on a road with several roundabouts, but there are no houses anywhere to be spoken of. The trees almost look like they were specifically planted so as to be spaced far enough apart to one day accommodate roads and houses, but right now it is simply Florida land. There is a small barn and a chicken shack scattered amongst the property.

The show was Friday March 18 through Sunday the 20th. My girlfriend's sister and her boyfriend arrived with several of our friends on Friday evening, but my girlfriend and I had guests from back home staying with us on Friday night, one of whom would be playing at the festival the next night. My girlfriend had to work Saturday morning, so we did not arrive until late Saturday afternoon. Since we were only staying one night we decided not to bring a tent, but to instead sleep in our hammock. When we arrived there were probably about 300-500 people camping there. There were lots of kids, people with their babies. Older folks, people with dogs. People hula hooping, blowing bubbles, and spinning poi.

They had a lot of great vendors, and apparently had no problem with anyone who wanted to come in and vend doing so without paying any kind of fee beyond entry.
 One of my perennial favorite festival vendors was there, The Grilled Cheese wagon. This venture is made up of a lot of friends of mine, and they are quite possibly the hardest working crew on the festival circuit. There are times at festivals where I have gotten little or no sleep, only to see these guys up and operating even more than me. So since this was a smaller festival it was quite shocking to actually be able to see and photograph them closing for the night in an exhibition I call "No More Cheese"

There many diverse bands playing, from Bluegrass to Funk, Rocksteady Ska to Psychadelic. The two headlining bands on Saturday night were the Ska band The Duppies

and  the Jam band Cope, who even played a Dead-On cover of the Tool song "Sober"!!

Of course this is the Farm to Family Full Moon Celebration, and of course this happened to be on the weekend of the perigee-an moon. If you are not familiar, the moon orbits the earth in kind of an elliptical shape, when it is furthest away from the earth it is at its apogee, when it is closest it is at its perigee. The moons orbit does not directly coincide with its cycles, so the last time the moon was full at its perigee was in 18 years ago in 1993. Because of this event the moon appears much larger and brighter, almost as if it were a white sun.

After the music was over Saturday night there were people having small bonfires throughout the camping area. There was a small drum circle, and there was a guitar and banjo picking circle behind the stage as well. Everyone enjoyed themselves into the morning, and we fell asleep just before the sun rose. Right when the sun did rise they began a bluegrass set on the main stage, it was loud enough to enjoy as I drifted in and out of consciousness, but not so loud as to be disturbing.

We awoke around noon and enjoyed a few more hours of bluegrass before we packed up and drove back to Tallahassee for some much needed rest. It was great to get to go to one of these after 2 years, and this one was by far the best one yet! I can not wait for the next one, hope to see everyone there!