The Fayette Extension Horticulture program has held a Growing Community event for the last 12 years to promote vegetable gardening to under served audiences. Traditionally this has taken the form of short training sessions offered on a Saturday in May with the reward for attending 4 session being a bag of gardening resources, seeds, and transplants. It has always been very popular. The Covid pandemic left us unable to follow our usual training approach. We decided to just give away the garden kits and instructions as a drive through and promoted them via social channels. 

We were not quite prepared for what happened. Staff arrived two hours early to set up only to find lines of traffic already causing problems on access roads. We had no choice but to start distributing bags to reduce the traffic problem. Out highest attendance in the past was roughly 250 families. By the official art time of 10 am out supplies were nearly gone and we handed out the last of 400 bags at 10:03. It was great but unfortunately we had to put out crude signs and tell the next 800-1000 people we had already distributed all we had prior to actual start time. We learned that we had created traffic flow problems on both Versailles road and South Broadway. A huge success for Cooperative Extension. We were thrilled to provide vegetable gardens for 400 families but now know that we could easily distribute 1500 instead with people not leaving their cars.