September 18, 2013 by The Weekly Sun

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s t a n l e y • F a i r f i e l d • S h o sh o n e • P i c a b o It’s Not Just Food at the Farmers’ Markets

Wine Party Puts Public Face on Hope Garden

the weekly

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Cure Boredom: With The Valley’s Most Comprehensive Calendar Pages 10-11

Sun Valley Harvest Festival In Full Swing

read about it on PG 14

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S e p t e m b e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 3 • Vo l . 6 • N o . 3 8 • w w w.T h e We e k l y S u n . c o m

COURTESY PHOTO

Saving Lolita: Whale’s Fate Rests in Hailey Woman’s Hands BY KAREN BOSSICK

s a Desert Storm veteran, Lynn Timm fought for the freedom of humans. Now she’s fighting for the freedom of orca whales—namely, a whale named Lolita. Timm, who lives in Hailey, is trying to collect 430,000 signatures on an online petition to provide the whale with more humane treatment –Lynn Timm than Timm says she’s receiving now. “Yes, that’s a lot,” says Timm, who so far has collected 1,800 signatures. “I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. But I believe in freedom for people. I believe in freedom for all living creatures. And it kills me to see creatures like Lolita performing tricks their bodies are not meant to do.” Timm was awakened to Lolita’s plight when she and her husband Joby Timm spent their one-year anniversary last July whale watching by boat and kayak in the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast. They learned of Lolita while visiting the whale museum in Friday Harbor. “She is the last living orca from 50 orcas that were captured years ago. She has been residing in the Miami Seaquarium for 43 years in the smallest orca tank in the United States in violation of the Animal Welfare Act.” Lolita has spent 33 of those years alone, after her partner Hugo killed himself by bashing his head repeatedly against the wall of the tank. The plight of orca whales was brought to the public’s attention in the 1993 movie “Free Willy.” It starred Keiko as an orca who’d been captured off the Pacific Northwest coast and then rescued by a 12-year-old from the amusement park where he had been performing tricks. A new movie, “Blackfish,” opens at Ketchum’s Magic Lantern Cinemas on Friday and runs through Thursday, Sept. 26. The documentary looks inside the lives of captive orcas, including Tilikum, a bull orca that lives in captivity at SeaWorld Orlando, in Florida. The 22.5-foot, 12,000-pound whale has been involved in the deaths of three people, including a trainer who was drowned after a “Dine with Shamu” show in 2010. “Since the movie came out, SeaWor-

“She is the last living orca from 50 orcas that were captured years ago.”

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With Judd McMahan STORY & PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

udd McMahan missed the dirt beneath his fingernails. And he missed the kind of community that rallied around his friend after his house caught on fire. And so he and his wife Heather walked away from their Seattle apartment and his design career to hoe weeds near Bellevue. “Seeing my 5-year-old son Austin running around a hose naked reminds me of my own childhood riding horses, jumping on the tractor now and then,” said McMahan, who started life on a farm in Picabo. “I figured all we might get if our house burned down in Seattle was a night on someone’s couch. We found a farm that was available and unloved with an old ranch house that we have the electrician check every time he comes through. And we decided to go for it.” Today, McMahan’s five-acre Wood River Organics farm on Townsend Gulch Road is a showcase for high-altitude organic gardening. In fact, the farm served as the showpiece for a recent farm tour offered by the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides, which attracted 32 people. Frances Prior came all the way from the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Owyhee, Nev. “I’m starting a garden there—I want to eat more healthily and so I wanted to find out about organic gardening,” said Prior, who represented the Duck Valley Hoop House and Garden. Auto mechanic Keith Selner came from—well—Bellevue, where he started an organic garden at home and now has three farms on which he raises enough produce to sell to the Bellevue General Store. “One day I walked into the grocery store and bought an ounce of baby kale for $15 and that got me started,” he said. “My day starts at 4:30 and I

Judd McMahan hawks a handful of beets at the Wood River Farmers’ Market in Ketchum.

return home at 9. But when you enjoy what you’re doing, it’s not an issue.” McMahan, likewise, started off small, simply trying to grow a variety of tomatoes. The first year he sold the 40 extra plants he had started in his motherin-law’s backyard. This spring he and his wife sold 2,200 tomato plants and the same number of pepper plants. “It’s a matter of finding the right varieties that do well in the Wood River Valley,” McMahan said. Today McMahan raises baby kale, carrots, beets, arugula, radishes, edamame, bok choy, broccoli and cauliflower, and fennel, among other things. “I’d never grown broccoli and cabbage well. Then I changed the variety and the location where I planted them. Now I have broccoli and cauliflower the size of dinner plates. It’s insane,” he said. Scrapping the scissors McMahan started harvesting his lettuce by cutting the leaves

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Oak Street caterers prepared a number of dishes using McMahan’s produce for tour-goers. Among them: black rice salad with edamame and snap peas; beet kale salad with goat cheese, tomatoes and almonds; mixed greens with sweet turnips; and Chinese chicken salad with Napa cabbage.

EVENTS TO REMEMBER Savor New Panels of Foodie Superstars