This goat with the sloe-doe eyes and confectioners sugar-dipped ears and muzzle is not my goat. She is a darling at lovely Bleugrass Chevre Farm, and she did her nuzzly best to become the darling of the Lexington Farmers Market Second Annual Farm Tour on June 20.

I had no idea bottle fed goats sport  the visceral appeal of a sturdy horse crossed with a good-natured dog, but so it is with “the girls” at Bleugrass Chevre.

My happy little party of three enjoyed the goats and the cheesemaking room at Bleugrass Chevre, and then drove to the compact herb and vegetable gardens at Henkle’s Herbs & Heirlooms in Nicholasville. A few minutes with any of the farmers we met on the tour could convince a frozen stone that the people who grow our food love what they do, and are good at it.

The problem? They need more of us to buy what they grow and produce. They could use better distribution systems and more affordable market and marketing options. I’m for that 1000 percent.

Here’s what gets my goat: In spite of all the energy and skills poured into social networking monsters like facebook and twitter — and I do use both, and value both — we are still waiting for the perfect social/local marketing software that will accelerate our farmers’ sales of their flavorful, delicious, healthy products straight to us. I wish I had majored in databases, but I wasn’t thinking ahead when I studied 20th Century American Poetry and Eighteenth Century Opera.

Having forgotten everything I paid good tuition money to learn, what I know now amounts to what I can look up online. “Online” is just another way of saying I look in a place that works like a giga-miracle because of the sweat poured into it by people who develop and manage databases. Perhaps it’s true that most database developers live on a steady diet of cheese curls, large diet sodas, and Ensure (for dessert). Maybe they are not foodies or people enamored of local economies. More likely, the people who pay database gurus to stay in the darkened rooms with the empty Cheetos bags do not see ways to make millions from small farms and their patrons. Whatever the reason, those in charge of databases have not taken on the challenge of helping locally grown food and nearby forks find each other in a mutually happy economic exchange. As a result, the information/technology overload we sometimes rue does not extend to the likes of Henkle Herbs & Heirlooms and Bleugrass Chevre.

I do not expect the people in those fine establishments to address this problem of the missing databases themselves. They have goats to milk, cheese to strain, tomatoes to sucker, and cilantro that needs its head chopped off so it won’t go to seed. No time to go to database summer camp. So how can they get ample quantities of their quality products into our hands?

Bless the ones who keep trying to solve this puzzle of farm-to-us sales. Here’s a worthy new attempt, Locavore Network, born out of one man’s frustrated efforts to find again the peach orchards he remembered visiting as a child. So flavor made him do it. Dan Sutton is building a whopper online farm/vineyard locator out of love for flavor and those who nurture it along.

Locavore Network includes basic information on thousands of farms, orchards, vineyards, wineries, and restaurants nationwide, findable by state. Many of the Kentucky listings were news to me, places I had never heard of — which is exciting — although most listings throughout the site offer only skimpy information so far. It’s a fine effort, though, and Savoring Kentucky hereby officially designates Dan Sutton as a Peach of a Man for his commitment to using databases in the service of small farms and farmers.

My uncle who farmed by day and read philosophy at night said that all colors work together in gardens and flower arrangements, because all colors appear together in nature. The Gardener at my house likes a semi-wild/semi-contained mix of colors, shapes, and textures in our ornamental beds, and has begun stretching the principle further by mixing fruits and vegetables into the ornamental beds.

Our dark beautiful Bluegrass soil (Maury Series Loam), coupled with this growing season’s ample rain, yields a wondrous tousle in our long borders. Giant squash leaves unfold next to daylilies and space-age Echinops, and a happy new dwarf Montmorency cherry tree stretches up nearby.

We made a mixed up arrangement, above, to brighten the living room for last Monday night’s Cornbread Supper (you’re invited every Monday). It led me to the hope that just as colors and types of plants mix in nature, so can topics mix in blogs.

In theory.

Here comes the test — a bit about several topics on my mind.

• Amazing people at Art in Motion — please take 100 bows, Yvette Hurt — have raised money, caucused with neighbors, and this week are installing Lexington’s second art bus shelter right here at E. Third and Elm Tree Lane. In winter I can see the spot clearly from any back window of our house. This creativity-brimming shelter will feature a  changing back wall exhibit of local art, a large metal sculpture by the renowned Garry Bibbs, and the ability to rearrange sections of the shelter so that it becomes a performance space, particularly handy for street festival weekends.
• The Gardener (that same wonderful man) appears to be documenting this construction project on facebook (as Steve Kay) and twitter (as @campsiesteve). Photos, too.
• This is a bit prospective, and I don’t want to jinx the outcome, but the tone and statements about renovating and expanding the Lyric Theatre were promising at today’s work session of the Lexington Fayette Urban County Council. The Lyric, closed and neglected for 46 years, can become one of the most exciting, healing, enriching developments I’ve witnessed in Lexington, assuming the Council votes to approve construction funding this Thursday, July 2.
• And then there are black raspberries. At least for a moment, anyway, at Reed Valley Orchard. Black raspberries are their own luscious thing, not some version of blackberry. I like black raspberries best of all berries (at least until someone offers me a mulberry, or a pail of freshly picked wild blackberries, ready for pie.)
• Blueberries, too, are quite literally growing on us here in central Kentucky. Several types of blueberries, by the tens of tasty thousands, can be picked or bought already picked at Reed Valley Orchard and at other orchards nearby. Could the Bluegrass become the Blueberry Belt’s Buckle?
• Two friends have new books. Equine ER, Leslie Guttman’s new book about Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital, comes out soon. I have ordered an Early Bird copy (Free Shipping). I expect to enjoy it and learn a great deal from it. Delightful friend Chuck Sohner did not live to finish his lively, funny memoir, Final Exams, but completed enough to make a great read that integrates personal, political, and social history. Congratulations to his family for publishing this book about a life that could only have unfolded in the USA.
• Topics I’ve noted during recent Suppers:

• Composting
• Kentucky League of Cities, worries and miseries
• Composting types
• CentrePointe
• Composting
• Pedicures — deadly or delicious?
• Beehive construction — little hammers work best
• twitter
• Do Kentucky wines deserve a future?
• Downtown backyard chicken coops
• Publishing
• Printing and binding one’s own fine book at the King Library Press
• twitter’s impact on Lexington
• Jennifer’s tomato soup
• Carbon offsets
• Yin, but also Yang
• House-buying
• London Ferrell Community Garden
• Sacred prostitution in the Indian state of Karnataka
• Movies: Amélie, Bull Durham, Away We Go, and nothing violent or sad
• Composting tools
• twitter’s ability to integrate with other social media and cure the economic downturn’s marketing blues for big things like WEG (451 days to go)
• Writing Practice groups at the Carnegie Center
• String theory
• United Nations
• Horse surgery
• High hoop greenhouses at Au Naturel Farm
• Seedleaf – the wonder of it
• Bourbon pie made with Cool Whip, melted Hershey bars, and one cup of Makers Mark, in a bought graham cracker crust
• Composting temperatures
• Cocktails made with local fruits, herbs, botanicals — whither? Blackberry? Tomato? Rely on Bourbon?
• The ineffable majesty of deviled eggs
• Bones for Life
• Compost, though I may have mentioned that before.

Chef Jacob Graves and his “Cookin’ Up Kentucky” fresh air restaurant at the Saturday Lexington Farmers Market makes me realize how puny my wishes have been with regard to places to eat at the Market. For years I have noted what a destination the Market is. People bring their pleasure principles with them: slow Saturday-paced approaches to friends and neighbors, longish talks, lots of dogs and children (and balloons), music everywhere, colors, smells, sensual delights. I have believed many more people would extend their stays downtown and increase their enjoyment of the Market if only there were more places to eat and drink that suited them. We have needed more good brunch places near the Market, particularly.

I never envisioned Cookin’ Up Kentucky, though, and I should have. Chef Graves makes his offerings from what farmers bring to the Market each week, with nearby Sunrise Bakery playing a supporting role. The Evans Orchard strawberry crepes with elegant custard made from Elmwood Stock Farm eggs delighted me a couple of Saturdays in a row. I appreciated the handmade food. I saw others enjoying Sunrise Bakery biscuits with Stone Cross Farm sausage, or with the Nickels’s Fayette County honey and Amish butter from the Market. Fried green tomato sandwiches have been calling my name, but I have not answered yet. I will, if Chef Graves continues offering them.

Barbeque is also cooking in the Saturday Market these days, and there are smaller samples of good things at lovely Oliva Bella, all the cheese purveyors, and more. I like that more people have more reasons now to come downtown and stay longer. Cookin’ Up Kentucky is a huge positive step for Lexington Farmers Market and for our downtown.

I applaud Chef Graves for his fine food that showcases the amazing tastes that come from our region’s soil, sun, and water. I wish Cookin’ Up Kentucky every success.

A wonderful friend and mentor used to say that fairly often — “It’s hard to make a true statement” — which tickled me because that statement itself may be one of the few that is quite true.

The statement runs in my head a good deal, but last Saturday it came with a full choir and orchestration, just to remind me that I rarely know what I’m talking about.

Here is the sequence of events. Around 11 AM last Saturday, I stood at the Lexington Farmers Market, having survived my first attempt to “Twitter the Market.*” Relaxing with the wonderful people on “Luscious Row” (luscious with lilies and jams, chevre, freshly roasted coffee, and, of course, chocolate and pastries all lined up in a row), I blithely told the extraordinary confectioners at Viburnum Valley Farm Confections that chocolate is lost on me.

It seemed true at the time – even though I can testify firsthand to the excellence of Viburnum Valley Farm truffles.  Actually, I HAVE testified right here. And here. And a few more places, too.

I did think it was true, at that very moment, that chocolate is lost on me. I often choose caramel, lemon, blackberry, tart cherry, or apricot desserts instead of chocolate, if I can. But on Saturday, VVFC’s delightful Elaine Shay came out from behind the stand, put her arm around me, and said sweet things about how foolish I was being, and how confused I was, because there is a new truffle, German Chocolate, with “oh, caramel, and nuts, and…all kinds of good things, wrapped in 70 percent chocolate…” And then, “And there’s a little Bourbon in there – you won’t mind that, will you?”

The upshot being that about 90 minutes later, I did as instructed and, sitting in my kitchen after lunch, bit into my room temperature Viburnum Valley Farm Confections German Chocolate Truffle with all kinds of things in it and the Bourbon that I didn’t mind – and I heard the orchestra and chorus tuning up for a grand rendition of “It’s hard to make a true statement.” I can’t share that audio with you, so I reached for the camera.

This truffle could single-handedly convert me to a person upon whom chocolate is not — absolutely not — lost. That, just possibly, maybe, could be a true statement.

*About “Twittering the Market:” Using my Twitter identity, @savoringky, I sent a series of short messages (tweets) and a few photos of the offerings at the May 30 Market to people who follow me on Twitter. Fun, challenging, and a skill I might improve if I practice a bit and get feedback on the best (and least annoying) use of the tool.

These mulberry (Morus) fruits look a bit disoriented, with good reason. A windstorm a year ago tore their loaded branch off the old tree 50 feet from my backdoor. Once the storm passed through, thousands of black (sweet), dark red (sweet-tart) and white (sour) mulberries, typically tucked under the protection of long rows of leaves, presented themselves in the open, at about at about waist level — perfect for effortless picking.

I became a mulberry-ian on the spot. I have lived around mulberries all my life, but somehow had never put one in my mouth. That amazes me, and as I wrote earlier this year, mulberries are not the only fantastic, widely available food I have only recently tasted.

There’s no explaining it.

But there are things to be done – and one of those things is to take people of all ages to the tree this year, show them the berries, and watch as their faces register the pleasure of the sweetly tasty, soft, pleasing, not seedy fruit. I love blackberries, especially wild ones, but mulberries are better: sweeter, missing the bitter undertone, and missing the famously diamond-shaped seeds.

Mulberries are so delicate, so thin-skinned, that they cannot be picked into a box and sold at a farmers’ market. Straight into the mouth, or if you don’t mind the mess, into a bowl to make a pie – that’s it. Mulberries are maximum local food. For the next two or three weeks, look around your neighborhood for telltale purple spots on the sidewalk or street, and then look up. Chances are good you will see these fine-tasting berries, and chances are also good you will be able to reach quite a few of them. Do try – and hoist up a nearby child or two so they can start loving this beautiful free food a lot earlier than I did.

On the other hand, organic milk, a completely familiar, virtually irreplaceable food, is in serious jeopardy, according to a recent New York Times story by Katie Zezima. I have become convinced by Weston A. Price Foundation research of the merits of unpasteurized and, particularly, un-homogenized milk.

If you can support a dairy farmer who is using organic practices and treating the milk with all appropriate care, please do. Where fresh milk is sold directly to consumers — see states’ milk policies here — buyers pay a premium of about $2/gallon to support local organic producers. For all who can afford it, this premium not only supports body health and community economic health, but also helps with planetary health by reducing pollutants in air, water, and soil.

In spite of this deep concern about a core food, we have reasons for great hope that even those of us who live in cities are regaining the freedom and self-reliance that come from feeding ourselves. Lexington’s urban agriculture efforts pause for a Pea Pickin’ Party at the London Ferrell Community Garden this Saturday, June 6. You’re invited.

And the final delight, the dessert. Get ready to be happy because human beings right in our own time are ingenious and flexible. Enjoy reading about Urban Sharecropping. It is so much better than it sounds, as you will see. Apartment dwellers with no land get matched up with people with backyard space to spare. Gardening ensues. All benefit.

In appreciation for tipping us about this article, we dip the Savoring Kentucky fork to the tall, handsome, kind young gentleman from New Hampshire Avenue (and before that, from our sister Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and before that – yessiree, from this Bluegrass State).

A red-headed, red-bearded, pipe-smoking carpenter came to work on some ugly walls and ceilings of our old house not long after I moved in. His fine works holds up well more than 20 years later. I think of him often, though, for a completely different reason. He sang his way through each systematic task as he repaired our house. I don’t remember the songs, but I remember sensing in his songs his pleasure in his work, his contentment glowing through the house like a yellow sun.

People sang as they worked on their farms as I was growing up. One energetic uncle sang each evening as he headed to the barn to milk after a day teaching fifth grade: “Oh, my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away, and I’ll never see my darling any more…” or “The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be…”

My beloved childhood dentist hummed as he worked, and made up little songs to keep me amused during my long sessions in his chair. My equally beloved present dentist also hums as he works, and it soothes me like musical Xanax.

If I ever catch myself singing without realizing it, I am washing dishes, folding clothes, chopping an onion. My hands are changing something, making something, without a lot of focused conscious thought. Though I use my hands in my “real” work, 80 percent of which involves generating words on keyboards, it is a different sort of handwork somehow, with the hands doing the brain’s bidding. Typing ideas onto a keyboard does not — so far — lead to singing while I work.

I once interviewed a weaver who is a leader in crafts-based sustainable economic development  in western North Carolina. I wanted to identify busy people who work to carry out positive community change. I asked the weaver how she managed her civic work along with her demanding, time-consuming craft. She said something like, “Oh, all of us [crafts people] who are involved are lucky. We get to use our hands. We get to work with materials. That gives us strength and ideas for our civic duties.”

“We get to work with materials.” That sentence stayed with me because I did not understand, at first, what was so great about materials. Eventually it helped explain an experience I have often: an insight, a solution, a useful phrase, a way forward comes to me when I stand at the kitchen counter stemming parsley after hours of fruitless struggle at the computer. In my life, perhaps, the ingredients for dinner are my materials, and putting my hands on them completes a circuit as necessary as breathing for my well-being.

Recently I realize, too, that people just don’t sing “Darling Clementine” or “Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight” as they work unless that circuitry of well-being is running smoothly, running through hands at work with materials. I’m a slow learner. I gave no thought to the wonders of song-inducing work the day I left the farm for college, bent on finding great ways to work that didn’t involve the sometimes grueling hand work of growing, harvesting, processing, cooking and preserving homegrown food.

Along with a lot of others in the country, I am happy to see and take part in a revaluing of hand work as well as head work. This revaluing extends well beyond rural people, young people, old people, back to the land people, or crafts people. In the past week, the New York Times has run a front page story on young people’s increasing interest in hard labor internships on organic farms; the Sunday New York Times Magazine ran a first-person account of the satisfactions of running a motorcycle repair shop instead of being a “knowledge worker,” and the food section featured a New Yorker who feeds her family partly by canning foods she buys from farmers markets.

Though none of these articles mentions singing, each underscores the satisfaction of making or changing things — materials — using hand work. Singing is bound to follow. If you need to prime the musical pump to get your handwork-to-singing circuitry moving, try Rise Up Singing.