photo by: Mike Yoder

A Yurt draws a crowd at the Colorado Yurt Company booth during the Mother Earth News fair Saturday in Watson Park. The fair continues Sunday with many demonstrations and hands-on workshops.

I’ll take a break from hand-sewing my Sluggerrr costume for tonight’s pivotal Game 6 Royals/Blue Jays match up to empty my notebook. Here are a few tidbits to close out the week:

• Lawrence, if you want to get your green on, you had better plan a trip to Topeka this weekend. That’s right, the Capital City — at least this weekend — is more of an environmental bastion than Lawrence.

Topeka is hosting the Mother Earth News Fair on Saturday and Sunday at the Topeka Expocentre. The fair is a gathering of experts and vendors on how to live environmentally sensitive and sustainable lives. It attracts about 10,000 people.

Perhaps some of this rings a bell to you because Lawrence played host to the fair two years ago. The event was hosted in downtown’s Watson Park, and people raved about how Lawrence was the perfect place to host an environmental celebration. (I can still envision the after-party: Wheat grass shots out of bamboo cups with people passed out on a cork floor.)

photo by: Mike Yoder

A Yurt draws a crowd at the Colorado Yurt Company booth during the Mother Earth News fair Saturday in Watson Park. The fair continues Sunday with many demonstrations and hands-on workshops.

The event is put on by the Topeka-based magazine Mother Earth News, which is one of the larger magazines of its type in the country. Leaders with the company said they were pleased with the turnout the event got in Lawrence in 2013. And it seemed like it was a good deal for Lawrence. Bryan Welch, the publisher and editorial director for the parent company of Mother Earth News, told city commissioners at the time that about 10,000 people attended. He estimated about 4,500 of them had never been to Lawrence before, and most of those visitors came from more than 100 miles away. That’s a good formula for hotel and tourism spending.

But Welch also told city commissioners that it likely was going to have to find a larger venue in Lawrence to host the event. Welch suggested South Park. When we last reported on it in November 2013, it appeared the city was willing to accommodate a move to South Park. Then, I kind of forgot about the whole thing. (Sorry, a wheat grass hangover causes me to drop the ball on a lot of things.) But something happened because the fair didn’t return to Lawrence in 2014 and company officials seem pretty happy in their new home in Topeka.

“Bringing it back here (to Topeka), it is so close to our offices,” said Alec Weaver, marketing and publicity coordinator for the fair. “It is kind of easier on us.”

Weaver said Lawrence didn’t do anything wrong to lose the event, but rather that it just worked out better logistically in Topeka.

So, I guess throw a bottle of wheat grass in the glove box, and away you go. The fair is set to run from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets for a weekend pass are $30.

• Fans of wind energy in Douglas County also don’t have a lot to celebrate this week. As we reported earlier — and opined on in an editorial today — Douglas County commissioners have again extended a moratorium on wind development in the county. The moratorium dates back to December 2013, when some county residents became concerned that a large wind energy company — NextEra Energy Resources — wanted to install some meteorological towers in southwest Douglas County to monitor wind patterns.

The commissioners allowed the monitoring stations, but said they needed some time to get regulations on the books before allowing companies to propose actual wind farms in the county. Everyone kind of shrugged their shoulders because it was understood that NextEra was probably more than a year away from deciding whether it made sense to do a wind farm in Douglas County. Then, I kind of forgot about it. (The bamboo cup was really big.)

But now, we are going on two years for developing these regulations. The approval by county commissioners on Wednesday extends the moratorium until July 2016. Our editorial today opines about how that seems to be excessive, so I won’t pile on in that regard. I’m sure there are a lot of issues to think through when developing regulations for wind energy farms. Having them next to residential structures can be challenging.

What I’m more interested in is whether there’s actual interest on the part of wind energy companies to locate in Douglas County. And if so, where? The previous talk focused on southwest Douglas County, near the Osage County line and Overbrook. We’ll try to do some checking with NextEra in the coming days to see if they are still interested in the county.

Travis Young

When I first heard of NextEra’s interest in 2013, I was dubious that anything would ever come of it. I long had been told that wind energy doesn’t work in this part of the state. It is a western Kansas thing. But that seems to be changing. It hasn’t gotten a lot of publicity, but there is a wind farm developing not far from Douglas County.

An approximately 200-megawatt wind farm with 95 large turbines is under construction outside of Waverly in Coffey County. That’s less than an hour’s drive from here. (If you have ever been to Guy & Mae’s, the famous rib joint in Williamsburg, you are right next door to Waverly.) The next time you are on Interstate 35 between the Waverly and Melvern exits, look to the south and you can see some of the turbines. I’m not an expert on wind (hot air, yes; wind, no) but I grew up just a few miles from the site of the wind farm and the wind there seems a lot like the wind here.

There also once was a plan to build an approximately 200-MW wind farm near St. Joseph, Mo. That project was billed by its developers as a $400 million plan. That number seems hard to believe, but it certainly has me wondering how much value a wind farm does add to an area’s economy. We may try to look at what some of the communities out in western Kansas have experienced after allowing wind farms in their communities. It seems important to understand whether this moratorium is hampering significant economic development opportunities for Douglas County.

The St. Joseph area project, though, serves as a good reminder of how these projects can be controversial. My understanding is the project has been discontinued because there was concern the wind turbines would kill large numbers of birds near the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge. Wind turbines aren’t universally loved by environmentalists.

I think this issue does have the potential to be an interesting one to watch in Douglas County. Lawrence and Douglas County really do have a chance to become a green energy capital for the region. We already have a hydroelectric power company, we have at least two very active solar power companies, we have a handful of research-based companies, and importantly, we have KU researchers who are making progress on items such as biofuels and other renewable energy sources. This moratorium isn’t likely to cancel out any of that, but if not handled correctly, it is the type of thing that can give a community an unfavorable reputation in the industry.

• Speaking of reputations, there is a particular bakery in town that has a reputation of busting my elastic waistbands. It also has won some national kudos as well. Munchers Bakery at the Hillcrest Shopping Center at Ninth and Iowa streets, has been named the best bakery in Kansas in article published on MSN’s food and drink website.

The survey used results gathered by Foursquare, the city guide app that lets users save and highlight their favorite locations. Munchers ended up being the Kansas bakery that had the best Foursquare rating. The MSN article highlighted Munchers’ doughnuts, which the article said are both “cheap and fresh.”

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Cream Cheese Doughnuts at Munchers Bakery, 925 S. Iowa St., Suite M.