Whether you've got drip-irrigated corn in the front yard or just some potted mint on top of the fridge, the Common Table agriculture festival has something for you. Slow Food Sacramento, the local chapter of the worldwide food community Slow Food, is offering city residents the chance to spend this Saturday getting green at their first AgFest workshop series, called the Common Table.

Saturday's AgFest is taking place on the Sacramento's first Urban Ag Day. The Sacramento City Council recently adopted a resolution to make July 11 an annual citywide celebration of local gardening.

Starting at 8:30 AM, AgFest activities include lectures on how to grow and manage food crops at home, tours of local farms and Sacramento community gardens, screenings of documentaries and opportunities to get your hands dirty at Soil Born Farms. The workshops are spread all over the Sacramento area and attendees are encouraged to check out as many as they like.

For those hungrier for ag knowledge, a separate set of evening activities will be held at the Fremont Community Garden, including a charity auction, a lecture from local food activist Brahm Ahmadi and a three-course dinner of seasonal foods from local business Magpie Caterers.

Admission to the daytime workshops is $25, and the evening entertainment runs at $75. Half of ticket revenues will go toward the Sacramento Community Garden and Sacramento Hunger coalitions, who are working with Slow Food to put on the event.

As the charitable fundraising would suggest, the workshops have a focus on community outreach and will address the question of how to keep all members of our city healthy and well-nourished.

"Slow Food has always had the mission of increasing the availability of good, clean and fair food," said event coordinator Charity Kenyon. "In this economy, we're emphasizing the 'fair' part of that mission. That's food justice." 'Food justice' refers to the equitable distribution of food in a society, or in simpler terms: feeding the poor and homeless.

One of the more experimental workshops, Hunger 101, places participants in the role of hungry Sacramentans who have to learn to cope with limited food availability. This hour-long simulation at the Sacramento Food Bank seeks to raise awareness and understanding of the difficulties of stable food sources for low-income families.

Other workshops offer lessons on composting, organic soil management and a variety of other green subjects. You can also get tips on how to give back to the community through gardening, crop-swapping with your neighbors and "gleaning" excess fruit from unpicked trees to donate to local food banks.

If you're up for a bike ride, you can visit Sacramento gardens on a guided cycle tour to check out "what's 'growing' on" in your neighborhood (pun courtesy Slow Food).

Two films will be screened in the afternoon: the critically acclaimed documentaries The Garden and Fresh. The Garden documents a neighborhood's challenge of maintaining an urban garden in East L.A., while Fresh critiques mainstream fast-food and educates about healthy alternative diets. They will be followed by question-and-answer sessions.

Those attending the evening festivities will be able to place bids in a charitable auction for a variety of green goodies. Auction items range from professional cooking lessons, countryside getaways and gardening consultations to "the best damned pie you've ever tasted" prepared by pastry chef Kira O'Donnell.

A full listing of the times and locations of each of these workshops is available at Slow Food Sacramento's website.

Slow Food Sacramento and its allies are seeking to educate Sacramentans on the viability of being more self-sufficient when it comes to food.

"In Moscow, 56 percent of food comes from urban agriculture," Kenyon said. "Here in Sacramento, we're in one of the richest ag regions in the world, yet not very much of our food is locally grown. We want to show that this is more possible for more people."