Mission Garden: San Ysidro Festival
Since wheat was adopted as a valued crop here in the 18th Century, it has been harvested on Saint Isidore’s Day. This day was an opportunity to remember San Ysidro—the patron of laborers and farmers—and to harvest the wheat.
At the festival we will demonstrate the traditional way wheat was harvested, threshed, winnowed and ground into flour. Our volunteers will do this all with sickles, baskets, our tahona (mill), and other traditional tools. And there will be a horse helping with the threshing! This is all in line with a central thread of our mission, to recreate and teach about traditional agriculture of many eras of our 4,100-year agricultural and culinary history.
Of course, any celebration calls for a feast. So, on this day we will feed visitors the traditional food for this festival, pozole de trigo. This soup contains wheat grains among many other hearty ingredients). As Mission Garden continues to mature we hope to feed people, just as San Ysidro did near Madrid in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. Come and experience this taste of history!
Saturday May 20, 2023, 8:00AM to 12:00PM
Free with a suggested donation at the front gate
- Audience: Adult, Teen, Youth
- Genre: Field Sciences
- Type: Expo/Festival
