Wheat harvest at the San Ysidro Festival (Michael McCrory)

San Ysidro Festival

Saturday May 18, 2024, 8:00AM to 12:00PM
Free entry. Your gifts help the garden grow.

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.

The day will begin with a traditional procession featuring San Ysidro, starting at the garden’s front gate. Arriving at the threshing ground there will be blessings.

Then Mission Garden staff and board members will explain why we re-enact the San Ysidro Festival every year. Mission Garden’s Curator of Collections Dena Cowan and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s Research Associate Jesús García will describe the wheat tradition of our region as the harvest gets started.

As the festival proceeds, our heritage wheat field—this year planted with Pima Club Wheat—will be harvested. Volunteers will use sickles to cut wheat stalks and bunch them into sheaves to bring to the threshing ground. The wheat will be threshed in a traditional method, with heritage Spanish Barb horses walking on it to dislodge wheat grains. Then it will be winnowed and milled into flour, also with traditional tools and techniques.

The public may join in with this harvest as volunteers, after checking in at our volunteer table near the threshing ground.

This festival is consistent with our mission: to recreate, and teach about, traditional agriculture of many eras of our 4,100-year agricultural and culinary history.

Costumed volunteers from the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson Museum will participate in the harvest and you’ll be able to learn more about the presidio at their information table.

Taste History!

Of course, any celebration calls for a feast. So, around 10am we will feed visitors a traditional food of the O’odham people: Poșol (po-shol). This is a stew based on wheat and beans. 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! Fresh wheat-flour tortillas will be available as well to taste and purchase.

Because this is the third Saturday of the month, some participants in our usual Traditional O’odham Agriculture program will be there at tables as well.

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Learn More

White Sonora Wheat (Triticum aestivum) - information PDF