Since wheat was adopted as a valued crop here in the 18th Century, the harvest has been done on Saint Isidore's Day (May 15), this year Mission Garden will celebrate the festival on May 22. Besides harvesting wheat, it was an opportunity to revere the saint--the patron of laborers and farmers--and his miracles feeding the poor in and around Madrid.

At the festival we will demonstrate the traditional way that wheat was harvested, threshed, winnowed and ground into flour. We will do this all with sickles, baskets and other traditional tools. This is in line with a central thread of our mission, to recreate traditional agriculture of many eras of our 4,100-year agrarian and culinary history.

Pozole de Trigo

Of course any such celebration calls for a feast. We will feed you the traditional food for this festival, pozole de trigo. This soup contains wheat grains and many other ingredients. Come and discover what they are!

Bread for Sale

At the festival we will have a limited number of loaves of bread for sale. This bread is made at Barrio Bread by our board member Don Guerra. It contains the heirloom White Sonora Wheat that we grew last year! You can't get more authentic than that!

Plant sale

During the festival we'll sell a new range of garden plants grown this spring in our new grow spaces. Here is a list of the plants:

• Punta Banda tomatoes

• Tohono O'Odham Ha:l squash

• Tohono O'Odham Yellow Watermelon

• Tatume squash

• Chinese chives

• Limited quantities:

• Hollyhocks

• Ordoño chile peppers

• Chichiquelites

• Nopalea (hummingbird prickly pear)

• Indian Fig / Nopal de Castilla

• Agaves (various)

• Aloe Vera

• Irises

• Jatropha cuneata (physicnut)

• Aloysia gratissima (bee brush)

• Lemongrass

Will will have limited numbers of the following trees: Cucurpe Peaches (1-gal), Figs (few varieties, mostly 5-gallon), Velvet mesquite, Screwbean mesquite, Desert Willow (5-gallon).