San Ysidro Festival
Saturday May 21, 8:00AM to 12:00PM
Free with a suggested $5 per person donation at the front gate
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.
Taste 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!
San Ysidro Festival T-shirts will be on sale for only $20.
Starting at 9am, the Garden Shop will have a limited number of bread loaves for sale from Barrio Bread. This scrumptious bread, made by our board member Don Guerra, contains heirloom White Sonora Wheat grown last year at the garden! You can't get more authentic than that! This is another great opportunity to "taste history"!
Event Itinerary
San Ysidro Festival 8:00am - Noon
Garden Shop
Our Garden Shop will be open throughout the event. In addition to our books, clothing, foods, and other items, we will be selling 50 loaves of bread from Barrio Bread. This bread contains White Sonora Wheat, the same heritage variety harvested at Mission Garden during the festival.
We will also be discounting our San Ysidro Festival shirts at $20. If you were at our Agave Heritage Festival events, you may have seen these great shirts. We will also again have amazing rugs by Jacobo Mendoza of Oaxaca.
8:15am Blessings by Father Greg Aldoph
Father Greg Adolph will bless our grape vines, the new shrine to San Ysidro (Saint Isadore) in the Mexican Garden, and the wheat field.
8:45am Blessing by Chairman Nunez
Chairman Austin Nuñez of the San Xavier District Tohono O’odham Nation will do a traditional blessing.
9:00am Basket Dancers
The Basket Dancers from the Tohono Nation will perform in the central area of the garden.
9:30 - 11:00am Interpretation and Harvest
Jesús García leads us in the harvest of the wheat. He’ll start by describing the tradition of the wheat harvest and giving our volunteers, who will be helping with the harvest, some instructions.
We are pleased and thankful that the Presidio de Tucson will be sending some of their volunteers to help with the wheat harvest!
Jesús and volunteers will move into the wheat field with hand-held sickles and use them to cut wheat stalks until their arms are full!
The wheat will be carried to the era, or threshing ground, where it will be laid down in a circle. There a Spanish Barb horse–a descendant of the first horses brought here by the Spanish–will walk on the wheat, dislodging wheat grains from the heads. The horse is graciously provided by Beth Mendivil of the Spanish Barb Horse Association.
One more step is necessary before milling the wheat into flour–winnowing. That is separating the wheat grains from the chaff. This can be done by scooping it up and tossing it in the air, or by pouring it from one basket into another. Either way, a light breeze (hopefully) blows the chaff away and leaves the wheat.
Then some of the wheat grains will be taken to our tahona–traditional mill–to be milled into flour by the heavy mill stones.
10am Pozole de Trigo
The traditional food for the historic San Ysidro Festival is pozole de trigo. Pozole usually features hominy but this version of the soup has softened wheat kernels in it. Pozole de trigo! It’s a wonderful, vegetarian mixture of vegetables and wheat in a tasty broth. It will be available in the kitchen area at the north end of the garden.
Along with the pozole, watch Betty Pancho–expert tortilla maker–make large flower tortillas on our traditional comal. Traditional aguas frescas (juice drinks) will be available as well.