6th Annual New Mexico Prickly Pear Festival

Coming back for our 6^th year, the New Mexico Prickly Pear Festival is excited to return to the beautiful grounds of the Gutierrez Hubbell House for another year of food, music, arts and crafts and a lot more celebrating everything prickly pear. In addition to our full day of cooking demos, arts and crafts workshops, music, and vendor market selling all kinds of prickly pear and local goods on Saturday September 28^th, we’re also adding an evening event to our festival line up. On Friday September 27^th, our Prickly Nights programming will host music and performances alongside a selection of food and drinks with a prickly pear focus. Tickets can be found here.

On Friday, festival goers can watch a series of musical performances from jazz trio Basilaris, named for a species of prickly pear cactus, Lara Manzanares, and performance by the National Institute of Flamenco Company, all while taking in the evening air and food and drinks from a selection of vendors.

Then on Saturday for our main day festival goers can enjoy cooking demos from Lilia Avila from Three Sisters Kitchen, Amber Benson from NMSU, and Tina Archuleta owner and chef of Itality as well as a prickly pear cocktail and mocktail demo with Safe House Distilling Co. and Sugar Moon Syrups, and prickly pear-mushroom tea demo from Midnight Disco Fungi. Folks can also get creative and paint their own prickly pear decorated pot with four painting sessions throughout the day with Susan Gomez Arts (you can book your session here) and two natural dye workshops from Kalyn Finnell showing folks how to make the gorgeous carmine red dye with the prickly pear cochineal bug. Attendees can browse 60 plus vendors selling all kinds of prickly pear eats, drinks, arts, crafts, and other local products and while checking out the vendor goods folks can hear performances from Micah Thunder, Mauro Woody, and Dust City Opera.

And inside the Hubbell House we’ll have a series of talks and workshops for farmers, ranchers, and gardeners on how and why to incorporate prickly pear and other native plants into their systems.