The cauliflower is rarely accused of having charisma. It sits pallid and lumpy in the produce aisle, waiting to be riced, roasted, buffaloed, or disguised as something with carbohydrates. But in Margaretville, the vegetable once known as “white gold” gets the full celebrity treatment: a parade, a royal court, a historical marker, and—because reverence has its limits—a catapult.
The Margaretville Cauliflower Festival returns September 19 for its 22nd year, filling the village park with food, craft vendors, music, children’s activities, and hundreds of locally grown cauliflower heads. The day begins at 11am with more than 20 tractors rolling down Main Street behind the self-crowned Cauliflower Queen, Fifi Dupree, who will be escorted to the festival grounds to preside over her cruciferous kingdom.
“I did not know how awesome tractor parades were until I went to my first one,” says festival co-organizer Garth Kravits. “I literally teared up.”
That blend of sincerity and silliness is the festival’s natural register. Organizers Kravits and Julia Rugg, founders of the Margaretville Arts Center and Delaware County School of Performing Arts, inherited the event unexpectedly last summer. It was early July when a friend ran across the street in nearby Andes to tell them the festival had been canceled—and that she had volunteered them to save it.
Kravits and Rugg knew how to produce events, but they soon understood that this one carried more weight than its name might suggest. Cauliflower was once a primary cash crop in the Catskills, its success driven by the region’s soil, cool climate, and growing season. A local farming family reportedly began experimenting with the vegetable in flower boxes before expanding production.
Cauliflower grown in the Catskills is loaded for market at Margaretville’s auction block, where the region’s “white gold” was sold to buyers for shipment along the Eastern Seaboard.
By the 1930s and ’40s, cauliflower grown around Margaretville supplied markets along much of the Eastern Seaboard. Farmers loaded their harvests onto trucks and brought them to an auction block near the railroad, where commission merchants bid on entire loads for shipment to city markets. The business declined as large-scale California agriculture and long-distance distribution transformed how Americans bought produce. On September 17, the Historical Society of Middletown will unveil a marker at the former auction site, now the Binnekill parking lot.
When Kravits and Rugg revived the festival in 2025, they resisted the urge to remake it as another polished Catskills lifestyle attraction. “We wanted to keep it as it’s always been,” Kravits says. “It celebrates community, it celebrates Margaretville, it celebrates farming and agriculture.”
They also put cauliflower back at the center. Attendance roughly tripled last year, according to the organizers, after they gathered the festival’s scattered elements into a more cohesive celebration. This year, 15 food vendors will serve cauliflower in Mexican dishes, pasta, sandwiches, and other preparations. Union Grove Distillery will pour pickled cauliflower martinis. Harold’s Cold Comfort, the ice cream vendor, received the sole exemption from the cauliflower mandate, an act of mercy for which everyone should be grateful.
The festival’s biggest development, however, is agricultural. Finch Farm in Fleischmanns is growing roughly 300 heads at the organizers’ request, making this the first recent edition at which all the cauliflower sold will be grown locally. Many food vendors will use it in their dishes as well.
“Last year we didn’t have enough lead time because it was July,” Rugg says. “But this year that was our first order of business.” The organizers stop short of predicting a full-scale cauliflower renaissance, but the harvest reconnects the festival to the farming tradition it exists to celebrate.
Around the food will be more than 25 makers and agricultural vendors, live music, baby animals, a bounce house, miniature carnival games, and the returning cauliflower catapult. Tractor awards will recognize the biggest, smallest, oldest, and best-restored machines. The Cauliflower Queen will bring a costumed court, having apparently decided that self-appointed vegetable monarchy works best when delegated.
Photo: Heaven McArthur
Kravits and Rugg are already imagining future attractions, including an “Iron Chef”-style cauliflower cook-off. Someone proposed a children’s fart-noise contest, based on the vegetable’s digestive consequences. That idea remains under consideration, if not active development. Kravits has also floated the possibility of someday ending the festival by setting fire to a giant wooden cauliflower. Think Burning Man, with more fiber.
The organizers claim Margaretville’s is now the world’s only cauliflower festival, which places considerable responsibility on the village. They have responded by recording “Cauliflower Dreaming,” a vegetable-based cover of the Mamas and the Papas song, with Alexandra Ruggiero of festival performers Raquel and the Wildflowers. It began, as many worthwhile things do, with someone saying, “That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s what we keep leaning into,” Rugg says. “We need to understand that this is cauliflower.”
The free Margaretville Cauliflower Festival takes place September 19 from 11am to 4pm in Margaretville Village Park. Local restaurants will offer cauliflower specials September 18, and Cafe Mornings in Arkville will serve a cauliflower-inspired brunch September 20. Margaretvillecauliflowerfestival.org.
