<\/p>\n
The fourth annual Dolores Harvest Festival kicked off to a beautiful autumn morning on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The festival has been taking shape for the past few years since beginning in 2011.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Dolores Chamber of Commerce started it, and they had always had something in the fall to bring people in,\u201d said Rocky Moss, manager of the chamber.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, it was basically a craft fair. The event itself has grown, and it has kind of an anchor with MORP,\u201d Moss said. \u201cWe have seen attendance grow by about 25 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the second year, the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project is \u201cloosely partnered\u201d with the festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw the Dolores chamber was doing this harvest festival, and rather than have two different events competing, it made more sense for us to combine this, and that really helps,\u201d said Jude Schuenemeyer, co-founder of MORP.<\/p>\n
The festival is a time for the citizens of Dolores to get together one last time before winter sets in, according to Tonya Hainey of Madd Canners.<\/p>\n
She has been participating in the festival since its humble beginnings.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt started very unorganized, and there was just people that would have little tiny tables here and there and maybe five or six of us or something like that,\u201d Hainey said.<\/p>\n
Schuenemeyer also expressed the importance of bringing people together for the festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have done this harvest festival for a few years, and the idea is just to bring people together even if it is a year like this,\u201d Schuenemeyer said. \u201cWithout fruit to be able to bring people together to get people thinking about orchards.<\/p>\n
Though a late frost killed a lot of crops in Montezuma County this year, the festival went on and sold what it could.<\/p>\n
Marilyn Volm, from Dolores was disappointed by the amount of produce but still enjoyed herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe look forward to it, because there are all different kinds of booths, just like here, you got crafts, you\u2019ve got preserves and all that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
hurt the produce, but not the spirit of the harvest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":75286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,13,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-75285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75285"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=75285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}