On the Saturday morning of Margaretville's Cauliflower Festival, a Cauliflower Queen will climb onto a tractor at the top of Main Street and lead a parade down to the fairgrounds behind Freshtown Marketplace on Bridge Street. It happens most years, and if you've lived here a while, you already know the drill: live music at Union Grove Distillery the Friday night before, the parade at 11 the next morning, a Sunday brunch that turns cauliflower into something you'd actually order twice. What's easy to miss if you're only half reading the flyer taped to the general store window is that this weekend isn't a solo act. It's the opening leg of a relay that hands off from town to town almost every weekend through the middle of October, each leg run by a different Main Street.
The circuit, not the weekend
Look at the dates side by side and the pattern gets hard to unsee. The 22nd Annual Margaretville Cauliflower Festival runs Friday through Sunday, September 18 through 20. The following Sunday, September 27, Delhi's Courthouse Square fills with vendors for the Delhi Harvest Festival. The very next day, September 28, Unadilla Fall Fest takes over the Covered Bridge Farm Market with a corn maze and fifty-plus vendors. Two weeks after that, October 10 and 11, Hancock Town Square hosts its Harvest Festival and Tractor Parade, with barbecue from Brooks BBQ and a scarecrow-making contest. Delhi comes back around October 11 and 12 with the Maple Shade Hootenanny, the event long known as Taste of the Catskills before it took on its current name. And Deposit closes the run on October 12 with its 29th Annual Oktoberfest Street Fair on Front Street.
Whether or not the county's chambers of commerce sat down and drew this up on purpose, the effect is the same. No two towns are competing for the same Saturday. A resident who wants a full autumn of parade routes and pie contests can hit nearly every weekend from mid-September to mid-October without repeating a location. That's not how a single big festival works. It's how a circuit works, and Delaware County has been running one for years without ever quite branding it as such.
Here's the full lineup as it stands for 2026:
- September 18-20 — Margaretville, 22nd Annual Cauliflower Festival
- September 27 — Delhi, Harvest Festival at Courthouse Square
- September 28 — Unadilla, Fall Fest at Covered Bridge Farm Market
- October 10-11 — Hancock, Harvest Festival & Tractor Parade at Town Square
- October 11-12 — Delhi, Maple Shade Hootenanny
- October 12 — Deposit, 29th Annual Oktoberfest Street Fair on Front Street
Same storefronts, new signs
What doesn't repeat on the same reliable schedule is who's running the businesses lining these parade routes. Sixteen Upper Main Street in Callicoon is a good example. Claire Marin spent six years distilling and operating Catskills Provisions out of that building before selling it. The Callicoon Pantry, the town's low-waste grocer and refillery, is reopening in that same space on September 12, with plans for Day's Sandwiches and Smoothies to fully open there by spring 2027. Pollinator Spirits, which shared the old footprint, keeps its wildflower honey and distilling operation running separately out of Long Eddy. One tenant's six-year run ends, another begins the same month, and the address stays exactly where it's always been.
Margaretville shows the same pattern feeding straight into the festival calendar. RAE'S, a newer restaurant and bar on Main Street, is running a cauliflower tasting menu alongside its regular offerings for festival weekend. Café Mornings is pairing its usual Korean brunch menu with a cauliflower-inspired spread that Sunday. Neither business existed when the Cauliflower Festival was young. Both are now part of how the weekend actually tastes.
The festival itself changed hands too. Garth Kravits and Julia Rugg, full-time Margaretville residents since 2023 and founders of the Margaretville Arts Center, stepped into producing the event last year. They're not longtime festival veterans handing down a tradition unchanged. They're recent arrivals who took on the job of keeping a 22-year-old event alive, folding in acts like Whiskey Lily, a band made up of Margaretville and Roxbury residents playing vintage covers, and Lali and the Pops, a five-piece group blending old-school and newer sounds. The tradition holds. The people running it and the businesses catering it turn over.
For anyone who's lived here more than a couple of years, that's the actual takeaway. The Main Streets hosting these festivals aren't frozen in place waiting for October. They're in motion year-round, and the festival calendar is just the moment when that motion becomes visible all at once, block by block.
What this means if you're actually going
If you're planning to work the whole circuit rather than pick one weekend, a few practical notes make it easier. Margaretville's Friday night kickoff at Union Grove Distillery is a lower-key way to see the town before Saturday's crowd arrives. Saturday itself runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the tractor parade departing Main Street for the fairgrounds, a Pure Catskills tent handing out samples, a kids' activities tent, and the 1903 Auto Run Drive-In bringing a lineup of classic vehicles through. Vendors that weekend include names worth knowing if you're stocking a pantry for the season: Fox Meadow Honey, Pepacton Farms Creamery, Meridale Farms, and Crystal Brook Farms among them.
The following weekends scale down in size but not in character. Delhi's Harvest Festival is a straightforward Main Street affair, vendors and apple cider donuts filling Courthouse Square for an afternoon. Unadilla's Fall Fest leans toward families, with a corn maze and enough vendors to spend a full day browsing. Hancock's tractor parade and barbecue give the Delaware River side of the county its own harvest moment, and Deposit closes things out with a beer tent and street fair that's been running for 29 years straight.
None of these towns are trying to be the biggest stop on the circuit. They're each taking their turn, which is arguably why the whole thing has lasted this long. A festival that tried to be everything to everyone every weekend would burn out its volunteers and vendors fast. A relay spreads the weight around, and it gives residents a reason to actually drive the twenty minutes to the next town over instead of staying put.
That's worth remembering the next time someone asks what there is to do here in the fall. The honest answer isn't one festival. It's a schedule that keeps a different Main Street lit up almost every Saturday for a month, run by people who, more often than not, only recently became your neighbors.
If you're weighing what a move to one of these towns might actually look like, or you're already here and thinking about what's next for your own place on one of these Main Streets, Jocelyn Justiniano is a good person to talk to. Let's Connect.
