Eastham Turnip Festival

A
celebration
of
turnips
Eastham has been famous for its turnips for a long time. The sandy soil with lots of nitrogen is perfect for growing sweet turnips. Nobody is really sure where the Eastham variety of turnip comes form, some say its from Europe, other people say it was developed here on the Cape and others claim it is actually a cross between regular turnip and a rutabaga.
Wherever these particular turnips originally come from Eastham is now famous for its small, purplish and very sweet turnips. In fact they are so proud of these root veggies that they have a festival honoring them every year.
The festival of course had some Eastham Turnips for sale along with turnips games, turnip recipes, turnip hats, and of course crummy t-​shirts with turnip pics and sayings on them. There also was a turnip cooking contest and musical entertainment. Quite a lot of turnip stuff going on and plenty of people to talk to that are really, really, really into turnips.
Unfortunately the festival was jammed into a relatively small room in the local high school so not as many turnip things as I would like could be fit into the small space. I would have loved to have seen more turnip food for sale and perhaps some more arts and craft vendors. The huge rutabaga festivals in New york and Wisconsin are much larger with far more rutabagian things to do and fool with. Even though the Eastham Turnip Festival can’t really compete with rutabaga events, it still was a fun place to spend some time and learn far more than you ever wanted to know about turnips.