The Connecticut Garlic & Harvest Festival runs October 10 to 11, 2026 at the Bethlehem Fairgrounds on Route 61 in Bethlehem, Litchfield County. Adult admission is $10 and children under 12 enter at no charge. It was established in 2000.
The festival is built around garlic in every form it can be served, roasted garlic sausage, wood-fired garlic pizza, garlic ice cream, alongside craft vendors and growers selling seed garlic. That last detail is why the October date matters more than it appears. October is when garlic goes in the ground in this climate, so the festival is timed to the planting window rather than to the harvest, and the seed stalls are a genuine reason to arrive early rather than a novelty.
The two September garlic festivals cancel each other out
Three other garlic festivals sit within a few hours of Connecticut, and the calendar does something awkward with them.
The North Quabbin Garlic & Arts Festival in Orange, Franklin County, Massachusetts runs September 26 to 27. The Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, Ulster County, New York runs September 26 to 27. Those are the same two days. They are roughly two and a half hours apart, and no amount of planning gets you properly to both.
Connecticut's is October 10 to 11, a fortnight after that clash. So the sequence actually available to you is one of the two September events, then Bethlehem two weeks later. Anyone trying to build a garlic weekend circuit runs into that fork immediately, and it is the single most useful thing to know before booking anything.
And Connecticut has its own collision that weekend
October 10 to 11 is not a quiet weekend inside Connecticut either. The Riverton Fair runs October 9 to 11, also in Litchfield County, about forty minutes north. It is $10 adult, the same price as the garlic festival.
The Southington Apple Harvest Festival also covers those dates. It runs October 2 to 11 across two weekends in Hartford County, so its closing weekend lands squarely on the garlic festival.
That gives Litchfield County two ticketed fairs on the same two days and a large apple festival closing nearby. If you were assuming a garlic festival in a town of a few thousand people would be a quiet drive, the county calendar says otherwise. The weekend before, October 2 to 4, is heavier still: the Harwinton Fair and the Portland Agricultural Fair both run then. Connecticut compresses most of its October fair season into these two weekends.
How the garlic festivals compare on price and size
Bethlehem is the cheapest of the three we hold admission data for, at $10 adult with under-12s free. North Quabbin is $12 adult, also free under 12, and it is the largest of them: established 1998, drawing about 12,000 people. We do not carry an admission figure for the Hudson Valley festival, so we are not going to invent one.
A fourth, the Long Island Garlic Festival in Riverhead, is a longer trip and carries a $20 adult admission in our data. Its 2026 dates are genuinely unsettled, with sources disagreeing between the weekend of September 12 and September 19. Confirm it with the farm directly before planning around it. We would rather flag that than print a date we cannot stand behind.
Bethlehem runs three events a year, and this is the middle one
For a town of its size, Bethlehem carries an unusual amount of the Litchfield County calendar. The Bethlehem Fair uses the same fairgrounds on September 11 to 13, a month earlier, at $12 adult. Then the garlic festival takes the same site in October.
In December the town becomes the Christmas Town Festival on December 4 to 5, which is where Bethlehem's local identity actually comes from: its post office postmarks Christmas mail, and the name is not a coincidence. Three distinct events, one small Litchfield County town, spread across autumn and early winter.
The practical upshot for the garlic festival is that the site is used to crowds. Parking and layout at the Bethlehem Fairgrounds are built for a full agricultural fair, which is not true of the farm-hosted garlic festivals elsewhere on this list.
What we do not publish
We do not list opening hours for this festival, because none are recorded in our data, and a directory inventing gate times is how people end up standing in an empty field at nine in the morning.
Check hours with the organizer, and check them again if you are driving more than an hour. Single-weekend October events in New England move or shorten for weather considerably more often than summer ones do, and a static page cannot track that.
