Every Wednesday this month, we’ll discuss a festival from the previous weekend, with no shortage of options to choose from, so check every week for a new installment. This week: horseradishes; next week: beer.
Back in the olden days, one of my favorite road races was the Horseradish Festival 5K. Some short runs don’t provide all that much of a challenge, but Collinsville’s a hilly, little town and you definitely got a workout on the winding, rising, and dipping roads of C’ville. Afterwards, it was always fun to mill about the site, as organizers offered a celebration of everything relating to horseradish, with competitions like the root toss and root golf slated for different points of the afternoon.
And those things were what you’d expect from the names. Root toss? That’d be tossing a root, as far as possible. Root golf? Driving frozen chunks towards a hole, with the closest one the winner. Even when the competitions don’t involve horseradish—like the fishing contest for kids—there’s a homespun charm to it all. Yup, it’s a genuine, small town festival, with a spicy twist.
The connection between Collinsville and the horseradish trade is fairly simple: More than half of the world’s horseradish is grown nearby. So the vendors selling food inside of Woodland Park naturally offer horseradish as the perfect complimentary-and-complementary condiment. Maybe the funnel cake gets a pass, but your hot dogs, your burgers, and your fried potatoes all get the offer of a side squeeze of ‘radish.
The Woodland Park site gets a bit jumbled, with all kinds of activities, from a fairly large laser tag play area to a series of vendor-tent villages, with sellers trying to unload from pop-up chairs to duck decoys to dog puppets on a string. The most interesting merch is that dealing with the horseradish, itself. You can secure anything from the obligatory T-shirts to the actual plants, which you buy as roots for $3, or as already-growing “sets” for $5, which was the deal I jumped on.
While I’m a few years removed from waking up at 6:30 a.m., to head across the river for a rather-punishing road race, whiling away the afternoon sipping lemonade and tossing roots, the purchase of the horseradish set was a nice reminder of the good old times. Now, I can look out the back porch window and watch a little piece of Collinsville taking up residence in the backyard, reaching skyward to the tune of two to three feet. Have no intention of eating that plant. Just wanna watch it grow.
Thanks, Horseradish Festival. There’s no souvenir like a living one.
