Buena Vista Farmers Market at Turner Farm on Sundays

For ten summers, the Buena Vista Farmers Market moved around town looking for a home. Columbine Park, Linderman, East Main, the parking lot behind the courthouse. If you have lived here through any stretch of that run, you know the pattern: a good Saturday two years in a row, then a quiet one, then a new spot, then a new day.

That search is over. As of this season, the market lives on Sundays at the historic Turner Farm at 829 West Main, and the shift is bigger than a change of address.

Why The Old Market Ended, And Why The Museum Said Yes

The Foodshed Alliance, which had run the market for the last decade, announced this spring that it was pulling out of Buena Vista. In its own words the group said it had tried the BV market on four different days, at five different locations over the last ten years and that support and stamina never caught up. Foodshed is keeping the Salida market and the Chaffee County Winter Farmers Market, and it is offering a free shuttle from anywhere in Chaffee County to the Winter Farmers Market in 2026. That is a fair read of the situation: one market in the valley works, one didn't, and the shuttle solves the second problem instead of forcing it.

What is new is who stepped in. Buena Vista Heritage announced it is taking over the local farmers market, and when the Foodshed Alliance decided to drop it, the museum stepped up to bring it back. BV Heritage had hosted the market at Turner Farm years earlier, so this is less of an experiment than a return.

The practical details are simple. The Turner Farm market runs 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Sundays from May 31 through October 25, at the historic Turner Farm at 829 West Main Street. It also serves as a fundraiser for the farm, which is the real hinge point of this story.

The Sunday You're Actually Buying Into

Here is the thesis, plainly. Under Foodshed, the market was a produce errand that happened to be outdoors. Under BV Heritage, it is a produce errand that happens on a 100-year-old working orchard, inside a nonprofit's operating budget. The dollars you spend on jam and eggs are keeping five historic buildings standing.

That reframing matters because of what Turner Farm actually is. Once destined for another subdivision, the early 1900s homestead was rescued in 1997 by Buena Vista Heritage and transformed into a "living museum," with 50 apple trees and five historic buildings including the two-story farmhouse, the mother-in-law cabin, the homestead cabin, the garage workshop, and the two-story barn with its tack room. In 1997, Buena Vista Heritage acquired the farm headquarters with the homestead cabin, farmhouse, apple orchard, barns and garage. Restoration was paid for by private donations and support from the Colorado State Historical Fund.

If you have lived in Buena Vista for any real stretch, you already know Turner Farm as the AppleFest place. Most residents have not thought of it as a weekly destination. That is about to change.

The Week, Rearranged

The most useful way to think about this is calendar shape. Turner Farm now hosts three overlapping seasons of programming, and if you live here it is worth knowing which is which.

The Friday at the Farm Concerts Series runs every summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and AppleFest lands on Saturday, September 13, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the same address. Add the Sunday market and you have the first year where Turner Farm anchors a Friday-Saturday-Sunday rhythm rather than a single September afternoon.

For residents that is a genuinely new pattern to plan around. The old market pulled you to a park downtown. The new one pulls you to a specific two-acre site on West Main, one that most residents drive past more often than they walk into.

What A Sunday Morning There Actually Looks Like

The orchard has a real history worth understanding, because it is what you are walking through while you buy tomatoes. The property started as the Walker homestead in 1891, and in 1911 Mr. Walker built the two-story farmhouse complete with electricity and indoor plumbing, then sold to William Turner, whose family operated the farm and apple orchard until the 1970s. The orchard was watered with irrigation water from Cottonwood Creek, and in 1911 he planted approximately fifty-five seedlings, including Wealthy, Transparent, and Crab apples and one cherry tree.

Those are not decorative details for tourists. Those are the same trees, or their direct descendants, that you will be standing under on a Sunday in July. The orchard still produces rare heritage varieties no longer found in markets.

For scale on what BV Heritage is actually running here: AppleFest welcomed more than 1,200 visitors in September 2025, with the record turnout closer to 3,000. A market that pulls even a fraction of that on a summer Sunday would be the largest recurring gathering in west Buena Vista most weeks of the year.

The AppleFest Bridge

The market's October 25 end date is not arbitrary. It walks the season right through the orchard's harvest and past the museum's biggest day. AppleFest is worth flagging on the calendar now if it is not already there. The event celebrates the 110-year-old historic Turner Farm orchard, with butter churning, a two-man saw, old-fashioned crafts and games, pony rides courtesy of Mt. Princeton Stables, and the annual apple pie bake-off. Categories are Best Tasting, Best Crust, Best Looking and Most Unique, with a $50 prize for each winner.

If you have been meaning to enter the bake-off, the market itself is a soft on-ramp. You can walk the orchard eight or nine Sundays in a row, get a feel for which trees are producing what, and know which apples you actually want to bake with by early September. Turner Farm apples are available for competitors to use for baking.

If You Want To Sell Something There

The vendor door is open, not gated. Vendors interested in participating can reach out to Amy Weisenhorn at 719-297-5430. For anyone who grows, bakes, roasts, or makes something in Chaffee County and has been waiting to see whether the new market has legs, the answer from BV Heritage is that they want the booths filled. The market is a fundraiser for the farm, which means every vendor who shows up is directly propping up the orchard restoration.

That is a very different pitch than the old model, and it is why I think this version has a better chance of sticking. Foodshed was trying to make the numbers work for a nonprofit based elsewhere. BV Heritage is trying to make the numbers work for a property whose fence line runs behind the booth.

What Changes For A Resident

A few small things, if you are already living here.

• Your Saturday is free again. The market is on Sunday now, which means Saturdays through the summer are back for river time, trailheads, or Salida errands.
• Your Sunday has a downtown-adjacent anchor from Memorial Day weekend through late October. 829 West Main is walkable from a lot of in-town addresses and an easy park-once stop from anywhere south of town.
• If you host out-of-town family in summer, you now have a single site that shows them what Buena Vista actually looks like when it is working. Historic buildings, working orchard, live music on Fridays, produce on Sundays, all inside two acres.
• If you volunteer with any of the community groups that used to set up at the old market, the new one is a chance to plug back in on a stable footing rather than chasing a moving location each year.

None of this is about tourism traffic or resale narratives. It is about the shape of a week in the specific twelve blocks between the river and the highway, and about a market that finally has a landlord that intends to keep it.

If you would like to talk about what it looks like to actually live in this pocket of Buena Vista, or you are considering a move within the valley and want a candid read on the west side of town, Mary Kale is happy to walk you through it.