Columnist Susan Snyder: Logandale harvests a festival

Monday, Oct. 6, 2003 | 8:25 a.m.

Jana Ward plucked a pomegranate from a tree in her mother's Logandale orchard and popped it open with two fingers.

Its pale yellow flesh cradled dozens of pulp-covered seeds that shone like rubies in the late-morning sun.

"I love walking through here," Ward said. "I think they're so beautiful."

Red or yellow, tart or sweet, whole, juiced or jellied, Logandale has pomegranates.

Everywhere.

By early October, the trees' branches are heavy with the tart, crimson- skinned variety and their sweet, yellow-tinged cousins.

Residents figure there's no sense ignoring that which can be celebrated. So for the past seven years the Moapa Valley Art Guild has hosted the Pomegranate Art Festival in late October.

The festival raises money for the guild's scholarship program. The guild gives three $1,000 scholarships each year to college-bound art students, said Jo Tame, guild president and festival coordinator.

The event, conducted at the Old Logandale School, is to feature works by about 40 artists and craftspeople from Nevada, Utah and California, in addition to food booths and entertainment, Tame said.

Tame and Ward are among the local artists who will be selling their work. Both paint in watercolors. Tame also burns images into wood, and Ward sculpts with terra cotta clay.

The guild is a small but dedicated group that seeks to create a permanent display inside the historic Logandale school. The Depression-era stone building currently houses the valley's history museum. Tame says the guild is planning to hang paintings above the historic photos already on display.

They acquire works from local artists but also buy them from those in other states, she said. About a dozen hang in the art room inside the school.

"But our permanent collection is scattered all over the valley in the schools, the library and the banks," Tame said. "We probably have 75 to 100 paintings."

But this time of year, their attention turns to pomegranates.

"We gather them from everybody in the valley. We take all we can get our hands on," Tame said. "We get boxes and boxes of them."

Many people come to the festival simply to buy whole pomegranates, pomegranate juice or pomegranate jelly. Tame and the guild's other half-dozen members make all the jelly and squeeze all the juice themselves using a large hand-press.

"We meet over at Joyce Jones' old house in Overton and juice and juice and juice," Tame said. "You have to use your whole body" to weight the press.

The fruit typically isn't ripe enough for juicing until after the first frost. So they freeze the juice a year ahead. They'll start picking for next year's batch in November.

"Two weeks after the festival ends, we start working on next year's festival," Tame said.

The festival will be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 24 to Oct. 25. From Las Vegas, the drive to Logandale takes about about an hour and 15 minutes. Head north on Interstate 15 and take the Logandale exit. Follow the Moapa Valley Highway into town. The festival will be easy to spot.

And so will the pomegranate trees.

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