Sunflower Garden Music Festival: Help Us Leave This Field the Way We Found It

Luciana our founder planted this field by hand.

Every sunflower you will be dancing between at Sunflower Garden Music Festival on August 22nd was put in the ground on our family's organic heritage land in King City, and we have spent the season fertilizing, watering, cutting, and tending it so that it would be standing tall for you. This farm has been certified organic and cared for by the same family for more than 30 years.

We are telling you that for one reason. Most festival grounds are built to be cleaned up after. Ours is not. On pavement, a dropped cup is litter. Here, it is something one of us has to find, on our knees, in soil we grow food in.

So we are asking for something small.

There are five things you can do on August 22nd that will make almost the entire difference, and each one takes about a second.

Bring a bottle you can refill. Fill it before you leave home. It is a full day outdoors in August, and one bottle you keep replaces four or five you throw away. It also saves you hunting for a bin every time you finish a drink.

Look before you drop. If there are separate bins for recycling and garbage, take the extra second to read them. Once food and drink get mixed in with paper and cans, the whole load has to be handled as garbage instead of being recycled.

Watch the small things. Big items get noticed and cleared. What stays behind is small: bottle caps, straws, wrappers, twist ties, elastic bands. In a field, small pieces are the hardest to find and the worst to leave. If it fits in your pocket, it can wait until you pass a bin.

Say no to the bag. Our market is full of local makers who already think about this. "No bag, thanks" is a normal thing to say here, and most of them will be glad you said it.

Take the shuttle if you can. There is a shuttle from Vaughan Station and parking on site is limited. Every car that does not park on a farm field is less mess, and less damage to ground that has to grow something next year.

The three-second version

• Refill, do not rebuy

• Read the bin before you drop

• Pocket the small stuff

• Skip the bag

• Take the shuttle

That is genuinely it. Five seconds of thought across a whole day, from a few thousand people, is the difference between a field that needs a week of hand-picking and one that does not.

What happens after you go home

We thought about this part carefully when we chose who to work with.

Our bins for the festival are provided by Toronto Metal Traders, a local King City and Vaughan company that does bin rental and metal recycling. Once the field clears, they collect the bins and take them to a sorting facility rather than straight to landfill.

What happens after that is more involved than we expected. The load is weighed, tipped out onto a floor, and picked through material by material before any of it is recycled — and only what survives all of that actually gets a second life.

What is left at the very end is whatever could not be sorted, and that pile is almost always bigger than it needs to be. The reason is nearly always the same: a few things went into the wrong bin at the end of a long, happy day.

Which is really the whole reason for the five things above.

A lot of the people who come to Sunflower Garden run things of their own — markets, fundraisers, weddings, community days. If that is you, they have written a plain guide to renting a bin for an outdoor event: what size you need, where to put it on a field, and what cannot go in.

By Sunday morning, this is a farm again

That is the rare thing about what we are doing on August 22nd — an alcohol-free music festival on working farmland, 45 minutes from downtown Toronto. A few thousand people can spend a whole day here and leave it ready to grow food again.

It just takes all of us doing one small thing on the way out.

Thank you for treating this field the way we do.

Bins and recycling for Sunflower Garden Music Festival 2026 are provided by Toronto Metal Traders, a locally owned bin rental and metal recycling company serving King City, Vaughan, and York Region.