The fifth annual

Tomato Jam 2026 at Sistermoon Farm in Shenandoah Junction, WV

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August 15, 2026 · Photographed by Aaron May

Music, art & tomatoes Every photo free to download Moon Booth + full event coverage

Tomato Jam is a community-run music festival at Sistermoon Farm in Shenandoah Junction, West Virginia, thrown every August for what the organizers call lovers of music, art, and tomatoes. The fifth one happened on Saturday, August 15, 2026, from midafternoon until well after dark. I was there with cameras and a portrait booth built around a giant crescent moon.

If you came to Tomato Jam and sat on that moon, or just wandered past my lens at some point during the day: the photographs are here, they are free, and the button above goes straight to them. If you have no idea what Tomato Jam is, keep reading. You'll want to go next year.

How I got here

The very last-minute invitation

Rosie and Maria Russo, the sisters who run Sistermoon Farm, got in touch pretty last minute about having a photographer at this year's Jam. I looked at my calendar and found an open Saturday in the middle of August. Wedding photographers do not have open Saturdays in the middle of August. I have been doing this since 2018 and I cannot fully explain it.

So I said yes. Some gifts you don't interrogate.

A volunteer in a red dress fastening wristbands for two arriving guests at the Tomato Jam check-in table

For everyone who got here by Googling

Tomato Jam, and the farm that throws it

Sistermoon Farm is 33 acres of regenerative, no-till farmland in West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle, on Flowing Springs Road between Shepherdstown and Harpers Ferry. Rosie and Maria founded it in 2020, grow vegetables and hay there, and treat getting people onto the land as part of the job.

Tomato Jam is their fundraiser and their party: volunteer-run, family-friendly, and stubbornly local. This year ran from 2:30 in the afternoon until the amps hit their 10 p.m. curfew, and the bill was deep for a farm festival: Mister Mae, New Way Drive, The Fly Birds, Aristotle Jones & the Appalachian Soul Band, and The Woodshedders on the main stage, with The Glass Eyes on the pond stage back along the walking trails. In between came yoga, a sound bath, a community art build, an instrument petting zoo run by Wind Gap Music, craft vendors and food trucks up the hill, a raffle, a Biggest Tomato award, and several competitive events involving airborne produce. And when the amps went quiet at ten, an acoustic Nightshade Jam kept going by the campfire, which is the most tomato-named thing I have ever heard. Proceeds go back into the Jam and the farm, with a boost this year from Mid Atlantic Arts' Central Appalachia Living Traditions program.

Crates of ripe local tomatoes on a gingham tablecloth behind a sign reading Local Organic Tomatoes, two for a dollar

Two vendors standing arm in arm behind their cold-pressed juice stand, bottles lined up on a checkered tablecloth

The white sailcloth vendor tent glowing at sunset across a meadow of tall grass and wildflowers at Sistermoon Farm, a tiki torch burning at the edge

The day, as I saw it

Photographing Tomato Jam 2026

I photograph a lot of weddings in these hills, and Tomato Jam runs on the same fuel: people who like each other, outside, in August, with a band playing. Except nobody here was on a timeline, and the dress code was tie-dye.

The music went all afternoon and deep into the night. String bands traded the stage under a pink neon Sistermoon Farm sign; by dark there were congas and a saxophone and a dance floor with no edges. The lineup ran from mountain string band to Appalachian soul, which is a range most festivals five times this size don't attempt.

A banjo player singing at the microphone under the pink neon Sistermoon Farm sign on the timber stage at Tomato Jam

A full band with congas and saxophone playing under the string-lit pavilion at night, hay bales at the stage lip

Three musicians with banjo, upright bass, and guitar gathered around one microphone on the Tomato Jam stage

Dusk view down the tree-lined lawn at Sistermoon Farm toward the lit Tomato Jam stage, the crowd seated along a grassy aisle

Black and white frame of the string band playing while a parent in a cowboy hat steadies a toddler standing on a hay bale

Then there is the tomato toss, which is an egg toss played with ripe tomatoes, and therefore a game with consequences. Pairs line up, the lines back apart, and the tomatoes get progressively less aerodynamic. The last team holding an intact tomato wins.

It is a family festival in the actual sense: three-legged races, face paint, an instrument petting zoo, and at least one attendee who brought her own parasol and her own eyewear and needed nothing further from any of us. By evening the front of the stage belonged to the dancers, and the age range out there ran roughly two to eighty.

Pairs with ankles tied together lurching forward at the start of the three-legged race at Tomato Jam

A man in tie-dye and a cowboy hat swinging a little girl in a pink dress by the hands mid-dance

Two women grinning in a hug mid-dance in front of the Tomato Jam stage in warm evening light

Backlit by low golden sun, a woman in a patterned skirt dances with a toddler in a pink dress on the open grass in front of the crowd

Young dancers erupting in front of the stage at Tomato Jam, one with an arm thrown up mid-shout

Two teenagers laughing as they walk arm in arm across the sunlit grass at Tomato Jam

A hand-lettered Tomato Jam sign painted on an old window pane, set in the grass among zinnias and marigolds

A toddler in a sundress and yellow sunglasses holding an embroidered parasol on the grass at Tomato Jam

A black and white border collie lying in the grass beside a hay bale at Tomato Jam, looking into the camera — Quality control.

The Moon Booth at night at Sistermoon Farm in black and white: a hand-painted wooden crescent moon with a face, a black bench, and a white sheet backdrop

Put a giant moon in a field, and people understand the assignment immediately.

After dark, and long before it

The Moon Booth

A hand-built wooden crescent moon with a painted face. A bench hiding in its curve. A white sheet strung up behind it, a light, and me. That was the whole booth, and it ran a line all day. In black and white it stops being a photo booth at a festival and turns into something older: a paper moon out of a hundred-year-old portrait studio, parked in a hayfield.

The moon gets its own credit line. It was donated to Tomato Jam by Pang Tubhirun, the Shepherdstown photographer behind Pangtography and Skull City Studio, her gallery and tintype studio on Princess Street. It was built by her husband, Shane Harris of The Other Place Signs, who hand-paints, carves, and gold-leafs signs all over this region and is apparently incapable of building something halfway. Look at that moon's face. That is a moon with opinions.

People came through all day and long after dark. Couples. Kids. Whole families. Friend groups that had to be stacked like firewood to fit. A musician with her guitar.

A toddler sitting at the base of the Moon Booth crescent moon, looking up at its painted face, in black and white

A woman in a long skirt reclining in the curve of the crescent moon, in black and white

A couple seated together on the crescent moon looking at each other, in black and white

A musician seated in the curve of the crescent moon with an acoustic guitar, in black and white

A family of six gathered around the crescent moon at the Moon Booth, in black and white

A couple seated side by side on the crescent moon, her long hair falling past her waist, in black and white

A couple laughing together on the crescent moon at the Moon Booth, in black and white

A couple kissing in front of the crescent moon at the Moon Booth, in black and white

A woman kissing her laughing partner on the cheek at the Moon Booth, in black and white

Two women laughing with their heads together on the crescent moon, in black and white

Three friends seated together in the curve of the crescent moon, in black and white

A whole crew crowded around the crescent moon at the Moon Booth, in black and white

The part you scrolled for

Find your Tomato Jam photos

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Every photo is free. If you feel like tipping, my Venmo is @A-May-14, or tip by card.

The photos are free. Actually free.

Download everything you want. Print them, post them, send them to your mother. No purchase, no code, no watermark, no email hostage situation.

Tip jar, entirely optional: Venmo @A-May-14 · or by card

If you don't, we're still friends. The photos were the point.

Thank you

To Rosie and Maria, for the invitation and for building the kind of thing Tomato Jam is. To Pang and Shane, for the moon. To everyone who sat on it, stood on it, leaned on it, or dipped somebody in front of it. And to everyone who let me point a camera at them mid-tomato.

My August Saturdays are usually spoken for. This one was well spent.

The rest of the year I photograph weddings and elopements around Shepherdstown and Harpers Ferry. If that's a thing you need, here's how to check a date.