On September 19, a Botetourt resident with dinner reservations at a Restaurant Week spot, a ticket to the last weekend of the Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival, and a spot reserved for The Homeplace's dinner-and-a-movie night on the front lawn in Catawba has a problem. All three happen the same Saturday, all three inside the same county. This isn't a scheduling accident that snuck up on the county. It's what happens when three of Botetourt's biggest annual draws land in the same ten-day window for the first time since The Homeplace reopened its doors.
Virginia's Blue Ridge Restaurant Week runs September 12 through 20 this year, pulling in restaurants from Botetourt County alongside Roanoke, Salem, Vinton, and Franklin County. That same stretch is also the back half of the Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival's eleventh season, which opened September 11 and closes September 20, with its two marquee weekends falling on September 12-13 and September 19-20. And smack in the middle of all that, on the evening of September 19, The Homeplace Restaurant in Catawba is hosting a dinner followed by a movie on its front lawn, the kind of event a restaurant only throws when it's confident enough in its footing to try something new.
If you've lived in Botetourt for more than a season, you already know these three things exist. What's worth understanding is why they piled up on the same weekend instead of spreading out across September the way county events usually do, and what that means for how you actually spend the next two Saturdays.
The Calendar Didn't Collide by Accident
Virginia's Blue Ridge, the regional tourism marketing organization that covers Botetourt alongside the City of Roanoke, Roanoke County, Salem, Vinton, and Franklin County, sets Restaurant Week's dates every year. This year they picked September 12-20. Beaver Dam Farm, an independently run family operation that has nothing to do with the regional tourism board, picked its own festival dates months earlier: September 11-20. Nobody coordinated these on a shared spreadsheet. But the overlap isn't a coincidence either, because the sunflower festival is the single biggest annual draw of visitors into Botetourt County, and stacking a food-focused promotional week on top of an event that already has thousands of people driving into Buchanan is the kind of overlap a regional tourism office would want, not avoid.
The scale here is worth sitting with. Beaver Dam Farm's roughly 700,000 sunflowers have grown from a spur-of-the-moment planting into an event that pulls more than 20,000 visitors a year and an estimated $1.4 million in local economic impact as of 2023, according to an independent study cited by the Fincastle Herald. For a county without a single town over a few thousand residents, that's not a nice local tradition. That's the largest single tourism draw the county has, larger by a wide margin than anything else on the September calendar.
"Back in 2015, we had an open field, and my father said out of the blue, 'I'm going to plant sunflowers.'"
That's Candace Monaghan, the festival's founder, describing how the whole thing started with an empty field and no plan. The following year she opened it to the public expecting maybe 300 people. Sixteen hundred showed up. Eleven years later, the farm has more than 115 craft and food vendors, a sunset dinner that sells out within a day, and a beer release weeks before the festival even opens, this year held at AFOG Brewery in Buchanan on August 22, that functions as an unofficial kickoff to the whole month.
The Restaurant That Sat Empty for Five Years
The Homeplace's return to the calendar changes the shape of this weekend in a way that wouldn't have been true a year ago. The Catawba restaurant, a Southwest Virginia landmark known for family-style Southern cooking, closed in 2021 after shutting down the year before during the pandemic. For five years, the space sat empty in a small community that had built family traditions around it for decades. New owners bought the property, kept the Wingate family's name, recipes, and most of the original menu, and reopened on April 22, 2026, five years to the season after it went dark.
This September marks the restaurant's first full fall season back in business, and the timing of its lawn dinner-and-movie night on September 19 tells you something about how confident the new owners feel. That's not a quiet Tuesday event. It's a Saturday during the festival's closing weekend, when Catawba and Buchanan both have out-of-town visitors already in the area for sunflowers. Dinner starts at 7:00 p.m., with lawn seating around 7:45 and the movie starting once it's dark enough to see the screen. A restaurant that just spent five years closed doesn't schedule its marquee fall event during its slowest week. It schedules it when the county already has a crowd.
Making the Weekend Actually Work
None of this requires choosing one event over the others, because Restaurant Week participants are spread across the whole region rather than clustered in one spot, which means lunch or an early dinner can happen almost anywhere in the county on the way between Buchanan and Catawba without much extra driving.
A reasonable version of the weekend looks something like this:
- Late morning: walk the sunflower fields at Beaver Dam Farm during the festival's published hours, before the afternoon crowd peaks
- Early afternoon: grab lunch at a Restaurant Week participant, since specials and promotions run for the entire nine-day window, not just the weekend
- Evening: head to Catawba for The Homeplace's dinner and lawn movie, if you've got a ticket, or simply drop in during the restaurant's regular Wednesday through Sunday hours if the lawn event is sold out
The sunset dinner in the sunflowers on September 18, priced at 40 dollars a person, is worth flagging separately since it tends to sell out within a day of tickets going live, and it puts you in the fields on a Friday evening rather than fighting Saturday crowds.
What Comes After the Collision
The reason this stacked weekend doesn't leave a gap behind it is that Jeter Farm, a fifth-generation family operation that's been working this land since 1853, opens its own fall festival right as sunflower season winds down. This year's opening falls at the end of September, with the corn maze, hayrides, and country store running weekends into late October. So the county doesn't go from a packed calendar straight into nothing. One season hands off to the next almost without a pause, which is a pattern worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who plans weekends around what's actually happening nearby rather than what a tourism brochure says is happening somewhere else in the region.
That handoff, more than any single event on it, is what makes September in Botetourt different from the rest of the year. The county isn't competing for your attention with one big thing. It's stacking three, back to back, and trusting that a single Saturday is enough time to say yes to all of them.
If this is the kind of local rhythm you'd want to understand before deciding where to put down roots in Botetourt County, or if you already call it home and are curious what a place like this is worth in today's market, the team at Mac Westland Real Estate Group knows these towns block by block. Reach out when you're ready to talk, whether that's about buying, selling, or just figuring out what your next move in Southwest Virginia looks like.
