INNISFAIL – It’s all about strawberries.
The Jungle Farm, north of Innisfail, held its annual Strawberry Festival on July 21.
“It’s just to celebrate the season and strawberries. It’s an opportunity to come to the farm and enjoy some extra things,” said Leona Staples, co-owner of The Jungle Farm.
The festival has been a part of summer festivities in Central Alberta for close to 15 years noted Staples.
The one-day festival featured a variety of activities, games, a homegrown market with several vendors, wood carving demonstrations, the Canadian Blood Services, a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) Learning Lab, and non-profit group Let’s Talk Science.
“They’re doing science experiments showing the DNA of strawberries,” said Staples. “We also have a local chef from UHarvest out of Red Deer and they are doing demonstrations using our strawberries.”
Visitors also enjoyed live music, drumming demonstrations and wagon rides out to the strawberry field.
Staples said the strawberry season had a slow start but there is still plenty of season to enjoy.
“Definitely our strawberries have not been as plentiful as they’ve been other years,” said Staples. “There could be many factors – strawberries don’t like heat so (the heat’s) been hard on them.
“We have so many families supporting the farm that we find we’re picking out of strawberries on a regular basis,” she added, noting strawberry picking began July 1 and is expected to last for several more weeks.
“We definitely expect to pick for another two to three weeks on summer strawberries and then we’ll have a day-neutral strawberry (available),” she said. “A day-neutral strawberry, or an ever-bearing strawberry starts the middle of August and goes into the fall.”
In addition, the event had strawberry shortcake and a variety of other strawberry products available.
The Strawberry Festival is always well attended said Staples, noting the community support every year.
“It’s been a great opportunity to share our farm with people,” she said.“We’ve been home (and on the farm) since 1996, for 22 years and that’s when we started growing strawberries,” said Staples. “It’s just expanded every year since then.”
The Crook family was enjoying the Strawberry Festival for the first time. Lindsay Crook from Strathmore was out Saturday with her husband and two daughters.
“It’s absolutely amazing. We’re having a ton of fun,” said Crook, noting the entire family enjoyed several features of the festival.
“We’ve been informed by our five-year-old that ‘we should come back next year mommy,’ so we’ll probably be back next year,” Crook concluded.
