Strawberry season’s back, and Boca Raton is about to be abloom with the most bountiful crop of delicious red berries, in everything from fresh flats to funnel cakes.
The third annual South Florida Strawberry Festival will celebrate the sweet ruby-red fruit when it returns Jan. 17-19 to Burt Aaronson South County Regional Park, touting a new name and its biggest footprint ever.
After two years at Mizner Park, organizer Skyler Mendieta’s rain-or-shine berry bash (formerly Boca Strawberry Festival) has expanded into a venue four times the size, doubled its amusement rides (from seven to 13) and vendor lineup (from 60 to 120), and added a lineup of live music to its bill of strawberry purveyors selling everything from strawberry-infused cookies and hot sauce to fudge and smoothies.
Mendieta expects 15,000 strawberry-heads at the three-day festival, which will also feature stunt comedy dog shows from the Puppy Pals (which competed on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent”), inflatable bounce houses, bumper boats, bungee trampolines, a petting zoo with live animals, a roving mascot (Silly Sammy the Strawberry) and “many different ways to sample delicious strawberries,” she says.
The aim of this festival — not to be confused with the Florida Strawberry Festival, an unaffiliated and near-century-old agricultural fair in Plant City, west of Orlando — is to salute the flowering plant’s lengthy Florida growing season, which spans late November to April and hits its peak in February and March.
“We’ve got fresh strawberries, strawberry treats, strawberry hot sauce — basically anything exciting involving the fruit,” says Mendieta, of Boca Raton, who programs the bash with her mother, Jackie Ralston. “We know how important of a crop they are in South Florida. There’s nothing better than celebrating strawberries in Florida sunshine while the rest of the country is buried in snow.”
Moving the festival to South County Regional Park solved a major logistical hurdle in which amusement-ride lines often clashed with vendor booths and dog shows, Mendieta adds: “We had so many people last year at Mizner, they were on top of each other.”
The live-music lineup will include ’80s act Mixtape, Motown cover band Endless Rhythms, funk-peddlers Tru Phonic and The Reggae Souljahs. Meanwhile, food trucks and food vendors will sell strawberry-themed dishes, with seating for up to 400 under a 100-by-40-foot dining tent.
Parking will be free, and the new venue can accommodate up to 1,600 cars, with plenty of overflow spots around the main entrance on Glades Road, she says. Want to be closer to the festival entrance? A separate VIP self-parking lot, beside Sunset Cove Amphitheater, will be available for $10.
The man in charge of the festival’s fresh strawberries is Robert Hoover, owner of the 30-acre Family Farms at 14950 SW 14th St., Davie. Hoover says an early harvest enabled him to bring 200 flats of fresh strawberries — roughly 2,400 small baskets, he says), along with purple kale, grape and cluster tomatoes for sale.
“They’re doing us a great service and they’re supporting local farms,” Hoover says of the festival. “They’re letting us provide the community with fresh vegetables, which helps us spread the good news that local farms are still in South Florida selling fresh produce.”
And Hoover should know. Family Farms is Broward County’s lone strawberry u-pick, home to 10 acres of strawberry plants, along with cows, chickens, bunnies and tractor hayrides that rumble to life on the weekends. (It will be throwing its own concurrent Strawberry Festival from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Jan. 18 in Davie, where visitors can ride ponies, pet and feed livestock corn for 50 cents an ear, pick strawberries off the vine and roast s’mores over a bonfire.)
Mendieta’s event-promotion company, FOMO Entertainment Group, will also produce the Ribs N Brew Fest on Feb. 22 at Sunset Cove Amphitheater and the South Florida Watermelon Festival on April 12-13, also at South County Regional Park.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: South Florida Strawberry Festival
WHEN: 4-10 p.m. Jan. 17, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Jan. 18 and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Jan. 19
WHERE: Burt Aaronson South County Regional Park, 12551 Glades Road, Boca Raton
COST: $20 general-admission tickets, plus an optional $25 for access to unlimited rides and inflatables; use promo code BERRY25 for a $5 discount
INFORMATION: SoFloStrawberryFestival.com