Pat’s Wildways: Strawberry Festival

Plant City, the “Winter Strawberry Capital of the World,” is more than four hours away from Fernandina Beach. But it was the start of their 10-day Strawberry Festival, and my friend Betty Duckworth was eager for an expedition. And, as usual, I was happy to go along for the ride.

We got to the Strawberry Festival, bright and early, after a night at a Holiday Inn, and we were delighted that we could park our car in an empty parking lot at 8 a.m. when we thought the festival started. But we were wrong. We parked and walked to the front gate, bought our tickets, and tried to go in, and uh oh. The festival did not start till 10 o’clock.

No problem for me anyway. I was happy to see workers unloading crates of strawberries from Wise Farms at a stand right on the corner where we parked. The guys unloading told me they expect to sell 80 flats of strawberries that day from that location. Further inside the fair later, we found another booth for Wise Farms and at that location they plan to sell another 120 flats. Two hundred flats of strawberries a day for 10 days from just this one farm, and there are others. Lots of strawberries!

Before returning to the fair when it opened in a couple of hours, Betty and I drove around. We admired the strawberry fields all around the area, some with workers hurriedly picking berries and loading trucks, and others with u-pick visitors in the fields themselves. The scenery was fun, but on to the fair!

Since we got there again at 10 o’clock, right when the fair opened, we had easy access to everything we wanted to see, with none of the lines that built up a bit later. We tasted strawberries. We listened to a cookware demonstration; we learned how to start a fire with an antler-handled device; we walked through an adult version of Candyland with all kinds of long-forgotten candies for sale in bulk, and lots more too. And of course, we had to have a handmade strawberry shortcake, a key element of this festival. We had no line to wait in that early, despite the markings on the sidewalk that showed waits up to eight minutes and longer. But we were able to go right in to pay our money to the charity supporting it and to help ourselves to a biscuit and massive scoops of strawberries and whipped cream. Delicious.

As our final event at the fair, we boarded this biggest Ferris wheel I have ever seen outside of a theme park, the “Berry Big Wheel,” 155 feet tall, supposedly the largest mobile Ferris wheel in the country. From the view of our gondola, we could see the lines already building up at the famous buttermilk-coated corn dog stand just below us. We were glad we got there early!

But then we were done with the fair. On the way out of town the next day, we stopped at Parkesdale Farm Market, a famous strawberry vendor in these parts. Betty happily bought a few flats of strawberries to bring home. Strawberries have a short shelf life and freshly picked strawberries from Plant City are a real prize back home in Fernandina.

Because we planned this as a two-night trip, we had plenty of time coming and going to explore bits of old Florida tucked in the middle of the state. Betty had scoped out Cubby’s Art Studio in Inverness so we stopped there on our way south. On the way north after the fair, we traveled back roads north and east, seeing what we could see. I spotted a sign for the Citrus Tower and we made a beeline for it. This used to be a big tourist site in the middle of Florida, where you could take an elevator up high and view all of the orange groves around it. At 230 feet tall, it was a bit higher than the Ferris wheel, but a lot less interesting and we didn’t pay our 10 dollars to board the elevator. Now, in current Florida there are no citrus groves here to look at, just more of the massive sprawl that has gobbled up our landscapes.

The citrus industry in Florida is having a massive decline and has been for years. The freezes and droughts are more intense, the hurricanes are more frequent and development has taken up much of the land. And worse yet, the citrus greening disease caused by a pathogen originating in Asia has impacted trees throughout Florida, making the fruit bitter and ultimately causing the trees to die. Orange production in Florida has declined by over 90% since the 1990s. There are efforts underway to develop disease-resistant trees and to plant those, but these efforts will take years. In the meantime, farmers are being encouraged to plant different crops, including bamboo and pongamia — a tree from India that produces edible beans that can be consumed once the bitter-causing chemicals within them are removed by some patented process. It remains to be seen whether oranges will ever make a comeback to Florida.

It was a fun trip and a learning experience, like all trips are for me. And life goes on …

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com