PONCHATOULA, La. — Festival season is in full swing!
April 8-11 a festival just as sweet as the fruit it celebrates returns: The Ponchatoula Strawberry Fest.
In memorial park festival attendees can enjoy three days of berry fun including entertainment, food and of course strawberries. This year the festival celebrates 50 years.
"Well, it started with a group of four people, Chamber of Commerce, and the Ponchatoula JC's, and those four people had a plan to create a festival to help strawberry farmers in the area and it started as a strawberry bonanza back in the day, very small, little street fair. It has now grown into a 50 year event that is bigger that I've ever seen. We're proud to say that we're the largest free festival in the state of Louisiana," said Strawberry Fest's, Don Lanier.
While entry is free you can purchase game and ride tickets for an affordable price, with proceeds going to local non-profits. Festival attendees can also enjoy three days of music.
"We try to bring a little bit of everything. A little different genres for everybody. People like country, they like rock and roll, they like zydeco Cajun, and of course the 80s cover bands everybody really likes. So, we just try to mix it up so everybody has something to listen to," Lanier said.
Opening the stage on Saturday is American Idol season four top 12 finalist: Lindsey Cardinale.
"You can expect everything from country music to oldies to rock and roll to a little bit of rap, if we're feeling good," Cardinale said.
The Ponchatoula native describes the festival as all around fun, diverse, and ever growing.
"I can actually describe it kind of like our set list. You will see a lot of people, they come from all over and everybody's so excited and were supposed to have beautiful weather. So, I want to give you great expectations but I think that they will far exceed them," Cardinale said.
The entertainment alone is enough to draw a crowd, but hundreds flock to the "Strawberry Capitol of the world" for one thing: the strawberries.
"We have a lot of local strawberries. There's strawberries in abundance this year. So you will not be able to come out here and not find strawberries. We have strawberry shortcake on the grounds, chocolate covered strawberries, strawberry beignets," Lanier said.
It takes about a week to set up this festival but the board of directors work 365 days a year to bring it all together.
Come festival weekend, there are more than a thousand people coming in and out of the grounds to help bring the festival to life.
There are also 50 non profits that have booths at the fest. QUAD V.E.T.S is one of them.
"We're going to be raffling off six guns that I purchased and they're good guns to by the way, really good guns. But these booths they're going to go to helping our veterans at our facility. We get homeless veterans off the streets and just rebuild them to get back into society," QUAD V.E.T.S' Sidney Woods.
So, you can have fun and give back at strawberry fest.
A nice trip down strawberry fields with loved ones is often all you need and you're sure to find that on the scene at strawberry festival.
"I can't wait!" said Lanier.
The festival opens at noon on Friday, nine on Saturday, and 10 on Sunday. Find out more details here.
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