Some of the best strawberries are up for grabs in this year’s Strawberry Festival which is being staged at Benguet capital town, La Trinidad. Photo by EV Espiritu
BAGUIO CITY — As this year’s Baguio Flower Festival winds down, tourists have been drawn to its Benguet neighbor, La Trinidad town, which began celebrating the 38th Strawberry Festival last week.
On Friday (Mar. 8), strawberry gardeners displayed their harvests, competing for the title of heaviest and sweetest berries.
The town is also counting down to March 23, when it recreates a giant strawberry cake. Baked in 2004, the 9.6-ton dessert earned La Trinidad the Guinness World Record for the largest strawberry shortcake.
La Trinidad, the Benguet capital town, is the provincial center and is where vegetables grown in mountain-side gardens are traded.
The first-class municipality is also where tourists go to visit vast strawberry fields, where they can pick berries for a fee.
his gadget measures the sweetness of strawberries. which were put on display for this year’s Strawberry Festival. The event is being staged at Benguet capital town, La Trinidad. Photo by EV Espiritu
There are over 700 strawberry farmers in La Trinidad alone, many of them concentrated in the villages of Betag, Balili, Poblacion, Tawang, Puguis, Pico and Wangal.
In 2018, 49 hectares of the town’s strawberry farms produced over a thousand metric tons of berries.
This year, strawberry farmer Jason Edwas produced the heaviest berries, after a set of ten berries weighing 540 grams beat last year’s heaviest berries which weighed 350 grams, in the annual contest’s open category.
Edwas said he uses organic fertilizer composed of chicken droppings and lime.
Farmer Martha Bulangan grew this year’s sweetest strawberries, in the winter dawn category.
The first Strawberry Festival was staged in 1981./lzb
Strawberry gardeners displayed their best harvests on Friday (Mar. 8) , where they compete for the heaviest and sweetest berries. The products are part of this year’s Strawberry Festival which is being staged at Benguet capital town, La Trinidad. Photo by EV Espiritu