SAN ANTONIO – Poteet has a special rising season than California strawberries and SoTex Farms has other soil, which is why the house owners say their strawberries style sweeter.
“I love strawberries, even though I’m mildly allergic to them,” Pat West Jr., proprietor of SoTex Farms mentioned.
West and Joanna Garcia of SoTex Farms in Poteet say they put a large number of love and care into planting their strawberries.
“I’ll eat them until I get a rash, but growing up in Poteet, there’s a lot of pride for it,” West mentioned. “My grandfather was actually one of the people who started the Strawberry Festival back in 1948 as a way to bring soldiers back from World War II, to have pride in their town. And now I’m here carrying on the legacy.”
The pageant is a practice that also is going on nowadays, attracting over 100,000 other people. It’s additionally the financial pulse for the small the city.
“It’s really an economic boom for this, for the county and the city,” Darrell Eichman, president of the Poteet Rotary Club mentioned. “During the Strawberry festival, we have a lot of civic organizations that have booths in the strawberry festival grounds, churches, nonprofits, all kinds of groups like that. And that is their main fundraiser for the year.”
The cash additionally is going again to the strawberry growers in Poteet that compete after which public sale off their produce.
“A lot of the money goes back to the growers, those who are the grand champions and all the different places,” Eichman mentioned. “And we also keep some of the money for scholarships for the local students and to support the FFA.”
Planting appears a bit of other in Poteet when compared to the place maximum of the nation’s strawberries come from in Northern California.
“We get a little bit more sun earlier than everybody else,” West mentioned. “So we actually plant in October, sometimes September, all the way through November and our berries come in about mid-February and stay through about the first week of June.”
“We cut off a couple of inches of this root, we poke holes, put them in the ground and we let them grow,” Garcia mentioned. “Once they’re in the ground, we’re pretty much hands off until the harvest season comes.”
SoTex Farms they’ve remodeled 13,000 toes of rows and it takes about two weeks of 30 to 40 other people serving to them plant 33,000 strawberries.
They have had a large number of luck at the pageant since 2018.
“We got reserve grand champion two years ago in our in our fourth year of growing,” West mentioned. “We’ve gotten first place miscellaneous two years in a row now.”
So what’s their secret?
“She talks to all the plants, but I really do think it’s because we grow on clay,” West mentioned. “The clay is, you know, it has a lot more natural nutrients in it. I think our berries just taste sweeter because of it.”
The Poteet Strawberry Festival in 2024 will happen on April 12 to April 14.
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