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July 28, 2021 - 7:00 PM
The founders of an Abbotsford tulip festival will be testing residents’ desire for flower festivals in the North Okanagan next month with sunflowers.
Alexis Szarek started the Abbotsford Bloom Tulip Festival in the Lower Mainland in 2016 before her family decided to move to the North Okanagan.
READ MORE: Popular Abbotsford tulip festival moving to North Okanagan
Now, their first flower festival will feature sunflowers in August, located at 5050 Knob Road in Armstrong.
Tickets went up for sale yesterday, and Szarek is encouraging customers to purchase them through the website for a discount. General admission online is $16 for adults and $10 for children ages five to 12.
There are four acres of land containing 80,000 sunflowers that will be showcased in the festival set to run from Aug. 18 to 31.
They decided to start with sunflowers as the 2020 tulip festival was cancelled due to the pandemic which also put the future of the 2021 festival in jeopardy. They're still planning to have a tulip festival next spring and will set them on two acres of land.
“We just weren't sure what was going to be possible and we didn’t want to plan a big festival and then have to close like we did in 2020 so we decided to hold off with the tulips but the sunflowers grow quite a bit quicker,” she said.
In the Fraser Valley, there’s a lot of sunflower festivals, but in the Okanagan there aren’t really any around so the sunflowers are a good trial run to see how the tulip festival will run in the spring.
She said the popularity of flower festivals have been increasing because customers are shifting to pay for more experiences as they go out.
The rise of social media and the demand for that perfect profile picture has also led to an increase in interest for flower festivals, she said.
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