Elon Community Garden hosted its annual Strawberry Festival on May 1. Students and community members were able to enjoy lemonade, ice cream and live music and more activities.
Students and attendees were able to adopt a plant, a tradition for the festival, and also got to enjoy balloon flowers, a strawberry hunt and painting tote bags. Later in the festival attendees got to sit down and enjoy live music.
Sam Hinton ’25, a teaching assistant for the garden studio class, a hands-on course that explores the relationship between humans, food, and local culture through gardening.
“Just celebrating spring, celebrating strawberries,” Hinton said. “So it's really special for us, because we get to kind of show people what we're doing here all day as a class and as the community that keeps up with the garden.”
Hinton said this event wouldn’t be possible if not for the work that the students in the class do.
“The event is entirely planned by the garden studio class every semester,” Hinton said “So members of the class are responsible for reaching out for us, planning events, planning the different activities we'll do. We also reach out to our student performers. We plant the plants, we propagate the seeds. It's all put on by the class.”
Hinton said this teamwork is what makes the Strawberry Festival special.
“I think that there's something really special and powerful about community gardens, because it's so reliant on teamwork and on mutual work together to make something as beautiful as the garden is,” Hinton said.
Junior Elisabeth Holmes, who also helped organize the event, emphasized the community aspect the event brings each year.
“The Strawberry Festival is one of those great events that is held every spring,” Holmes said. “We enjoy the community and everybody is coming and seeing the garden and getting to share what we have done in this past year.”
One of the main activities that the festival has is the option to adopt a plant and Holmes said that ahead of the event attendees can pre-order plants. Holmes said this activity is something she looks forward to.
“I mainly look forward to the whole plant adoption event, seeing all the people that come and get their plants and how happy they are when they see what they're getting.”
Hinton said the strawberry festival is special because of how much of the Elon community shows up.
“Obviously, we have a lot of students here,” Hinton said. “We have parents, we have professors, we have people that live in the area. And it's really fun to see how many young kids and families are here as well.”