- November 22, 2024
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The 14th Annual Spring Fever in the Garden — with its colorful blossoms, food and merchandise vendors and valuable gardening information — hits Plant Street from
WHEN: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 11; 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 12
WHERE: Plant Street, downtown Winter Garden
WEBSITE: springfeveringarden.com
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WINTER GARDEN — The annual spring gardening event and fundraiser that the Bloom & Grow Garden Society plans for all year long is coming to downtown Winter Garden this weekend.
The 14th Annual Spring Fever in the Garden — with its colorful blossoms, food and merchandise vendors and valuable gardening information — hits Plant Street from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 11, and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 12.
Bloom & Grow and the city of Winter Garden are co-sponsoring this weekend’s event. Tens of thousands of visitors are expected during the two-day festival.
Vendors will be selling flowers, plants, garden items and nature and wildlife art. Festival T-shirts and posters will also be available. Andy Crabtree, a Winter Garden artist and owner of Crabtree Ink, creates each year’s design.
Additionally, there will be food vendors, a garden art auction, live entertainment, artists painting on location and a Saturday morning sidewalk art contest.
One of the more popular interactive booths is the Avian Reconditioning Center. From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. both days, guests can get close to owls and hawks.
More details on the spring festival can be found at springfeveringarden.com. Proceeds from the event help support many local projects throughout the year.
ON STAGE
Entertainment takes place in front of City Hall and includes:
SATURDAY: Windy Ridge Elementary String Orchestra (10 a.m); Westbrooke Elementary Performance Kids (11:30 a.m.); juggler Bruce Sarafian (noon); young country/pop singer, songwriter and guitarist Appolonia (3:30 p.m.).
SUNDAY: Young singer/pianist Blake Guyre (10 a.m); juggler Bruce Sarafian (11:30 a.m.); The All American Rockers, five men specializing in 1950s and ’60s rock (12:30 p.m.).
On both days, Grant Livingston and Bud Tropico (Roger Hughes) will perform. Livingston is a Florida historian-in-song, folk performer who mixes in ragtime, country blues and early swing. Tropico plays and sings tropical and Caribbean music.
FOR THE LITTLE ONES
The Kids Zone has activities, including a dinosaur bone dig and a Solar Bears hockey puck game, and entertainment by world-record juggler and unicyclist Bruce Sarafian. They can take home ladybugs for their gardens, interact with animals brought by Swamp Girls and make crafts.
FUNDRAISERS
The Spring Fever auction will have a variety of craft items made by Bloom & Grow members. Some will be on the auction tables, and others will be for sale. The silent auction will be set up at the Winter Garden Police Department from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday.
Among the auction items are outdoor director chairs, painted folding chairs, watercolors and other paintings, a birdhouse and a knitted baby blanket.
The raffle features downtown Winter Garden with a one-night stay at the historic Edgewater Hotel, gift certificates to three restaurants (alFresco, Urban Flats and Attic Door), tickets to performances at the Garden Theatre and Disney Park Hopper passes.
The drawing will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday. The raffle booth will be set up at Boyd and Plant streets near the gazebo.
CHALKIN’ IT UP
Thanks to the generosity of Florida Hospital, the annual Chalkin’ It Up event in front of City Hall is even bigger. The event is expanding to increase prize money and T-shirts.
Additionally, Rudy Drapiza, a professional three-dimensional chalk artist, will create an interactive piece of chalk art, and guests can be photographed as an element of the artwork itself. Drapiza will create the piece on Friday before the festival begins on Saturday. On Saturday morning, artists of all ages will be creating their nature-related chalk artworks. Applications are available on the Spring Fever website.
For a related story about Drapiza, see page 13A.
TAKE A TRAIN RIDE
The Orange Blossom Cannonball train will be running this weekend. Tickets are $28 for adults, $16.80 for children and free for those younger than 4.
Trains will be departing from Winter Garden starting at 10 a.m. Saturday and 12:30 p.m. Sunday. Seating is limited.
Reservations can be made by calling (352) 742-7200.
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The festival will include a Florida citrus crate label show in front of the Winter Garden Heritage Museum from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, hosted by the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation. Colorful, iconic citrus crate labels will be for sale or trade from Florida dealers and collectors at the annual collector’s show.
Jerry Chicone Jr. and Brenda Eubanks Burnette have published a new edition of “Florida’s First Billboards — Florida Citrus Crate Labels.” Copies of this big, all-color book will be for sale during the show, and the heritage foundation can arrange for it to be signed by the author.
For more information, call the WGHF at (407) 656-3244.
Contact Amy Quesinberry Rhode at [email protected].
