LOVELAND, Ohio – The Strawberry Days Festival returns to Blooms and Berries Farm Market May 16th and runs through the 31st. The festival features live music, train rides, a petting zoo and more. Online tickets are required.

The farm also has U-Pick strawberries available for about three weeks in May. The festival and U-Pick were temporarily halted in 2025. In 2024, a nationwide strawberry disease crippled the industry, and the family took 2025 off to figure out how to deal with the disease.

Following on the heels of strawberry season will come U-Pick blueberries, blackberries, sugar-snap peas and U-Dig potatoes.

Blooms and Berries has everything a farm market can offer. This family-owned business features a garden center, market barn with a full-course kitchen, bakery items, meats and cheese, gifts, and a playground, plus special events happening year-round. Three roadside stands, one at the market and two at other locations, are open June 19 through Labor Day.

The farm market opened in 1999 when Cathy Probst and her late husband, David, came back to the family farm, fired up a 1957 tractor, and planted 5,000 strawberry plants. David passed away in 2005. When Jeff Probst graduated from college, he came back to the farm, and he and Cathy began growing the agritourism aspect. In 2021, Jeff’s wife, Emily, left a corporate career, joined the farm team, and began to develop the garden center.

This year, for the first time, the family opened a Tulip Trail in late March and ended it in early April. The trail was a half mile walk on a gravel path through stately woods with thousands of tulips of every imaginable shape and color blooming everywhere.

“We tried to do it in 2025, but got the bulbs in the ground too late,” said Abby Allen, marketing manager. “We decided to do it again in 2026. Because of the warm spring, the event was a bit shorter than we had hoped.”

They had been interested in doing tulips for quite some time, said Jeff Probst, AKA Farmer Jeff. But they knew that tulips had challenges. They can’t be too wet; they need to be rotated out every year, and deer are fond of them. Everything tries to kill or eat a tulip.

They planted about 300,000 bulbs at the end of October and the beginning of November, but some were lost to deer and too much water.

Probst said he would not recommend tulips for someone just getting started in agritourism. Because of the warm spring weather, the window for selling tickets to the trail was short. Had the spring been cooler, the trail could have gone on longer. Friends in the United Kingdom have had five weekends of tulips. Next year, they might move away from the trail idea and have a field instead.

The family invested a lot of work and investment into the tulips, Probst said. If they had gotten three solid weekends out of selling tickets, this would definitely be a win for every farm out there.

“Our first year has been an amazing experience for guests; from a financial perspective, we are not there yet,” he explained. “That is what it takes sometimes when you get into these new projects. It can take a couple of years to get them going, and that’s not a problem. We are just glad we were able to be open and sell some tickets. The people who came had a good time and enjoyed their visit. That’s how we are measuring success right now.”