FALLBROOK -- Local business owners and vendors are gearing up for Fallbrook's largest annual event, the Avocado Festival, which draws tourists to town every spring by infusing a street fair with new ways to eat or otherwise use avocados, the festival's chief organizer said Friday.

Scheduled for April 22, this year's festival will again celebrate the flavor and image of a curious green fruit that is the area's most lucrative agricultural product.

Bob Leonard, executive director of the Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce, said he was particularly excited about honoring the avocado this year, after a rough winter in which many growers lost large portions of their crop to frost.

"Avocados are interesting, and it's a fun thing to see the community enjoy its heritage," Leonard said. Though it's been "a tough year for the grower, moving forward with the enjoyment of the avocado … is exciting to be involved in."

The town's Avocado Festival began in 1963 as a small community event and was held each year until 1967, when it inexplicably died out. The festival was resurrected by the chamber in 1986 and has grown steadily since.

For the last six years, the festival has drawn what Leonard estimates at about 70,000 people to downtown Fallbrook. The weather has typically been warm and sunny as vendors turn Main Avenue into a noisy marketplace filled with the smell of fried food.

The mainstays of the event -- guacamole and salsa-making contests, culinary demonstrations and plenty of other food -- will be available again this year, along with a few new features, Leonard said.

Those first-time features include an "Art of the Avocado" contest, in which contest winners will be displayed at the Lace Apron bakery on Main, and a "Park Your Puppy" service provided by the Fallbrook Animal Sanctuary, where patrons can leave their dogs while they peruse the festival.

On the culinary front, Leonard said that Cold Stone Creamery has come up with a recipe for avocado ice cream.

"It's kind of like vanilla ice cream with some avocado (flavor) to it," he said, adding that he has tasted the concoction. "It's actually very good; I was surprised."

Other entrepreneurs have tried their hand at an avocado ice cream, but it usually came out more like sorbet, he said. This year's attempt is creamier.

"The secret to make it good was they added a little touch of citrus, so it balances very well," he concluded.

Parking for the festival will be available at Fallbrook High School again this year, with a shuttle system that will drop festivalgoers off at the street fair or take them to several other locations around town, such as the historical society and airpark.

As for the attendance estimate published every year, Leonard said it is derived by taking hourly pictures of the crowd, counting the number of people at a cross section of Main and using that figure to guess at the total attendance on the hour.

"Unfortunately, there's no other way of estimating that we've figured out," he said. "The average turns out to be about 10,000 people in an hour."

The calculation assumes that not very many people do more than one lap through the festival, which spans about a mile, Leonard said.

"The presumption is that someone comes, they do the full loop, then because of the time or the heat, we figure that (few people) spend more than two hours here," he said.

For more information about the 2007 Avocado Festival, visit www.fallbrookca.org, and follow the "Chamber" link to the festival page.

Contact staff writer Tom Pfingsten at (760) 731-5799 or tpfingsten@nctimes.com.