On Thursday, the 23rd of February Jessica Harland was announced queen.   To become queen she had to jump through a lot of hoops along with the other contestants.  She had to sell a thousand raffle tickets that were a dollar a piece.  She was asked to write and give a speech to a huge crowd that she is not used to.  Jessica had to be in the Almond Blossom fashion show.  Lastly, she had to do personality interviews with the judges one on one.  When asked, what was your favorite part about the whole experience she said, “Well, my favorite part of the competition was probably how close I became with the girls.  I was only friends with a couple of them at first but eventually we all became really close.”  After she was asked, was the competition what you expected she responded with, “It was honestly better than I expected, we did a lot of events and we were really busy but it was a great experience that i would not ever want to give up.”  She followed that statement up with, “One of the events that I enjoyed the most was actually volunteering at the second harvest food bank and handing out food to low income families.  We all worked together and it was something new.”  She gave advice to future contestants by saying, “Advice I would give to future contestants would be to make sure to start working on the speeches early because there are a lot of people and you are going to be nervous.  But if you are prepared and try your best then that is all you can do.”  She is now a role model to girls aspiring to one day wear the Almond Blossom queen crown.  Jessica Harland will now forever be in Ripon Almond Blossom history.