South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Pick your own fruit and veggies
Family Farm opens U-pick in Davie complete with animals, hayride.
It’s a farm within a city, yet it can feel like a world away.
Family Farm, at 14950 SW 14 St. in Davie, recently opened to the public as a strawberry U-pick. It’s a 30-acre destination with a onepath road, nestled in a neighborhood not far from Western High School.
Cows may be the first thing you see. Chickens and bunnies are behind the fruit stand, and a tractor-driven hayride pauses so children can feed cattle some breadsticks. Vern, the 5-year-old mixed-breed farm dog, trails quietly behind as the hayride goes near the strawberry and tomato fields and rows of purple kale.
Robert Hoover, 44, said he has owned the land for decades, and made a living selling what he grew to supermarkets. Now, his focus has shifted toward creating the U-pick farm, going against the trend of turning dirt into concrete across South Florida. As other U-picks vanished over the years, he now has the only known farm in Broward to offer a strawberry U-pick.
In addition to strawberries, families also may pick tomatoes, kale and peppers, including green peppers and poblano peppers. He eventually will plant squash, salad greens, papayas, bananas and corn.
“These people need what I am supplying,” he said. “We want to deal with the person — farm direct.”
Another Broward U-pick is Bob Roth’s New River Groves in Davie, which allows mango picking in the summer.
Others have disappeared. One of Broward’s last strawberry U-picks — West McNab U-pick off McNab Road in North Lauderdale — closed in 1998.
People flocked there to pick yellow and green squash, tomatoes, peppers, beans, pickles, zucchini, eggplant, onions and strawberries. The site is now a Walmart.
And Batten’s Farm in Davie also folded more than a decade ago. While it’s now the site of Marando Farms & Ranch, the U-pick is gone.
In Palm Beach County, pickings
are also slim. U-picks have made way to development, including Mecca Farms. The county in 2004 bought the agricultural land that once had citrus groves for $60 million with plans for development. The county in
2013 sold the property to the South Florida Water Management District for
$26 million.
In West Boynton, Bedner’s is a popular draw, which besides fruits and vegetables, also allows U-pick sunflowers in season, as well as an October corn maze.
In Miami-Dade, the U-picks have fared a bit better and there are still many choices.
That includes Burr’s Berry Farm, which borders the Miami-Dade cities of Cutler Ridge and Goulds, and Knaus Berry Farm in Homestead.
Richard Lyons Nursery in Miami has fruit tree U-pick for jujube, carambola, sapodilla and bananas when they’re in season. Also, Fresh Gardens in Homestead, with
1,000 tropical trees, has U-picks for Golden Passion, longans, lychees, guava, carambola and dragon fruit.
“Farms are going to disappear on a daily basis — you can’t grow anything on a piece of land that cost
$100,000 an acre,” said Robert “Farmer Bob” Petrucci, of Fresh Gardens.
His customers “love taking the children out there, they pick the fruit, the parents love it cause they get the children out of the house,” he said. “It’s a big deal to travel to our farm — [the drive to the Redlands is] the whole experience.”
Hoover in Davie has no website or Facebook page yet, but said business has been robust because of his customers spreading the word on their own social media.
“Everyone is always happy. It’s peaceful,“he said. “People really appreciate what we’re doing.”