“This is an exciting time of year. This is our growing season,” said Rose O’Dell King, owner of Rosy Tomorrows Heritage Farm in North Fort Myers. “That’s really what people should take out of fall here: It’s the start. No more veggies from up north and California, now we have all this wonderful produce bounty that’s just ours.”
At Inyoni Organic Farm in Naples, warm-weather greens such as bok choy and red Russian kale still line the fields, alongside loads and loads of zucchini and squash blossoms, according to owner Nick Batty. Transitional produce, including egg plants and cucumbers, are coming into harvest. And he and his team are preparing the 6-acre site for the cooler weather of winter, when the fields will overflow with tomatoes, peppers, lettuces, carrots and more.
“It’s opposite seasons,” Batty said. “A lot of the people who come down from up north don’t quite understand that.”
East Fork Creek, an urban farm in south Fort Myers, skirts some of that seasonality with its shade houses and hydroponics. The 10-acre facility devotes 2 1 / 2
acres to its lettuces, which it sells to chefs and restaurants, and to the public through its onsite market. East Fork’s offerings dwindle in summer. But as temperatures drop, its harvests rise.
Owner Frans Kox hopes to expand the farm from 13 varieties of lettuce to as many as 21 this growing season. Kox has eight new lettuces he’s testing from East Fork’s seed suppliers in Holland. Many of the new seeds came without pictures or directions. Kox and his staff are winging it, going by feel, and hoping for something delicious.
“We feed them and follow them along,” Kox said. “In another four weeks, we’ll know how they perform and if we’ll continue growing them through the winter.”
In the meantime, the farm has several warm-weather lettuces still sprouting, as well as an abundance of bananas, which grow from August to October. When asked about pumpkins and cranberries, Kox laughed.
“That’s definitely not our thing,” he said.